The making of Kane

Harry Kane was pipped to the PFA Player of the Year award by Riyad Mahrez but he could yet finish a brilliant season with the title. Nick Wright talks to his former coaches and team-mates about his unlikely rise from lower league loanee to world-class striker…

Harry Kane took two touches, darted into Stoke City’s box and cracked a curling shot through a crowd of defenders and beyond the outstretched Jack Butland. It was a stunning goal not dissimilar to the one he scored in the north London derby six weeks earlier, but this improbable penchant for the spectacular is nothing new. In fact, it has been years in the making.

Long before the Britannia, the setting was Millwall’s Bromley training ground. “One day in training he scored the best goal I have ever seen,” former Millwall captain Alan Dunne tells Sky Sports. “It came from the goalkeeper’s throw. He flicked the ball over his marker and hit a stunning volley from the narrowest of angles. It was like Marco van Basten. I thought: ‘Wow, who is this quiet kid?'”

It was December 2011 and the quiet kid from Tottenham had just embarked on a loan move he would later describe as “a big stepping stone” in his career. Kane had spent the second half of the previous campaign at Leyton Orient in League One, and his development was to continue with a fight for Championship survival at The Den.

“We were struggling at the time and Kenny Jackett brought him in along with Ryan Mason,” says Dunne. “We didn’t know much about him. He was a really quiet lad, a shy lad who didn’t say much. But when he went out on the football pitch he showed glimpses of magic I’d never seen before from anyone at Millwall.”

Kane was far from the minds of the Tottenham supporters watching Gareth Bale, Luka Modric and Rafael van der Vaart inspire a fourth-placed Premier League finish at his parent club on the other side of the Thames, but in south east London the 18-year-old’s contribution was significant, with a run of seven goals in 14 games helping Millwall escape the drop.

Much like Kane’s career as a whole, however, it was not a straight-forward success story. Kane failed to score in his first eight Championship appearances as he struggled to adapt to the physicality of the division, and Stuart Pearce, the manager of England’s U21s at the time, remembers his inauspicious start.

“I went to watch him play in his first game out on loan at Millwall and a few others,” he tells Sky Sports. “It was tough for him. He was being deployed maybe as a No 10, a more deep-lying role than he plays now. He never had that turn of pace and he hadn’t matured as a man either.”

Kane did not possess the outstanding speed, strength or flair that sets many young players apart and Pearce decided he was a long way from a call-up to the U21s, but what he lacked in a physical sense he made up for in other ways. The unassuming 18-year-old worked tirelessly and embraced the challenge at Millwall. His enthusiasm was not lost on his team-mates.

“Sometimes you get young players who come from the big clubs to somewhere like Millwall and they think that they’re it,” says Dunne. “They think they’re better than everyone else …

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