Harry Kane

  • The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...

    Get involved!

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

The "headline" stat I'm seeing everywhere is that this is the first time that Spurs have failed to score in three consecutive league games since the end of 2013 (just before Kane burst onto the scene). Although interesting and not particularly flattering, three games is also a terrible sample size. Those three goalless games could've occurred with reasonable probability at any time through shitty luck even with Kane (the probability would definitely be slightly reduced but maybe not to statistical significance).

The other stat I'm seeing is Spurs' record in the last six (seems to be league) games without Kane: W0 D3 L3. I don't like "arbitrary", selection-biased cut-offs designed to generate maximally sensational stats but if you stretch it out to a round ten, you still get a pretty terrible W2 D3 L5.

If you count all competitions and go back 17 games without Kane - which is as much as I could be bothered to calculate manually - you get W4 D4 L9. That's the kind of sample size from which you can infer legitimate trends and patterns.

My question is: when do Spurs get better without Kane?

(And for that matter: why the fuck are a bunch of English people on Twitter happy that some random doctor quoted by trashy tabloids says Kane "might" miss the Euros? England supporters have even less reason to think we're better without him than Spurs' do. These kids think we failed to reach a WC final because of Kane when the reality is that we wouldn't have made a WC semifinal without him. Fuck, there are some total dangers out there in this world.)
There was a brief period at Wembley where we scraped passed a few teams without Kane - somehow it was decided we were better without him.
 
You're a liar... Keep me out of it.
Credit where it's due! Even you can't bring yourself to suggest Sissoko was a replacement for Dembele!

Sorry Harry 7 you're on your own on this one.

In my view Harry is a fine keeper and should be pushing Lloris for the position.

Sissoko replaced Dembele... Give me strength
 
Last edited:
There was a brief period at Wembley where we scraped passed a few teams without Kane - somehow it was decided we were better without him.
This is right. The "better without Kane" meme comes from a combination of failing to adequately consider the context of the matches without him and misapplying statistics (which is understandable because the vast majority of people don't have, and can't really be expected to have, a solid grip on university level stats).

The context (at least as far as the '18/19 season goes) is one of cognitive disconnect between the raw results and the performances. In short: last season, Spurs won a lot of games without Kane where victory was probabilistically unlikely ("lucky" -- as much as I hate that word) and lost or drew a lot games with Kane which should've yielded higher average points. The raw results were exceptionally unflattering to Kane.

xG is a good benchmark for individual shots (which is, after all, its intended purpose) and also fairly good for assessing the performance of a player or team over a long series of games (when summed). xG is terrible for deciding which team "deserved" to win an individual match for the same reason that buying 10 lottery tickets gives you a poor chance of winning compared to someone with more than 2 million tickets, or even just a few hundred.

When you sum xG and xA differentials over the "with Kane" and "without Kane" conditions from last season, you find that - insofar as these particular models can be used to derive such conclusions - the team were far more likely to win the average game with Kane than without. The blocks of games where Kane was injured just happened to coincide with periods where the team was most likely to do extremely well versus their xG/xA. Sure, players like Son can generally solidly outperform their xG over a long period of time, but that doesn't explain much of the variance at all. Kane has one of the highest mean xG differentials in Europe since '14/15, which is consistent with him being one of the best strikers of a ball in modern football. If Kane had been playing in the games he missed, it's likely that Spurs' GF would've been even more emphatic.

The stats part is really - well, by far the hardest bit is wrapping your head around the stuff above! - to do with the relatively small sample size of games without Kane. Alone, the sample with the particular results isn't big enough to approach statistical significance. Worse, the massive difference in sample sizes between "with" and "without" makes them difficult to compare in any meaningful way. Many statistical tests prefer at least sanely balanced sample sizes.

Frankly, though, you don't need to be able to understand any of the above to put the hypothesis to a simple eye test. If you go back and watch some of the games without Kane, you'll see plenty of turgid football followed by a chain of fortunate last-gasp goals for narrow-margin victories. After that, go back and watch the first few games from when Kane returned the first time: observe how he still scored in consecutive games, with a lovely solo goal on his return against Burnley, and observe how the defence then ship enough at the other end to render Kane's goals meaningless -- twice in a row. I think it's particularly instructive how visibly the energy levels from the other attackers drop after Kane comes back against Burnley: as if they know they have to step it up in his absence before falling back to "allow" him to bear most of the responsibility again when he returns.

So even though Kane was doing his job and scoring last season - sometimes creating for himself out of nothing much, a la Burnley - it was very easy to simply conclude "we were winning when Kane was gone and now he's back and we're not winning". It was the most superficial analysis possible, and, unfortunately, because most football fans on e.g. Twitter aren't capable of much more, that was the analysis that stuck and became a meme.

The media, too, was complicit, whether through sloth, greed or actual incompetence (I suspect all three). Supposedly reputable sites like Sky Sports provided column space to pundits who parrotted the surface-level analysis and posted articles full of misleading stats, such as Spurs' overall five-year win-rate with and without Kane (useless for reasons already discussed; you can use this to make it look like Kane makes almost no difference to Spurs when he was individually responsible for winning more points than any other player in the league in '17/18).

The new ice cold take I've spotted on Twitter is to blame Jose because "Poch could get the team winning without Kane", which ignores everything I've said. Sure, the team have proven that they can do as well without Kane or even luck on their side in isolated patches, but the proposition is entirely untested in the mid-to-long-term. I suspect that a lot of fans are going to be shaken out of their stupour of taking Kane for granted over the next few months.

Bad statistics in the wrong hands, "social" media memes and not thinking critically for yourself form an incredibly dangerous combination. Luckily, in this case, it's only football. Less fortunately, the exact same thing is ubiquitous in real life.
 
Last edited:
Another issue when comparing With Kane to Without Kane, is that PL opponents know how we play with him and have inevitably worked out a kind of optimal defence. When he's out, they need to work out how we're going to play (as do we!). So for a period after he gets injured, I would argue that the forced shift in our tactics makes our opponents weaker, but this is not a sustainable shift because they will figure us out.

Worrying now is that without him I think we just look poor, although there are some glimmers of hope in how the new guys are coming on.

Personal wish: if Harry is not fit to play again for us this season, he should be ruled out for euros. Makes no sense to risk him in an intense spell of training and matches if he can't even play PL
 
Open questions -
  • Do ppl think Kane fully recovered from his injury last year? i.e. not as quick
  • Are folks worried he might be limited (maybe even more) by this injury?
I'm not sure he was as fast or physical this year, but it's hard to tell as the whole team dynamic has shifted markedly.
Either way a croked Kane will still be a decent finisher.
 
Open questions -
  • Do ppl think Kane fully recovered from his injury last year? i.e. not as quick
  • Are folks worried he might be limited (maybe even more) by this injury?
I'm not sure he was as fast or physical this year, but it's hard to tell as the whole team dynamic has shifted markedly.
Either way a croked Kane will still be a decent finisher.

Longer term I imagine Kane will play a deeper role where he can use his range of passing to best effect.
 
Honestly love Harry. Best striker in my lifetime at Spurs and already a legend, but it’s starting to really piss me off now the way the club manages him and how rushes back himself. It’s what stops Levy from purchasing a striker because there’s always that glimmer of hope that Kane will be back, it’s ridiculous. He’s been run into the ground for years now and he will ruin his career. We are a fucking shambles as a club honestly. Just buy a fucking striker Levy you tosspot, sick of it.
 
Back
Top Bottom