Could Tottenham's Harry Kane Be Found Out in the Premier League Next Season?

There was a brief time when Andy Carroll was the future of English football. 

Five years ago, at the start of the 2010-11 season, Carroll was in fine form for Newcastle United, scoring 11 goals in 20 games.

At the age of just 21, here was a muscular striker who had presence and strength, and he was proving to be clinical in front of goal.

In the autumn of 2010, Carroll made his England debut. There was genuine and growing excitement around him, and wearing Newcastle’s No. 9 shirt inevitably prompted comparisons to Alan Shearer.

Despite all the hype, Carroll was still a work in progress, only really enjoying his first flush of real form in the Premier League.

But Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish had seen enough, and in January 2011, he paid a barely believable British-record transfer fee of £35 million to bring Carroll to Anfield.

Until Raheem Sterling’s move to Manchester City becomes official, this remains the highest fee a British club ever paid for a British player.

Those six months at the start of the 2010-11 season were as good as it got for Carroll, who struggled at Liverpool, scoring just 11 times in 58 games before being shunted off on loan to West Ham United the following year.

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The move had proved to be too much, too soon for Carroll, who looked lost at Liverpool. He was never the same player again, and he can now be found at West Ham, a largely forgotten figure, beset by injuries.

On the eve of the new Premier League season, is it possible another young English striker, Harry Kane, could suffer the same fate as Carroll?

Despite not starting his first game of the 2014-15 Premier League season until November, Kane was a revelation, scoring 31 goals in all competitions.

Last season, Kane made his England debut, won the PFA Young Player of the Year award and was runner-up to Eden Hazard as the Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year.

He was hailed as a fusion of the 1990s England partnership of Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham, possessing both Shearer’s prolific goalscoring and aerial ability and Sheringham’s poise and intelligence.

Kane earned my vote for Footballer of the Year for achieving all he did at the heart of what was a relatively modest Tottenham Hotspur side. He had to earn every one of his goals.

But toward the end of the season, Kane did suffer a noticeable loss of form, only scoring twice in his final eight games of the season for Tottenham.

He took this form into the European Under-21 Championship with England, where he failed to score in his three appearances.

Kane might have been tired—he had never before played so much football—but he still looked like a poor version of the player seen in the Premier League.

In the aftermath of England’s disappointing campaign at the European Championship, Shearer told the Sun (h/t the London Evening Standard), “Harry Kane...struggled to live up to the hype in this tournament [but] is suddenly worth £40m. He has only been playing first-team football since November! For goodness sake, if he is still putting them away in two years, then fine.”

Is it premature to ask if Harry Kane could be found out this season?

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It will become more difficult for Kane. He emerged as a virtual unknown last season to surprise defenders, but he can no longer rely on that.

Managers and defenders will have done their homework; they will now know how Kane likes to play and will be more able to contain him.

But Kane is not simply a goalscorer who comes alive in the penalty box and can be snuffed out and man-marked out of a game. His movement and awareness of space, inside and outside of the box, has always been impressive and will allow him to evade defenders.

Kane’s most impressive games last season came against Chelsea and Arsenal, when he scored twice in each of Tottenham’s stirring wins over their London rivals at White Hart Lane.

But outside of these games, Kane scored only three other goals, and in total seven of his 31 goals, against teams who finished in the top half of the Premier League last season.

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It would be harsh to label Kane a flat-track bully, but he certainly feasted upon teams in the lower half of the Premier League, as well as the lesser-known teams in the Europa League last season.

To prove his worth, Kane needs to score more regularly against the bigger teams in the Premier League, and he has the all-around game and the inherent class to do that.

If Kane can score close to that 31-goal mark again this season, English football really will have discovered a rare talent.

But the English game is littered with strikers who enjoyed an initial burst of form but failed to ever repeat it. Next season, we should begin to learn whether Harry Kane is the new Alan Shearer or the new Andy Carroll.