Is Throwback Harry Kane the Premier League's Most Underrated Player?

For a man with an impeccable sense of timing, there's an inescapable feeling Tottenham Hotspur striker Harry Kane somehow belongs to a different era. In the same way La La Land is set in the present day but imbues classic 1950s cinema from its first frame, the Spurs forward seems like a throwback.

With his neat sweptback hair and prominent jaw, he looks like he would be more comfortable adorning a cigarette card than the cover of FIFA. He's the type of "proper footballer" grandfathers delight in showing their grandchildren, having long since grown exasperated with a modern game full of itself almost to the point of self-parody.

He plays like he looks, with an absolute lack of ego. Tottenham have always been an ensemble cast, with Kane a headline act who insists his name is set in typeface no bigger than his team-mates'. 

After Kane's hat-trick against Stoke City on Sunday took him beyond the 20-goal mark for the third season in succession—and past a century of career goals by the age of 23—his manager, Mauricio Pochettino, purred, per The Independent: "Harry has the profile to be a legend here."

Given Diego Costa is pondering a Chinese sojourn, Everton might be lucky to keep Romelu Lukaku, and Alexis Sanchez doesn't seem in a rush to sign a new contract at Arsenal, Pochettino predicting longevity at White Hart Lane for his star player could be perceived as being about as prescient as declaring, "Now this guy is going to make a swell husband for Elizabeth Taylor."

The only thing certain in football is divorce. Just ask Claudio Ranieri. 

Let's not forget the Premier League is a habitat where 19-year-old Chelsea striker Dominic Solanke (if you haven't heard of him, it's because he has played 14 minutes of first-team football) is purportedly demanding £50,000 a week, or he's off, per The Sun. That Solanke's situation is one that merits little more than an eye roll says plenty.

Kane could not be more different. It's not just his hair that harks back to a bygone era. Histrionics and headlines hold little interest to a player who seems almost pathological in his pursuit of self-improvement. Maybe the absence of the former is why he doesn't get as many of the latter as he probably deserves.

In his formative years as a player, he was toiling more often than triumphing. Loan stints at Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City and Leicester City made him realise talent might get him on the pitch, but it wouldn't keep him there unless it was matched by an iron will and self-belief. Success has not come easy.

An accumulative tally of 14 goals in 56 league appearances (across League One and the Championship) did not scream at the fact that, four years on, he would be sat pretty as England's best and most prolific striker.

Maybe it is Kane's ordinariness in a world that is anything but that explains why he's not yet a superstar. For if it was purely about what transpires on the field, there's a fair chance Tottenham's No. 10 would be the most talked-about player in English football. Or at least the second-most talked-about behind Zlatan Ibrahimovic. He's only human. 

Kane's far from cocksure, but don't be fooled into thinking he doesn't know exactly how good he is now and how great he could become.

Just after the start of last season, Kane gave a candid and ultimately endearing interview to the Telegraph's Jason Burt. In it, he confessed an aim to become a Tottenham legend (Pochettino will be pleased), change the image the country has of players playing for England, be a role model for youth teamers breaking through, convince Premier League managers to buy British and, most importantly, avoid "second-season syndrome," having scored 31 in his first full campaign as a regular at Tottenham.

In the hands of a hatchet man, Kane could have come across a little conceited; instead Burt presented him as straightforward and infectiously enthusiastic.

Which is pretty much how he plays.

When Kane kicked off last term by going six Premier League matches without a goal, there were those who predicted he'd prove a one-season wonder, perhaps as Jamie Vardy has for Leicester this time around. Just like with the Stone Roses, though, a Second Coming did materialise after a much-heralded debut, and Spurs supporters didn't have to wait five-and-a-half years for it either.

Kane finished last season with 28 goals in 50 appearances, winning the Golden Boot. He's well on his way to retaining it. 

Kane's numbers are emphatic to the point even Donald Trump's press team would struggle to dispute them, should it ever transpire the U.S. President wants them looking at as a favour to new BFF Piers Morgan.

Sunday's 23-minute hat-trick against an admittedly rancid Stoke was a second treble in as many matches and a third of the calendar year—in February. No Tottenham player has scored as many as the four hat-tricks Kane has managed in the Premier League to date.

Kane's 17 Premier League goals see him share joint billing at the top of the scoring charts alongside Sanchez and Lukaku, despite the fact he missed seven weeks of the season due to an ankle injury sustained in September. It's now 13 goals in the last 12 matches, and there's little sign of him slowing down at the business end of the season. 

He's the first Tottenham striker to score 20 goals in three successive terms since Jimmy Greaves, with his tally for the current campaign in all competitions up to 22 and counting.

Greaves had a personality as big as the Ritz, and while Kane could be seen as staid in comparison, Pochettino was keen to dispel the notion post-match.

"He has his character," said Pochettino. "Sometimes he argues with me. Sometimes he's upset with me. Sometimes he's happy. He has a strong personality."

Robbie Fowler used to say it infuriated him when people called him a natural goalscorer, as it intimated his talent was more by luck than design. Hours honing his finishing on the training ground when everyone else had gone home probably helped, too, to be fair to the former Liverpool striker. Kane is similarly known to be a prodigious trainer.

Former Tottenham academy director Alex Inglethorpe said of his one-time scholar, per the Telegraph's Jim White:

"

Harry was always someone who was going to get better just by the sheer volume of work he was willing to do, and by the mentality he would demonstrate on a daily basis to invest in himself.

He became obsessive about his finishing in all its various forms and would dedicate a huge amount of time to improve these aspects of his game.

"

Kane's first goal of the weekend was the 100th of his career, racked up in just 219 matches. His third made it 41 goals in his last 50 appearances, which puts him on a par with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. There would be no need for him to blush in such exalted company. After all, it is not inconceivable Kane could be a team-mate of one or the other in the not-too-distant future.

Sandwiched between his first and third goals was a technically perfect effort, after Christian Eriksen inexplicably was able to find him loitering completely unmarked just outside Stoke's penalty area at a corner. Letting the ball run across his body, he hit it on the volley at the perfect point of its trajectory, with his weaker left foot. It was a masterpiece in timing.

Speaking to Sky Sports after the game, Kane described how he "swung a left at it." Vincent van Gogh must have had the shock of his life when he swung a can of yellow paint in the direction of a canvas, and sunflowers appeared fully formed. 

His first goal wasn't half bad either. He hits the ball so sweetly, and hard, it's impossible not to draw comparisons with Alan Shearer.

With either foot, he has an archer's accuracy and a puncher's power. In the past, Shearer has joked of Kane chasing his Premier League record of 260 goals, with the Spurs man currently on 66. He's probably shifting in his seat a bit more uncomfortably now.

In order to match Shearer's total, Kane would need to score 25 goals for the next 7.76 seasons. Doesn't sound impossible, does it?

Kane, though, drops into pockets of space too readily, usually down the left to allow him to cut inside on to his right foot, to be categorised as a quintessential No. 9 like Shearer. It wouldn't be right to call him a No. 10 either, given he's too prolific a goalscorer and spends so much time in the box.

Les Ferdinand once came up with a "nine and a half," which isn't a bad description.

Wherever Kane was playing on Sunday, Stoke's players couldn't get anywhere near him. All afternoon he was a constant focal point for his team-mates to hit in Spurs' 3-4-2-1 formation, which—when combined with his three goals (on another day, he might have had five or six)—made it just about the complete centre-forward's performance. 

As mongrels go, a hybrid of Shearer and Teddy Sheringham has fair pedigree.

Sheringham once said of the comparison, per the Daily Star (h/t the Daily Mail): "For being like me, I think he's probably got a little bit more than me. He can do everything I could but he's got a bit of pace as well."

The issue of pace is often the elephant in the room when it comes to Kane. It's oft said if he had an extra yard of it, he'd potentially be world class.

It's always difficult with rangy players to tell exactly how fast they are going. On different days, they can look both deceptively quick and slow. Kane lacks the elegance of movement of someone like Thierry Henry, but given the Frenchman could glide across snow without leaving a footprint, perhaps it's a harsh comparison to make.

He certainly has more of it than Sheringham, who the writer Rod Liddle said of watching the debut of one of Millwall's favourite sons (via the Daily Mail): "I remember musing to myself with the prescience and good judgment that have always been my stock in trade: 'Now, there's a slow, lazy ponce who won't amount to anything'.

"I had forgotten that crucial ingredient, intelligence, which Sheringham has in spades."

Kane has it by the bucketload, too, which makes him such a fascinating player to watch. It seems remarkable, to this writer at least, how a player with such a quixotic mix of power and poise has left a good number of critics immune to his charms. 

He's a brilliantly economical player. Nothing he does is superfluous. When he has the ball, he follows the path of least resistance towards the goal, always moving and thinking forward.

Showboating is seen as a little uncouth, it's that 1950s sensibility coming through again. Though if the aim of showboating is to make an opponent feel belittled, Kane's touchline trickery in the buildup to assisting Spurs' fourth goal, for Dele Alli, did quite the number on Stoke defender Bruno Martins Indi. Had he been in possession of a spade, the Dutchman would probably have dug himself a hole and still be in there now, cocooned in the foetal position.

Former Tottenham striker Clive Allen, whose 49 goals in all competitions in 1987-88 is a club record Kane may just have his eye on, has always been effusive in his praise for a player he worked closely with when on the White Hart Lane coaching staff.

"You could see from the day he walked in he had a real desire to improve himself as a footballer and the one thing I'd say about him, which unfortunately you don't say about a lot of young footballers, is that he had a passion for the game," said Allen, per Phil McNulty of BBC Sport.

"He loves football, he loves playing, he loves scoring goals."

Allen's point about Kane's passion for the game is a pertinent one. A source who spent time around the England camp over the summer for the disastrous European Championship campaign in France told me how some of Kane's international team-mates were genuinely surprised with how obsessed he is with football. It probably said more about them than it did him.

Pochettino probably had it right when he said: "He's one of the top strikers in the world and I think he deserves it because he's a great professional and top man. I'm happy for him."

On the same day La La Land won six Oscars but missed out on the big one it thought it had bagged, Kane was making a compelling case for a leading man gong of his own. For all the hype, of the two of them, it will almost certainly be Kane who stands the test of time better.

Come the end of the season, there's a more than fair chance he'll be holding a gold statue, too, though his will be in the shape of a boot.