Harry Kane chasing Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo records

                                       

Harry Kane has declared that he wants to emulate Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, and if you think that's funny, you might want to pause for thought. The Tottenham striker is scoring goals at an astonishing rate. Three more against Apoel Nicosia on Tuesday night brought his season's tally to 11 for club and country. Not bad, especially when you consider that he didn't score once in August.

The man derided as a one season wonder after hitting 21 league goals in the 2014-15 campaign has since added 25 and 29 goal hauls to his CV, and that was in the league alone. In 2017, he's scored more league goals than Ronaldo (25 in 23 compared to the Real Madrid man's 15 in 20) and only slightly fewer than Messi (a superior 34 in 27).

Numbers only tell some of the story, of course, though you do wonder how those numbers would look if Kane had been playing for Real or Barca rather than Spurs over that time period. Kane is a fine forward, but he is unlikely to impact world football like Ronaldo or Messi for the simple reason that very few people ever will. Those two are really once in a generation players -- we just happen to have been fortunate enough to get them at the same time.

But that's no reason to laugh at Kane for trying to emulate them. No-one learns to cook so that they can burn cakes. If you want to do something, you look to the best for inspiration. Laughing at someone for aspiring to be the best is the preserve of the perpetual loser, whose only recourse is to try to drag everyone else down with them.

But for all that, Kane would be onto a winner if simply tried to be the best player he could be. After all, he is a very different sort of forward to Messi and Ronaldo. He is not, and never will be, the ethereal presence who shifts through defenders with a supernatural flourish that doesn't seem entirely fair. Nor is a rippling stack of bronzed muscle whose blurry-legged runs can sometimes only be stopped with a net and a tranquilliser dart.

Kane is not slow, but he is hardly lightning fast. He can run with the ball and he has a trick or two, but that's not his main selling point. What sets Kane apart from his peers, besides that goal scoring rate, is that his value as an individual is equal to his value as a team player.

                                       

Kane will never wander about alone in the final third, shrugging his shoulders. He'll rumble back towards the half way line to contest goal kicks, he'll put pressure on defenders, he'll always look for a way to make himself more useful. He reads the game well and he has an eye for a pass, or a well-directed header.

Most importantly of all, and one of the few departments in which he stands shoulder to shoulder with Ronaldo and Messi, is that he seems to have an unshakeable faith in his own abilities.

Even as he broke through into the Tottenham team as a youngster, it was noticeable that Kane's head never dropped when the shots whistled wide or flew over. He never hides from responsibility, giving up on chances by delegating them to others. You see it in other strikers sometime; that trait that might pass for selflessness if the fear wasn't so obvious.

Kane just keeps doing what he does, with the conviction of knowing that he will be rewarded eventually. He's fired off 39 shots this season, 12 more than his nearest contender in that field, Romelu Lukaku. He's hit the woodwork five times, more than twice as many as anyone else in the league. He is utterly relentless.


He's still only 24 and still improving. And those improvements won't be limited to his on-field attributes. He's already been displaying a maturity that belies his years and an awareness of the responsibility of his role. His declaration that you'd "have to be stupid to leave (Spurs) now," was quite an outspoken statement for a modern day footballer, but one that marked him out as a future club captain (he's already captained England).

Kane is quite right to set his targets high and seek to match the achievements of this generation's finest footballers. But the truth is that he is already one of the hottest talents in Europe; if he keeps working as hard as he's working, he's only going to get better. And, for the rest of Europe, that will be no laughing matter.