Harry Kane deserves better than Tottenham’s walk of shame

Fair play to whoever found enough highlights to put together an end-of-season montage for the Tottenham Hotspur supporters who bothered to hang around for the players’ walk of shame, even if a few of those fans booed at the end of it.

Unsurprisingly, Harry Kane featured in most of the clips and, even more unsurprisingly, the striker was presented with all three of Tottenham’s player-of-the-season awards following the club’s final home game of the campaign.

For Kane, this has been one of his best-ever seasons. He has broken the Tottenham and England goalscoring records and could still beat his best-ever Premier League tally of 30 after moving on to 28 top-flight goals.

Kane’s goal against Brentford clinched another League record as he has now netted in 25 different games this season, which also underlines just how bad the rest of the Tottenham team have been.

Collectively, this has been a nightmare season for Spurs and those who stayed for the ‘lap of appreciation’ that turned into a walk of shame will recognise that Kane deserves better, certainly much more than a mural – however good it is.

It was impossible to take any clues from Kane’s body language at the end as he waved to supporters, but caretaker manager Ryan Mason forgot the fact the striker tried to engineer a move away to Manchester City when faced with a similar scenario two years ago.

“He waves at the crowd every season,” said Mason. “I saw him waving two years ago and you guys were convinced he was leaving. He was just thanking the fans as he does every season.”

Kane did not try to sugar-coat the situation while accepting his awards, telling the few thousands fans who stayed behind after watching Spurs slump to a fifth defeat in seven that it has been “a difficult season”.

“We appreciate all the support you’ve shown us up and down the country this year,” said Kane on the pitch. “Obviously, we know it’s been a difficult year on the whole. But we appreciate all the guys and girls travelling away and coming here at home. We’ll try and finish strong next week.”

The good news for Tottenham fans is there is only one more game of this sorry season to go. The bad news is there is still one more potential humiliation left to endure.

Spurs supporters barely care whether or not their team sneak into the Europa Conference League next season and Brentford have now moved just a point behind them ahead of the last weekend of the League season.

Even when Spurs were winning, thanks to Kane’s brilliant eighth-minute free-kick, the home fans were singing “Levy out” songs and they got louder as Brentford completed a second-half turnaround thanks to two excellent goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa’s late strike.

In his end-of-season message to fans, Levy said: “This has been an immensely difficult season. We made footballing decisions over recent seasons based on ambition and a desire to bring success to our club and they have not delivered what we had hoped. Your frustration has been understandable and all of us at the club have shared it.”

He added: “We shall spend the period ahead of next season working relentlessly to position our club for on-pitch success and football you will love to come and watch. Every element of the club's operations is geared toward delivering that.”

It was a valiant attempt at giving the Tottenham fans something to be optimistic about, but the performance of the team again underlined the fact that talk is cheap. This has been a depressing, humiliating campaign and Mason conceded that seeing the stadium empty out before the lap of appreciation stung.

“Of course [it hurts],” said Mason. “It is understandable because of how probably the second two-thirds of the season has gone on and off the pitch, but, ultimately, we know the fans will be there next season.

“This club will keep moving forward and now is the time where we need to be stronger than ever and believe in what we're going to do, commit to it and have people that are committed to it. And I always say in football things can change very quickly and the energy can change quickly.”

Levy is stepping up his efforts to appoint a new permanent head coach and a sporting director and, asked what needs to change at Tottenham, Mason added: “There are many different conversations that need to happen, but ultimately, I have said it quite a bit, we need to commit to something and be consistent with it. Then have people, staff and players here who are committed to it too and I think that transfers to everyone else. That is what we need.”

Brentford’s first victory at Tottenham since 1905 was all the more impressive given that it came at the end of the week in which their own star striker, Ivan Toney, was banned for eight months.

“Our thoughts are with Ivan and we are very aware that replacing 20 goals in the Premier League is not easy,” said Brentford manager Thomas Frank.

“We talked about it and we actually have good players who can score and every time Wissa plays instead of Ivan he scores. He will score goals, he’s such a threat.

“But big praise to Bryan, he’s grown to be a big player for us. He works hard, he’s a fantastic pressing player, can score assists, link up and works very hard on his finishing. Those two finishes, I was very pleased to see his hard work pay off.”

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