Tommy Martin: Haaland v Kane. The battle of the men who saved the centre-forward
STAR FORWARDS: England's Harry Kane celebrates with former player Peter Crouch. Pic: Bradley Collyer/PA Wire.
By adding a corruption scandal involving the ruling regime of the host nation that the long-dead generals of the Argentine military junta would have envied, we can truly say this World Cup has had everything.
Ginormous stadiums, colourful bands of supporters and mostly exciting games – not you Switzerland – even the strong stench of institutional crookedness that accompanied Donald Trump's intervention in the Folarin Balogun affair has failed to take the shine off things.
Most beguiling of all has been the constantly updating graphic on the bottom left of your screen detailing the top scorers of the tournament.
As with those rare and wonderful Sunday evenings at a golf major when the top ranked players hit the back nine in a bunch, you can’t help but say to yourself: that’s one hell of a leaderboard.
Having Kylian Mbappé, Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland, Harry Kane and Ousmane Dembélé leading the Golden Boot reckoning heading around the final bend must be beyond Fifa’s wildest dreams.
Sadly, it will not be possible to keep them all in the tournament indefinitely, despite those allegations that the governing body is exerting a WWE style influence on World Cup proceedings.
Haaland and Kane go up against each other as Norway and England meet in the quarter-finals, a subset of the wider superstar derby in that it pits the game’s two leading, proper centre-forwards against each other. For at least one of the tournament's super-performing superstars, the end of the World Cup is nigh.
Not since the 2002 heyday of Brazil’s Ronaldo and his opposite number in the final, Miroslav Klose of Germany, has the tip of the arrow been the most potent weapon for the top teams at international football’s top tournament.
Mbappé and Messi have been more elusive threats for France and Argentina, operating from wide angles and stolen half-spaces. Germany’s 2014 team owed more to the roving operations of Thomas Muller than the declining Klose up front. Italy won in 2006 with the solid citizen Luca Toni at centre-forward. And the great Spain team of the era, famously, tried to do away with the position altogether.
But in Kane and Haaland you have two operators that a time-traveller from the 1930s could recognise as centre-forwards in the grandest traditions, even if they might spit out their Woodbine at some of Kane’s unmanly sojourns into deeper positions.
Both are square of shoulder and broad of forehead, all the better for muscling opposition centre-halves aside and thunking in meaty headers. Both can spank the ball with cruel and unusual force and both have the subtle movements of jungle cats when seeking space to practice their lethal craft.
Choose your poison then. It is easy to descend into a bewildering swirl of numbers when comparing the two men. The England captain’s ridiculous season with Bayern saw him smash in 61 goals in all competitions, a career high but with which Haaland’s monstrous 52 goals in his 2022/23 debut season at Manchester City in the more punishing environment of the Premier League compares well.
Kane has 442 goals in 647 senior club games. Haaland has 297 in 380. Haaland has 162 goals in 198 games since joining City in 2022. Kane has 146 in 147 games since joining Bayern in 2023. Before that, only Alan Shearer had scored more Premier League goals than his 213 for Spurs.
Kane has blown the England goalscoring record to smithereens, his 85 goals in 119 caps leaving luminaries like Wayne Rooney, Gary Lineker and Bobby Charlton gasping in his wake.
But Haaland has a frankly obscene 62 goals in 54 games for Norway. By comparison, Kane’s last 62 goals for England have taken 80 caps to accumulate.
But enough numbers. It’s more interesting look at these two specimens as exemplars of that premium position on the football pitch, the one who’s subtext is always the demand to give me the ball and I will score.
Haaland is infinitely more charismatic, arriving seemingly fully formed on the European scene as a terrifying, marauding goal pillager, laughably close to the Hollywood Viking stereotype in physical characteristics and the smirking remorselessness of his plunder.
The spawn of a former footballer and a nation heptathlon champion, he benefitted from the Norwegian policy of non-competitive sport for children under 13, playing soccer with his local team until his mid-teens while excelling at handball and cross-country skiing, a multi-sport background evident every time he leaps for a header in the box.
Once he had resolved to be a footballer – he stood up in a classroom, mid-lesson, and told the teacher he wasn’t going to do this anymore – his father, Alf-Inge, concocted a five-year plan that has seen his career move seamlessly through every progressive step, from Molde to Salzburg to Dortmund to City and a Champions League winners medal in his first season and to the quarter-finals of the World Cup, all with the same sense of untroubled, malevolent inevitability as he showed in dispatching his second goal against Brazil in the Round of 16.
Kane, on the other hand, was famously dropped by Arsenal’s academy as a child for being, according to Liam Brady who was then in charge of things, “a bit chubby” and “not very athletic.”
Nor did Kane show up as particularly special even when he found his way back into the academy system at Tottenham, contemporaries recounting that he only stood out because of his desire for self-improvement.
A growth spurt and a few muscles on the bones kept him in the mix as a youngster at Spurs but there was nothing of Haaland’s smooth career trajectory in the loan spells at Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich City and Leicester City that marked his early career.
Nor did anyone in Tallaght to see his first goal for Spurs in a 4-0 Europa League win over Shamrock Rovers think they were watching a future World Cup Golden Boot winner.
But then came the arrival of Mauricio Pochettino as Spurs manager and that restless work ethic that took him all the way here, to the point where you have watched him at Bayern in recent years and in the decisive moments at this World Cup and wondered, just days from his 33rd birthday, is he actually getting better and better?
For all that they face up as elite goalscoring peers in this World Cup showdown, there is the slight sense that Kane’s status has been harder won, his path more pocked with disappointments than Haaland’s has been.
After all, the Norwegian is playing his club football in a shirt that could have been Kane’s, had a botched transfer saga in the summer of 2022 not earned him the penance of another season at Spurs.
There was the missed penalty in the Qatar quarter-final against France, the general sense of being the face of Gareth Southgate’s nearly men and the wasted peaks years in North London.
If Haaland is the crazy-eyed berserker, Kane, for all his profile, has that bashful awkwardness of the Englishman who would rather be pottering at something in his shed than talking to you. But there is a quiet, steely determination that has made him as lethal as Haaland’s innate killer instinct does for him.
While Haaland led the Norwegian longboat row celebrations after win over Brazil, Kane croaked hilariously in the aftermath of his team’s quarter-final win in the Azteca. Aw bless, you thought, Harry even makes the post-match interview look like hard work. But you wouldn’t bet against him delivering Haaland his own taste of big tournament heartache. Two proper centre-forwards in a World Cup quarter-final. Everyone’s a winner.
