Forget Aguero or Chelsea’s Costa – Is This Tottenham Star The Best In The League Right Now?

Harry Kane has had a meteoric rise in English football, after coming through the youth system at Tottenham and impressing in their reserve team, he was again impressive when he got his chances last season but this season has been a completely different story as Kane has been able to keep veteran strikers Adebayor and Soldado out of the starting line-up.

Kane has scored 10 league goals this season for Spurs and has excelled playing for the club in Europe as well; not many would have expected a young English player to actually do so well in what is his first full season in the first team but just how good is he? We compare the young Englishman to the powerhouse strikers of the Premier League, Sergio Aguero, Diego Costa and Robin Van Persie using Squawka stats.

A proper centre forward

Although Diego Costa and Sergio Aguero have scored more goals than Kane, credit has to be given to him for even being close to these two world class players this season. If we look at the goals per game ratio, it is Diego Costa who leads the stats in that department with 0.89 goals scored per game, and then comes Aguero with 0.78 goals per game and Kane who fills in with 0.53 goals per game, I is Van Persie who comes in last in this regard with 0.43 goals per game.

 

While Kane might be scoring one goal every other game, his chance creation also is a little off with Costa creating 1.74 chances per game with Van Persie and Aguero creating 0.95 and 0.94 chances per game and Kane provides 0.74 chances per game, so chance creation is something that he can work on if he is being compared to the likes of the other three.

Kane really comes into his own league when it comes to doing some dirty work for the team, he might not be scoring as many goals as Aguero or Costa but he provides more to the team by pressing and harrying the opposition defence. He puts in a shift and that shows in his stats, Kane wins more aerial duels than the rest of the 3 players with him winning 1.16 duels with Costa coming in second with 1.11 wins in the air per game and Van Persie and Aguero come in with 0.95 and 0.28 aerial wins per game.

His work rate up front is further illustrated with the number of interceptions he makes per game, Kane makes 0.53 interceptions per game, while that may seem low, if we compare him to the other strikers we can see that he intercepts the ball nearly twice as much as his closest rival, which is Diego Costa with 0.26 interceptions per game, Aguero comes in with 0.22 interceptions per game and Robin Van Persie coming in with 0.19 interceptions per game.

Kane still has some time to develop and he could turn into a world class forward, he just needs to work on his finishing in the league.