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‘Over the bar, over the bar’, the Portsmouth winger jeered as Harry Kane lined up the free kick. In true football lingo, it’s best to retaliate first and dig early. Because Kane invariably gets the last laugh.
It will be a while before the missed penalty against France fades from the terrace mood. But he will wither in the coming months. What will remain is the magnitude of Kane’s goalscoring achievements. The free kick didn’t go so well, he crashed into the defensive wall. However, there would be an answer later. Of course there would be.
In the coming months the iconic records will collapse. Kane now sits just one goal behind Jimmy Greaves as Tottenham’s all-time top scorer. The celebration party for beating the top English goalscorer in history will have to wait for now. Perhaps next week’s North London derby will be a more appropriate occasion? So Wayne Rooney’s England record will be surpassed when he scores for the national team.
Harry Kane’s sublime curling effort in the second half was the difference as Spurs knocked Portsmouth out of the FA Cup
Antonio Conte’s men avoided a surprise in the third round of the FA Cup with a determined performance against Pompey at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
But the riddle remains. If Kane had broken Rooney’s record against France, could he now be at the top of his career and be a World Cup winner? All idle speculation in one sense. Right now a League Cup, the Intertoto Cup, any cup would do for Kane and Spurs.
The measure of Tottenham’s mediocrity is that League One opponent Portsmouth have won a major trophy more recently than Spurs. ‘When Sol went up/To lift the FA Cup/We were there!’ those 8,500 traveling fans chanted, a double jeer given Sol Campbell’s traitorous status here.
The only response Spurs fans could offer was ‘We want Levy gone’, the palpable discord at the club now apparently a permanent feature since the last days of Mauricio Pochettino, the manager seemingly at odds with the owner, whoever that may be. the head of management.
The League One side put on a brave display in front of their 9,000 traveling fans, but their FA Cup journey is coming to an end.
It was Portsmouth’s Reeco Hackett-Fairchild who had the better first-half effort with an acrobatic shot that Fraser Forster had to avoid.
For now it is Antonio Conte and in the midst of all the complaints and misunderstandings about his future – he seems to believe that he was hired to drive a Formula One car and they have given him the keys to the Ford Escort – it is not impossible that this competition or even the Champions The league could turn around a curiously ambivalent season for Tottenham, which began full of promise but lost its way. An FA Cup would be a major milestone for Spurs, so this win can be marked as a small step on that path.
Without reducing everything to personalities, the future of Spurs is tied to Conte and Kane. The latter has one more year left on his contract. The window of opportunity for him to move to a club that wins big trophies is now. If both he and Conte decide that Spurs are not that kind of club, and a quarter of a century will have passed since they won the 2008 Liga in March, then Levy’s rebuild will have to proceed without the club’s two most famous names.
For now, there is some hope and soon there will be celebrations. How could there not be when a record as significant as Greaves’ is about to fall? Kane’s step towards that goal came in the 51st minute, a rare moment of quality in a cup tie that was unremarkable save for the commitment of the visitors and their fans.
The Spurs players celebrate as Harry Kane opened the scoring with his marvelous effort which turned out to be the game winner.
There was nothing Pompey goalkeeper Josh Griffiths could do against Kane’s effort, who simply had to watch it fly by.
Kane’s latest goal for Spurs, his fourth in four, puts him just one goal behind Jimmy Greaves as Tottenham’s all-time top scorer.
Kane’s goal came just after Emerson Royal struck the woodwork with a brilliant header across goal from Son Heung-min’s cross.
Oliver Skipp sent a shot wildly over the crossbar from around eight meters after the ball went wide in the Pompey box.
Portsmouth’s players and coaching staff addressed their fans directly as the final whistle was blown to thank them for their vocal support.
Kane hit Ryan Tunnicliffe before trading passes with Ryan Sessgnon. Just outside the box, he looked up, took a touch, picked his spot and fired into the right corner. classic kane.
Portsmouth didn’t really have an answer for that, nor would you expect it to given it sank to twelfth in League One, its last league win coming in October, a run in which manager Danny Cowley was replaced last week. with a substitute. Simon Bassey here.
Here he was fearsome, his 5-3-2 kept Tottenham at bay and even made him a bit nervous in the last few minutes without generating a clear chance. His finest moment came on 13 minutes when Reeco Hackett-Fairchild found a cross with a glorious shot, spinning through the air to connect with the ball on the spin and forcing Fraser Forster to push it wide into the corner. It would have been a goal. Kane will no doubt empathize with Hackett-Fairchild’s sense of what could have been.
RE-LIVE ALL THE ACTION AS IT UNLEASHED WITH ARTHUR PARASHAR BELOW