‘‘As a child, I always had a ball nearby. I remember going over the park with my dad and brother; we played football most nights after we finished school. I liked a few different sports, but football was the one I pursued.’’

Harry Kane's first football lessons took place in an ordinary London park, where his father, Pat, and older brother, Charlie, kicked a ball around with him every evening once school was done. His parents, Pat and Kim, raised the two brothers in Walthamstow and then Chingford, in the east of the city, and Pat's family came from Galway, across the Irish Sea. Nearly everyone in the house was Tottenham-mad, living fifteen minutes from the ground. Yet the youngster's own early loyalty belonged to Arsenal. He grew up in the long shadow of David Beckham, who had walked the same school corridors and worn the same colours at the same grassroots club.

That club was Ridgeway Rovers, which took him in at six, and soon he was running out for a second side, Gladstone, as well. An academy place at Arsenal followed, a prize for any London child, and it lasted barely a year. The man in charge of the academy, Liam Brady, judged him too chubby and not athletic enough, and it fell to Pat to carry the verdict home to his young son. Years later, Arsène Wenger, the manager who ran the club, would say he was disappointed that Arsenal had let the boy go. The boy never forgot it either: he later called the rejection the best thing that ever happened to him, because it gave him a drive that had not been there before.
It sent him back to Saturday and Sunday football, back to the muddy pitches where he had started. A trial at Tottenham went nowhere.

‘‘He's a top leader in the English national team. I respect highly his commitment and his quality.’’

-Arsène Wenger