Tottenham bounce back after European heartache as Harry Kane hits first-half hat-trick against Stoke
Just one week on from his last hat-trick, Harry Kane bagged another at White Hart Lane this afternoon as Tottenham beat Stoke City 4-0 in a match that was dishearteningly one-sided. The fact that between Kane’s two hat-tricks he ran himself into the Wembley turf on Thursday, leading the line in a losing cause, makes this performance even more impressive.
Kane is currently in the form of his life and these three first-half goals moved him level with Alexis Sanchez and Romelu Lukaku at the top of the scoring charts on 17 Premier League goals for the season. He won the Golden Boot last year and should be confident of retaining it this year. More importantly, these three points moved Spurs back up to second in the table, ahead of Manchester City, who did not play this weekend.
Spurs are still 10 points behind Chelsea and the prospect of them winning the title this season is extremely slim. But they can still win the FA Cup, and can target second place in the league. They can do both of those if Kane, the in-form striker in the country, keeps playing like this.
This game was even more one-sided than the score-line suggests. But it was not even Spurs’ best performance of the last month or so. They played better here, for example, against West Bromwich Albion six weeks ago, another 4-0 win, another Kane hat-trick. Ultimately this game was at least as much about Stoke City’s utter lack of application, a dismal non-performance in which they were, in football parlance, lucky to get nil.
Stoke looked like players who knows they are safe, have nothing left to play for, and spend most of their time wondering if they are going to Ibiza or Las Vegas in June. They did nothing to make life difficult for Spurs, who could simply walk through them to score their four first-half goals. Had Spurs wanted another four in the second half, they could have had them.
The rout started with a goal that said everything about Stoke’s sloppiness. Christian Eriksen tried a pass into the box which hit Ryan Shawcross and despite all the Stoke players in the box no-one cleared the ball. So Kane pounced on it and drove the ball right-footed into the far bottom corner before Stoke could react.
Jan Vertonghen, Kane and Kyle Walker went close from distance before Kane added his brilliant second. Eriksen pulled a corner back to him, 20 yards out, on the bounce, and Kane got his body over the ball and struck it perfectly left-footed into the net.
That was the end of the game as a contest and five minutes later Kane had his third. Spurs had a freekick from 25 yards out. Eriksen tapped it to Kane whose low shot deflected off Peter Crouch, wrong-footing Lee Grant and flying into the opposite bottom corner of the net. Kane looked slightly sheepish to complete his hat-trick |with good fortune but he had more than earned his luck.
Still Spurs continued to push at the end of the first half and they were rewarded with a fourth just before the break. Kane lifted the ball over the head of Bruno Martins Indi, raced forward and then teed up Dele Alli, sliding gratefully in at the far post.
The second-half was a non-event. The game was dead and Stoke had no interest at all in trying to resurrect it. Spurs were happy to keep the ball and conserve their energy for their next game, against Everton here next Sunday.
The only thing that Stoke did in the first half was foul, picking up three bookings, and in the second half they did not even do that. The only incident, if it can be called that, was when Toby Alderweireld limped off with leg pain to be replaced by Kevin Wimmer. Pochettino also brought on Harry Winks and Heung Min Son, missing another chance to give some time to Vincent Janssen in a game looked perfectly set for him to come on and try to score.
The fact that Jon Moss awarded an almost unprecedent one minute of additional time at the end of the second half said everything about how little had happened, how the whole game had been settled in the first 45 minutes. He could even have blown the whistle when the clock reached 90 and few would have complained. Certainly not the Stoke City fans who came to White Hart Lane and could have expected better than this from their team.
