Ange Postecoglou says he has been operating on the assumption that Harry Kane will leave Tottenham Hotspur since his arrival at the club.
the athlete It reported that Tottenham accepted an offer worth more than €100m (£86.4m, $110m) from Bayern Munich for Kane on Thursday, and the 30-year-old was cleared to travel to Germany on Friday.
Postecoglou, though, was keen to reiterate that this came as no surprise to anyone in north London after a protracted transfer saga over the past few months.
“We’ve been planning this, fair to say, for a while,” said the Aussie. “It doesn’t take a lot of investigative work to see that this is going to happen. It doesn’t change things dramatically from my point of view.
His standing among our supporters speaks for itself. It’s fairly clear that Harry Kane will always be one of the greats of this football club.”
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Postegoclou said a lot of Tottenham’s work so far has been done with Kane’s departure in mind, but he didn’t give Daniel Levy a list of possible replacements.
“It’s not my wife who hands me a shopping list and tells me to get some bread, eggs and milk for the kids.
“We knew this was coming. It doesn’t change things dramatically. It’s not because Harry is gone. It’s always been the plan.”
Postecoglou said he and Kane had a conversation on their first day working together, which the Tottenham manager thought made it clear that his departure from the No. 9 was the most likely outcome. However, he said he did not try to convince Kane to stay.
“If you’ve been involved in football for as long as I have been, you know if the clubs are negotiating, you know the player wants to go.
“He was blunt and honest, and so was I. You get a signal there that if the clubs agree, he wants to go. Nothing along the way made me feel like there was going to be anything other than this outcome.”
“I didn’t see the point of (trying to get him to stay). Whatever I was going to say would be irrelevant… I could give this great insight, but he’d heard it all before. My feeling was, we’re going to get to know each other over the next month, and that’s it.” The best way to navigate it.
“If not, he was happy to stay. He was very professional about it, and I wanted to give him the respect any player of his stature deserves.”
(Photo: Eric Alonso/Getty Images)