Strong piece in the Guardian about Harry's loan spell at Millwall.
"Gallen returns on several occasions to the same subject: practice. It was all Kane ever wanted to do. Mauricio Pochettino, the Tottenham manager, talked last week about how Kane could get angry when he was ordered off the training pitch and it struck a chord with Gallen.
“In my 20 years of coaching, I’ve never seen a player practise as much as Harry,” Gallen said. “He was always practising from the edge of the box. That was his thing. He’d literally have to be chucked off the training pitch.
“Kenny [Jackett] would be watching from his office and he’d say: ‘Joe, you’ve got to come in. He’s going to pull his quad, here.’ I’d say to Harry: ‘Come on, we’ve got to go. Kenny’s going to kill me.’ And Harry would be annoyed. He would be groaning at me, saying: ‘Come on, let’s do some more.’ He’d be looking at me – not happy. The assistant gets all the abuse.”
Reminds me a lot of Larry Bird, NBA star for the Boston Celtics in the '80s. Not the most graceful physical specimen, not particularly outstanding in any one skill or attribute, but well rounded, good at everything, worked and hustled harder than everyone else and supremely determined and competitive. Bird was famous for being the first one to practice and the last to leave, going back to when he was a kid standing outside under the lights practicing his shooting into the wee hours. Harry and Bird even look a bit alike.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/mar/09/harry-kane-loan-millwall-tottenham-fa-cup
Not to belabor the point, but some background on Bird:
"I learned to be tough by watching my parents and the sacrifices they made for us," Bird told MacMullen. Bird also learned the virtue of hard work. His mother, for instance, labored at two jobs: cook and waitress. "Sometimes she would wake up sick in the morning," Bird recalled. "She'd be throwing up and feeling feverish, but since we didn't have a family car, she'd get herself dressed and walk to work. She'd walk over a mile to her waitress job at this breakfast place at 4 o'clock in the morning, then come back two or three hours later and get us breakfast and get us ready for school. Then as soon as the school bus took off, she'd be walking back another mile to the restaurant and work until 7, 8, 9 o'clock."
Following her example, Bird practiced basketball long and hard. When Bird went to the free-throw line in that game in his sophomore year, he wasn't worried about being rusty after not having played most of the season. He had trained relentlessly - going to the gym every morning at 6. Propping himself up on crutches, he shot 500 free throws daily. Discipline like that helped Bird hone his skills as a shooter, passer, rebounder, defender and floor leader. In the pros, fans forgot his early reputation as slow and a mediocre defender. Bird valued the advice of experts. When a high school coach told him there was more to being good than shooting, the right-handed Bird began to practice dribbling with his left hand even when he was just sitting with his pals....
He took even more pride in his rebounding and passing, skills he practiced repeatedly to keep sharp. All in the name of teamwork. "I like to see the gleam in my teammate's eyes as he runs back down the court after scoring off one of my passes," Bird told Ryan. "When you pass the ball that way, it makes your teammates happy and it also makes it much easier for you to shoot. Besides, passing is more of an art than scoring. My feeling aboutpassing is that it doesn't matter who's doing the scoring as long as it's my team."
http://www.investors.com/news/manag...iscipline-helped-him-lead-championship-teams/
