Tottenham Hotspur lost 1-0 to Manchester United today in Premier League competition, but the real loss could end up being a whole lot bigger than just one game. The closing moments of the match saw striker and franchise player Harry Kane in noticeable discomfort and limping off the pitch.
We won’t know more about the severity of Kane’s injury until Monday at the earliest, but if he is set to meet substantial time that could present a major hardship for Spurs. The north London side is now set to lose forward Son Heung-min to international duty with South Korea in the Asian Cup.
Potentially, he could be gone until the end of the month. And if Harry Kane is on the shelf for a considerable amount of time, manager Mauricio Pochettino will have a selection headache in the final third.
“My worry is that it was a bad tackle in the last moment,” Pochettino said in an interview with the BBC. It wasn’t the intention of the United player but it was a bad tackle and now he has a bit of a swelling on his ankle and he was limping after the game.”
“We are going to lose Son for the Asia Cup and if Harry Kane suffers an injury, it is going to be massive for us.”
Up next for Tottenham is a league away fixture at Fulham, followed by the road leg of their EFL Cup semifinal tie with Chelsea. Spurs are currently up 1-0 on aggregate in that competition.
In discussing Kane’s injury, Pochettino harkened back to the time he took heat for inserting Kane into a cup game against a much lower division team, while his side was up big. The Argentine made a very salient point- no one knows when injuries are going to strike.
“That is the risk in any competition,” said Pochettino in his post-match news conference.
“The people, they criticized me when we played Harry Kane for 15 or 20 minutes at Tranmere.”
“I told you the injury can appear when you don’t know when, and look today, [it happened] in the last action of the game.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, regularly appears as a guest pundit on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
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