There isn't a single manager in history who wouldn't start his best player and talisman in a CL final. If he can stand on his own, he plays
Agreed. I've already made a lot of defences of starting Kane in that final (before, during, immediately afterwards and ever since) so I'll just summarise my main points:
- As is now being made clear, Kane is so much better than every alternative that the potential reward of him playing well outweighs the potential risk of poor match fitness. We're also now seeing that Kane's presence is a massive boost on its own (both in motivating his own team and demoralising opponents; unlike a final against, say, Bayern, Liverpool's squad is full of players with memories of being Kaned). Poch's decision essentially boiled down to "risk Kane and win if he plays at his best or don't play Kane and lose regardless".
- Poch would've received even more criticism if he'd lost without Kane (which he would've done). You would look insane if you left your best player out after declaring him fit.
- Poch had no actual match data to go on. He had to make a call based on training observations. Speaking of which, none of us are privy to how Kane was performing in practice. This could've informed Poch's decision in a way that none of us could possibly understand. We'll potentially never know.
- None of the squad had played for about six weeks or something. In a sense, nobody was "match fit". And "recent" form (the key argument for Lucas starting) had become meaningless, thus the only thing that actually mattered was who was physically fit. Poch may have felt that Kane was closer to 100% than he was.
- Kane would've pushed hard to start. Probably would've been unhappy at the club for a long time after that if he hadn't.
- Lucas is a fraud. I said this at the time as well but now it's impossible to deny. Scoring that hat trick was the peak of his career but it never seriously put him in contention to displace Kane at Kane's preferred position. Sometimes people talk about his "form" leading up to the match (basically one game in the CL) but he'd actually been garbo in the PL between that semifinal and the final.
- Also worth noting that Lucas and Kane were never really in direct competition, contrary to the memes. They play different positions very differently. If Lucas had started, it wouldn't have been Kane who made way. Evidenced by the fact that he eventually did come on in a different position.
- With that in mind, Spurs only really had one first team level striker available at that time, so why the hell wouldn't he be picked? Experiments with Son since then have shown that he's absolutely not a drop-in Kane substitute (which was always obvious but apparently not for some people). Lucas is even less of a Kane substitute.
- In the end, Kane had surprisingly little to do with Spurs' loss. They fecked themselves inside the first few minutes (with a criminal decision tbf). Kane didn't even play
that badly. Sure, he wasn't good, but the weight of expectation made him look way worse. Him performing was the only realistic way Spurs were winning after the first few minutes and he clearly wasn't in a state to do it. Nonetheless, the rest of the team were almost to a man hot garbage. Kane was one of their only players who didn't forget how to complete basic six yard passes. Nerves wrecked most of them. Other stars like Eriksen were worse than Kane. Nobody could fashion one clear-cut chance for him in that match (arguably, of course, he should've "done it all himself" - because that old meme.. - but that was definitely too much to ask in the circumstances).
