Harry Kane eyeing place alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi as one of the greats

The forward has taken the Premier League by storm so far this season

An English and European great in the making? (Getty)

When Harry Kane was a young footballer, he was never quite one of those special talents constantly talked up as being potentially one of the best in the world, but absolutely everyone who worked with him greatly respected his very distinctive - and very deep - desire for self-improvement. He would take every little lesson or detail on in a bid to hone his game - to the point he is where he is now.

That is an attitude that is essentially identical to Cristiano Ronaldo’s, and it is one major reason why Kane now has absolutely no reticence about becoming one of the best in the world, of winning individual awards like the Portuguese did with Fifa’s ‘The Best’ on Monday night.

“That’s what I want to do,” Kane said after Tottenham Hotspur’s 4-1 win over Liverpool at Wembley on Sunday. “I’ve told you before, at some stage I want to be the best player in the world and to do that you have to be up there with these players. They set the standards, Ronaldo and [Leo] Messi, so for the rest of us it’s about trying to catch them and get up there. The numbers are good but for me, it’s more important to be winning these big games against big teams. It shows we are coming together as a team and getting better. That’s the most important thing. We will see where we finish at the end of the year but it’s always my aim to be up there with the very best.”

That will happen if he keeps scoring at the rate he is, and it should also mean Tottenham keep winning games and finally win trophies, because Kane currently seems like he could be one of those rare players who could well put in “a Ronaldo season”: one of those genuinely block-busting campaigns where his goalscoring stats defy all modern trends, and he hits more than a goal game - maybe into the 40s. That really is no exaggeration.

He already has eight in nine league games and 13 in 12 across all competitions, following on from his 35 in 38 last season to put him on 45 for this calendar year. It won’t take too much to take him to 50 for 2017.

“Fifty would be nice. We will see. There are plenty of games to go, a lot of tough games coming up so we will just see. I don’t like to think about it too much. We’ll see by the end of the year where I am but I feel good. As I’ve said before, I feel confident. Scoring early in a game like that helps as well, so I just want to keep it going.”

It is more than confidence. It now feels like what teammates of Alan Shearer used to call “a striker’s delusion”, how he has enhanced his fundamental technical qualities with a tenacious will for goals. It’s also why he feels like the greatest English guarantee of goals since Shearer, even more than Wayne Rooney’s scoring peak of 2009-12.

There is just that relentlessness to Kane, that near-deluded belief that he will score every chance, a connected refusal to let any miss affect him in any way and we thereby have this current situation where it feels like he will score in every single game. He will right now maximise the merest sniff of an opportunity around the box. The first goal on Sunday displayed this. Even allowing for the customary chaos in the Liverpool defence, it was still quite a difficult chance, but Kane made it look so easy because there is absolutely no hesitation to his game at the moment. He has full belief in what he is doing and fully took advantage.

Tottenham players celebrate after Harry Kane's opening goal against Liverpool (Getty)

Jose Mourinho is understood to be a huge fan of Kane and would have wanted to take him to Manchester United in his first summer in 2016, only to be told it was a non-starter. The Portuguese must have felt his side’s luck might be back in when Kane went off holding his hamstring at the end of the Liverpool game, temporarily raising the prospect he may miss Saturday’s trip to Old Trafford.

That now looks unlikely, as Mauricio Pochettino said it was merely down to tiredness, so will rest him this week before United. “He is not a machine,” the Argentine smiled.

He may well put in the numbers of a machine, though. He looks ready. He’s certainly willing.