The last few days have surely been among the most glamorous of Kane’s life. “We expected a lot,” said a salesman in the Bayern megastore. Kane has been signed primarily for his goals and assists, clearly, but also for his reputation and global appeal. The prevalence of Kane merchandise in Munich, so soon after his £86 million transfer from Tottenham Hotspur, provides just a small glimpse into what Bayern are hoping to gain from this deal. Already, special Kane-branded t-shirts have been commissioned, designed and made available for sale. With nine hours of trading still remaining, they had already smashed through it.īayern, clearly, have moved quickly to capitalise on the commercial uplift that Kane should bring them. “It is insane.” The store, he said, has a daily sales target. “I have never seen something like this,” a staff member told Telegraph Sport. In the Bayern club shop near the city’s airport, Kane shirts were flying off the shelves at an astonishing rate. He does not need to learn from us.”Įarlier in the day, just a few hours after his arrival in the Bundesliga had been officially confirmed, Kane’s impact was immediately felt. He went to bed at 3 in the morning after his medical. “We don’t expect him to be the superhero,” Tuchel said after the match. When he was then summoned from the bench in the second half, there was a guttural roar in the stadium that was unmatched by anything before or after. The first significant noise in the Allianz Arena came in the warm-up, when he was introduced to the crowd. Until kick-off, it had felt like the whole occasion - and indeed the whole city - had been geared towards Kane. Thomas Tuchel’s side wasted chance after chance, missing shot after shot, without Kane in the first half. This first appearance in German football flipped that discussion on its head, for it showed exactly why Bayern need Kane. So much of the conversation around Kane’s transfer, in England at least, has revolved around what Bayern can do for him. Or, as he might now put it, das ist Fußball. That, sadly for him, is the nature of football. Either way, the game was over before Kane could make his mark on it. Presumably he did so in English, although his first 24 hours in Germany had been so hectic that he might well have found time to learn a few phrases. In fact, Kane’s first act in a Bayern shirt was to complain to the referee about the decision. Within a few minutes, before he had made any impact on the evening, Bayern were trailing by three after Leipzig’s Dani Olmo completed his hat-trick from the penalty spot. It was a tough ask, with Bayern trailing 2-0 when he emerged from the bench after around an hour of play. Kane’s first task as a Bayern player was to save the day. But as he trotted onto the Allianz Arena turf for the first time in Bayern’s colours, in this German Supercup against RB Leipzig, he did so with desperation in the air and anguish on the face of his new fans. One can only imagine how intensely Kane wanted to win the first trophy of his career, to remove that burden so soon after moving to Germany. England’s captain arrived in Munich this weekend at the start of his new life with his new club, dreaming of fresh possibilities, but he left his first match for Bayern Munich with a feeling that must have felt grimly familiar.
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