It’s been known about for a while in football fan circles, but now it’s finally out in the open: a shining, sickly brown statue of England star Harry Kane.
The £7,200 monument was commissioned in 2019 by Waltham Forest, the London borough where Kane grew up and played for a local football team—Ridgeway Rovers. It was originally planned for the area’s Chingford train station, only for the idea to be scrapped over fears it could distract train drivers (The Art Newspaper has chosen to refrain from the jokes that could be made about this).
The gleaming figure has since resided in storage, until yesterday, when a beaming Harry Kane was pictured beside his glossy likeness at its new home, Peter May Sports Centre. “It’s moments like this… you never expected,” he told the BBC after the unveiling, something a lot of people seeing the sculpture for the first time might be thinking.
The work, by the artist Tony Currie, has had a mixed reception. “The bronze Harry is too stiff, too foursquare, more like a collectable bobblehead or Subbuteo figure than a flesh-and-blood, stretched and warmed-up footballer,” said Laura Freeman, the chief art critic for the Times. “I just thought the Roman emperors wouldn’t have put up with it, with this sort of standard,” the freelance critic Estelle Lovatt told Sky News when asked about her initial reaction.
It's arguably better than attempts to immortalise other players, however. Who could forget the somewhat unsettling—and unsettled—depiction of Cristiano Ronaldo, put on display at a Portuguese airport in 2017, which the artist took another shot at a year later. We’re all for second chances, but maybe leave this one alone.