One of the joys of making a preseason football prediction is trying to guess who will win the coveted golden boot awarded to the league’s top goal scorer. Even Premier League tipsters are having a hard time predicting the right outcome.
Once again, Harry Kane finds himself in the running after firing in a hat trick against Stoke City at the weekend as he bids to defend his title from last season.
His third strike against the Potters was his seventeenth in the Premier League and puts him joint top of the scoring charts with (whisper it quietly) Arsenal’s Alexis Sánchez and Everton’s Romelu Lukaku.
However, the signs are that Kane will once again snatch the golden boot as he has hit form at just the right time.
Rewind to the start of the season and it was in Tottenham’s fourth game of the season that Kane got his scoring exploits off to start.
Ironically, it was in the 4-0 away win over Stoke where he started his 2016/17 tally and since then he has gone on to score a total of 22 goals in 28 appearances in all competitions (including for England) this campaign.
Where the argument for Kane’s predicted golden boot claim heats up, is in the nitty gritty of the statistics.
Sanchez may ‘officially’ come first in rankings at the moment, but that is only by way of achieving more assists than Kane (eight to Kane’s four), what matters more is that Kane’s average minute to goal ratio stands at just 106 minutes whereas Sanchez’s is at 126 mins.
Lukaku’s seventeen goals have come at an average of 129 minutes between strikes with Chelsea’s Diego Costa a goal further back on sixteen at an average of 133 minutes per goal.
All of the above points to the fact that Kane is the man of the moment but threats are coming from all angles.
Manchester United’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic is just two goals back on 15 league goals but eclipses Kane in all competitions with a total of 26 and is very much in the form of his life as he works out where to ply his trade next season.
Whilst Chelsea have seemingly wrapped up the Premier League title, Costa will be eager to add a first Golden boot title to his growing roster of achievements.
However, Kane is showing no signs of slowing down and with Tottenham desperate for another crack at the Champions League next season, the best football prediction you are likely to get right now, is on Kane to reclaim the golden boot.
About the Author
Matthew Johnsville, is Premier League journalist at FootballPredictions.com. He lives in London and is the type of football fan that knows every league from inside out. In his spare time he plays football on a very amateuristic level