First, the numbers. In the past three seasons, N’Golo Kante has
played 129 club matches for Chelsea and Leicester City, scoring four
goals and providing seven assists. In roughly the same time frame, he
has played 29 matches for France, with a goal and an assist. So he’s not
a goal-scorer or goal provider.
He has got a total of 21 yellow cards in that same period, and not a
single sending-off – so he’s not really a defender either, with those
last-ditch tackles, taking one for the team.
At 168 cm – shorter than Xherdan Shaqiri, shorter than Tuesday’s
opponent Dries Mertens – you could miss him on the pitch amid the
muscled-up giants of the modern game.
And yet, in those three seasons, Kante has seen his market
valuation go from €9m, when Leicester signed him from French club Caen,
to €36m, when they sold him to Chelsea, to the €100m Chelsea are now
reportedly demanding of any club that wishes to sign him now.
N’Golo Kante has been one of the breakout stars of the 2018 World Cup and if France win it all, he’ll have played a major part.
In those three seasons, Kante has won the Premier League title
twice – with different clubs – and been voted player of the year by his
Premier League peers and by the English football writers’ association,
each a difficult constituency to please.
On Tuesday, Kante was the wall standing between Belgium’s star-studded attack and the French goal they couldn’t penetrate.
So, for those who’ve come in late, who is N’Golo Kante and why is he important to club and country?
The second part first. Kante’s role, in one line, is to stop the
opposition’s attacks before they become dangerous, anywhere on the
pitch, and to then start his own team’s movement forward before the
opposition has time to organise itself. It sounds simple and complex at
the same time – how could one man do both jobs, and all over the pitch?
And that’s the key to Kante: His ability to be wherever the danger
is – or, actually, a second before the danger arises. That explains
those facts above: He is not interested in scoring goals, he is not
necessarily the player who will pass to the scorer either. His job is to
anticipate, intercept, pass, anticipate. As France’s coach Didier
Deschamps said on Monday: “He is an essential part of our plan. You
don’t want to just steal the ball from your opponents. Kante uses the
ball, he has a lot of trajectories for his passing.”
Deschamps would have an affinity with Kante; he was dismissed as
the water carrier in his playing days by Eric Cantona – his sole role
being to pass the ball to his team-mates. Kante is the water-collector
and carrier. The ultimate firefighter.
So how does his play help his team? Basically, by enabling swift
counter attacks. Leicester City’s game plan was built around the speed
of their striker Jamie Vardy, who would run at opposing defences in a
quick counter; the key was to get the ball to him as fast as possible
once his team had the ball. France use a similar style with the tear
away Kylian Mbappe. Chelsea have Eden Hazard. They all need someone who
can turn a threatening move against their team into a threatening move
by their team in the shortest possible time, before the opposition can
recoup.
That’s what Kante does.
He is an unlikely star on YouTube, with clips focusing on his
reading of the game and his ability to cover distance at speed. One
short clip – 20-odd seconds – features a sequence where he gives away
the ball, then wins it back three times in succession each time a
team-mate gives it away.
The most common description of Kante is that he’s everywhere at one
time. It’s what Steve Walsh, the Leicester scout who spotted him while
he was playing in France, says about him. “When I first saw him (playing
for French club Caen) I thought ‘is there two of him?”
When Leicester improbably won the Premier League title in 2016, the
joke was that they won it with three players in midfield – Danny
Drinkwater in the middle and Kante on either side of him.
Those jokes – born out of sheer incredulity – followed him to
Chelsea. His club team-mate Hazard, Belgium’s captain and creative force
who Kante stopped in Russia, said: “Sometimes, when I’m on the pitch, I
think I see him twice. One on the left, one on the right. I think we
play with twins.”
Marcel Desailly, a former France captain, tweeted this probably
unoriginal joke when Kante was helping Chelsea to the league title in
2017, “71% of the earth is covered by water. The rest is covered by
N’Golo Kante.”
That same season, Thierry Henry – who is now on the Belgium
coaching staff – wrote of his visit to a Chelsea training session: “I
went over to him and stood in front of him. And I poked him in the
chest. I had to, just to check if he was real!”
And yet all of this might not have happened. Kante’s football
career began late – so late that, at 21, when his current peers were
making their first millions, winning their first championship medals,
making their first headlines, Kante was still studying for a diploma in
vocational accounting.
The problem was his size; no academy in France signed him because
of his height. Perhaps it was understandable; there is a picture of
Kante, pre-teen, with his local club team-mates after winning a trophy.
There is only a couple of years’ age difference but he is about half the
height of the others, a baby among boys. Watching him in training today
presents a similar image: a boy among men.
But he had quality and he had determination. He finally made his
professional debut at 21, for Bolougne against Monaco, and his progress
since then has been swift. Yet, like an expert tackler, he has kept both
feet on the ground. In an age of football stars driving Ferraris and
Lamborghinis, Kante drives a Mini – it was the first car he bought when
he moved to England in 2015 and it was easy for him to learn how to
drive in it. The story goes that he bought the car only after being
persuaded to abandon his plan of running to training every day. There’s a
lovely video out there of a doorman at the plush Chelsea Harbour Hotel,
where the club team assembles before matches, kitted out in top hat and
formal coat and opening the door of the Mini Cooper for Kante.
Kante is also notoriously reserved. Those who’ve spent long spells
of time with him – whether team-mates who drove him to training, or a
flatmate back in France – remember him saying absolutely nothing. But
occasionally he would break into that innocent, gap-toothed smile. He
hasn’t given too many interviews but one journalist who has interviewed
him, Jonathan Northcroft of the Sunday Times, writes of “the genuineness
of the look in his eyes”.
In a game that has at one level become increasingly complex, with
multiple systems and formations, Kante keeps things simple. Where the
game celebrates its goalscorers, dribblers and creative geniuses, Kante
minds the baseline. He never did become the accountant but out on the
field, Kante is the one who will ensure his team remains on the credit
side.
***
–Culled from: www.kwese.espn.com
