Tottenham Hotspur has no great Plan B if injury keeps Harry Kane out for a long time

It’s been a pretty good season for solo strikers in the Premier League. Of the six teams striding, jostling, or stumbling towards Champions League qualification, three of them — Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, and Manchester United — have built their seasons around a prolific man up top.

Diego Costa has scored 18 of Chelsea’s 75 goals across all competitions, Harry Kane 24 of Spurs’ 81, and 274-year-old Zlatan Ibrahimovic a remarkable 26 of United’s 83. Even those teams looking for other paths to victory have developed their dependencies. Sergio Aguero has scored 24 of Manchester City’s 93 goals, despite not being guaranteed a first-team place, and Alexis Sanchez has picked up 21 of Arsenal’s 95, despite not always playing as a striker.

Indeed, the only thing that looked like distracting Chelsea from their relentless march to the title was a reported training ground bust-up between Costa and Antonio Conte. Fortunately for Chelsea, that turned out just to be a misunderstanding.

COSTA: [wiping blood from his jaw] WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA!

CONTE: YES! [runs into the middle distance waving his arms and screaming]

This trend isn’t necessarily a huge surprise: Good teams try to find good goalscorers, and good goalscorers like to play for good teams. But it does mean that the sight of one of these good goalscorers limping off the pitch against Millwall in an FA Cup quarterfinal raises certain questions. How long will Kane be out for? And how on earth do Tottenham cope without him?

The answer to the former will arrive at some point this week. The answer to the latter could go two ways. Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino’s first response was to look at his bench, look past specialist striker Vincent Janssen, and bring Christian Eriksen on. Son Heung-Min moved up front and responded with a hat trick that was two-thirds brilliant, one-thirds hilarious. So that’s probably Plan B.

It seems a pretty good one, too. Son obviously lacks the magical instincts that set great strikers apart from mere mortals, and at times looks frankly maladroit, but like Kane he moves intelligently and can shoot accurately with either foot. Sunday’s hat trick took him to 14 for the season, and the fluid front three he formed with Dele Alli and Eriksen looked capable of troubling opponents stronger than Millwall. They also seemed to gel nicely with Spurs’ ultra-attacking wingbacks, in particular Kieran Trippier.

Janssen, then, will likely be Plan C by a distance. The goal-shy Dutchman eventually made it onto the pitch in the second half and scored his first Tottenham goal from open play, a neat, instinctive finish just inside the post. He was mobbed by his clearly delighted teammates, and celebrated a few minutes later by planting a relatively straightforward header right into the keeper’s arms.

Regardless, after the game Pochettino praised Janssen’s recent improvement in training, and Eric Dier pointed out that adjusting from one league to another isn’t always an instant process. Perhaps he’s worked the Eredivisie out of his bones and is ready to assert himself as Kane’s backup. Perhaps they were just being polite.

Whichever Pochettino plumps for, he will be assisted by a quirk in the fixture list. Spurs, who are out of Europe, have 11 games left in the league but have already played all their most difficult away games. They’ve been to north London, west London, both sides of Manchester, and both sides of Liverpool. And despite taking just three points from those games, they’re up in second, with a six-point gap to fifth and Arsenal, Manchester United, and Liverpool all taking it in turns to punch themselves in the face.

Home games against United and Arsenal lurk towards the end of the season — just in time for a heroic return from Kane, perhaps — but all of their remaining away games come against teams in the bottom half. There’s never a good time for a team to lose their best striker, but there might have been plenty worse …

… were it not for the FA Cup semifinal that Kane blew out his ankle trying to get to. That game will be played on the weekend of April 22, around six weeks after the quarterfinal. It will pit Tottenham Hotspur against one of Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, or Chelsea. And last time Harry Kane went over on this ankle, he missed about six weeks.

So while Operation: Top Four will probably survive an improvised front three of Son-Alli-Eriksen, with Janssen offering support from the bench, Operation: Trophy may not. This team is brilliant at times, but they’ve exited every other cup competition this season in fairly miserable fashion. It looks like they’ll have to try to break that habit without their most dangerous player. And they’re already bad enough at Wembley.