Meet the goalkeeper who cannot remember conceding Harry Kane’s first Tottenham goal
Last Sunday at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the celebrations that greeted Harry Kane’s decisive 15th-minute goal against Manchester City took on an added level of importance.
Stabbing home with the certainty we have to come to expect of him after collecting a Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg pass, Tottenham’s talisman secured his team just a third Premier League win since the turn of the year.
A message of congratulations was plastered across the state-of-the-art big screens at either corner of the magnificent arena that Spurs now call home, congratulating Kane on surpassing Jimmy Greaves’ record of 266 goals for the club.
The nature of the record-breaking strike, let alone the achievement itself, would have been unthinkable for anyone who witnessed Greaves’ final goal for the club against Derby County in January 1970.
It was also quite possibly implausible for anyone who was there to see Kane’s first in a Tottenham shirt.
In his dead-eyed way, the England captain has gone on record saying that he remembers that maiden strike against Shamrock Rovers at Tallaght Stadium in December 2011 – even if the man who conceded it does not.
“At the risk of sounding really ignorant,” agonises Richard Brush, a Birmingham-born goalkeeper who has spent almost his entire professional career in Ireland, “it was just another goal that I had conceded.
“I respect everything that he (Kane) has done now, he’s one of the best players around and has been for years, but no I don’t remember it.”
Brush was in the final months of his first spell at Rovers at the time. Having already conceded to Steven Pienaar, Andros Townsend and Jermain Defoe in a one-sided Europa League group stage tie, it was perhaps no surprise that he had little interest in a late landmark for an 18-year-old substitute.
After then Spurs manager Harry Redknapp introduced Kane in the 76th-minute, the future England captain capitalised on some ragged defending as he swivelled and turned home a Townsend knockdown in a style that can only be described as quintessential Kane.
Kane had appeared as a substitute in the reverse fixture between the sides at White Hart Lane, but Brush, who featured in the 3-1 defeat in north London, admits he was not familiar with a striker who had returned from a loan spell at League One Leyton Orient just a few months beforehand.
“I’d never heard of him,” he says with an almost rueful smile, “he’d never come on my radar. The analysis side of football over here eleven or twelve years ago wasn’t a massive thing.
“We had information on teams we’d play in Europe, small snippets to work out who we were playing against. But in terms of guys like Kane who were just breaking through, there wasn’t a whole lot of information supplied to us.
“You wouldn’t need to be Einstein to know about Harry Kane these days, but back then the League of Ireland was a good bit behind.”
It took until 2013 and loan spells at Millwall, Norwich City and Leicester City for Kane to score his second Tottenham goal, and it was not until 2014 that he found the net in the Premier League for the first time.
However, the arrival of Mauricio Pochettino at White Hart Lane that summer coincided with the forward forcing his way into the first team more regularly and the goals soon started to flow.
Kane scored his 100th league goal less than four years after his first, reached the 200 mark in all competitions in just 300 appearances, and he currently has three Premier League golden boots to go with the one he won for England at the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
It is only in the past few weeks that Brush, who is now a player-coach at Sligo Rovers, became aware that he was about to be remembered as a part of Tottenham history.
“I’ve had a few calls asking if I remember the goal and it’s always ‘no’,” he explains. “As much as it is a great thing to be involved with, it’s not my milestone!
“At the clubs I’ve been to, I take the mick and say that Kane scored his first goal against me; it’s been a bit of a tagline of mine. But up until three or four weeks ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue that he was close to breaking the record.”
Maybe it is the nature of ball finding net that has brought on Brush’s inability to fully recall the moment of significance for his adversary. A scorer of goals memorises every successful finish, ready to utilise the associated muscle memory in the future. The ‘keeper who has conceded removes the incident from his mind, the potential trauma damaging the pretence of impenetrability that the trade relies upon.
But Brush has a simpler explanation: “Premier League and English football just isn’t my thing. I have no interest in football outside of my living. As a footballer, I understand the significance of the achievement, but interest-wise, it’s not for me.”
Brush has a natural warmth about him that overcomes the distance of an online interview, even after more than one false start due to technological difficulties. In his own words he played a “small part in a footnote” of Kane’s impressive career, but an incident in 2018 has allowed him to appreciate the bigger picture.
Driving home after playing for Cliftonville in a televised Monday night fixture in the Northern Irish Premiership, Brush began to feel woozy as he turned a corner.
“I reached for a bottle of water and it poured out of my mouth,” the 38-year-old recounts in great detail. “My left leg didn’t lift to put the clutch in as I went to pull over, then my left arm wouldn’t lift either. I didn’t know what was going on.
“I managed to flick a light on and realised that the left side of my face had completely gone as well. It was a lightbulb moment: ‘I’m having a stroke!’.”
Brush made a series of desperate calls to friends and family as he began to fear that no one would find him after he had finally brought his car to a halt on a rural road as midnight approached.
“There was an instance where I really thought ‘I’m done’,” he admits. “After a couple of minutes, a man pulled up and shouted to ask what was wrong. Fortunately for me, he got out of his car and relayed what he thought was happening to the emergency services.”
Scans showed that Brush had suffered two clots on the brain, later determined to be due to a hole in his heart. However just six weeks later he was back in goal for Cliftonville.
“I reluctantly got the all clear from my wife,” says Brush. “The week before Boxing Day, the goalkeeper who was standing in for me got sent off. The decision (to play) wasn’t taken out of my hands but it was a reason for me to get back playing.
“It was a blessing. If I’d been away for longer maybe I would have drifted away from the game.”
Although his career in Ireland has spanned eight changes of club between the League of Ireland and Northern Irish Premiership, Brush maintains that those European nights at Shamrock were the highlight.
Even if Kane’s first step on the road to making history was at his expense, and not quite as memorable for Brush, he is still appreciative of what the striker has achieved.
“It is a proud moment, as daft as that sounds after someone has scored against you,” he says as he breaks into a smile once more. “It’s probably the biggest thing that has happened in my career. It was nice to be part of it in some small way.”
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