Will Keane: From Promising Striker to Resilient Underdog
On a spring evening in May 2012, two young centre-forwards led the line for England’s Under-19s against Switzerland in a European Championship qualifier.
Ask anyone around that squad which one looked destined for World Cups and semi-finals, and the answer would not have been Harry Kane.
It would have been Will Keane.
Back then, Keane’s path felt straight and steeply upward. Manchester United debut in the bag. A Youth Cup winner. Goals for England age groups. A family of United supporters watching one of their own seemingly glide towards the first team.
“I'd never had any setbacks at that point,” he recalls to BBC Sport. “When you're young, you're fearless. The whole trajectory of my career was up… Everything was taking off.”
Then the tackle, the twist, the knee.
Late in that Switzerland game, Keane suffered a serious knee injury. Sixteen months vanished. Sixteen months in which the other Kane went out on loan to Norwich and Leicester, then began to force his way into Tottenham’s side.
“It’s timing,” Keane says, without bitterness but with total clarity. “Some lads go their whole career and have a few niggles, but nothing derails them too much.
“That first injury was at a crucial time. I had my foot in the door. The feeling was I would probably have been around the first team.
“If the injury had happened a couple of years later, I might have been an established squad player. When I had it, I missed 16 months at a crucial part of the transition from reserves to seniors.”
Two strikers. One sliding doors moment. The rest is football’s ruthless fork in the road.
From World Cup build-up to Champneys Springs
As Harry Kane readies himself for Argentina and another tilt at history, Will Keane’s week looks very different.
He is at Champneys Springs in Leicestershire, one of 45 players on the PFA’s 12-week pre-season camp for out-of-contract professionals. No fanfare, no wall-to-wall coverage. Just running, drills, analysis, and hope.
At 33, with 335 senior appearances and 85 goals behind him, Keane is not done.
He has already switched international allegiance once, playing youth football for England before choosing the Republic of Ireland at senior level, following the line of his father’s birthplace. Five caps so far. He wants more.
“A couple of lads I know did the camp last season and spoke really highly,” he explains. “I almost feel like I'm part of a squad, and we're away for pre-season.
“There are so many staff; medical, coaching, administrative, media. It's quite competitive and there are seven or eight games, so clubs can see you're playing.
“There's an app clubs can sign up to. It's like a PFA transfer list – all our training data goes on it. Clubs can contact us directly, so hopefully if you go somewhere, you can go straight in.”
This is the other side of the game. GPS numbers instead of headlines. Data feeds instead of transfer tickers. Players fighting not for medals, but for contracts.
Keane has been here before. In 2020, as Covid bit and budgets shrank, Ipswich chose not to trigger a one-year option. Uncertainty, again. He eventually returned to Wigan, one of eight clubs on a CV that charts a career repeatedly forced off-course, then dragged back into line by sheer persistence.
The injuries that changed everything
The first ACL was brutal. The second felt cruel.
Keane’s body has been through more than most. That initial knee injury cost him his momentum at United. Then, just as he was trying to climb back, came another blow.
He “ripped his groin” in an FA Cup tie for United at Shrewsbury in February 2016. Three days later, with Keane in the treatment room, 17-year-old Marcus Rashford sat on the bench for a Europa League tie against Midtjylland.
Anthony Martial pulled up in the warm-up. Rashford came on. Two goals on his debut. Two more against Arsenal in the league that followed. A superstar born in real time.
“I went to America for an operation, landed in Philadelphia, turned my phone on and saw he scored two more,” Keane says.
At 23, he knew. That was the end of his United dream.
“It was hard to take, but I had to move on. I got a good move to Hull, who had just been promoted to the Premier League,” he says.
Hull was supposed to be the reset. Instead, game six, his knee went again. Another ACL. Fourteen months gone. Hull went down. Team-mates moved up.
“I missed the whole season, and we got relegated,” Keane says. “A lot of the young lads still got good moves; Harry Maguire went to Leicester, Andy Robertson went to Liverpool, Sam Clucas to Swansea.”
The dressing room splintered upwards. Keane, again, stayed behind.
Rewiring the mind
This was the point where the story could have faded out. Another talented academy graduate, broken by injuries, drifting through short-term deals and what-ifs.
Keane chose something else.
At Wigan, he went deeper than the usual sports-psychology clichés. He began working with a “spiritual psychologist” who had never been involved in football. A different language. A different lens.
“I'd used sports psychologists before and always tried to be positive and optimistic, but I started working with someone at Wigan who hadn't worked in football before,” he explains.
“He's a bit more of a spiritual psychologist. We focus on positive intentions, manifesting, visualisation.
“I'd tried everything in the box, and kept breaking down, so I wanted to do something a bit different.
“I wish I'd had that when I was younger, especially with the setbacks I had early on. It might have got me back into the right frame of mind.
“For any player if you've not got belief in yourself, and you're lacking confidence, you're not going to perform the way you can.”
The doubts had crept in long before Wigan. The loans that didn’t quite work. The feeling that the cohort he’d grown up with were accelerating away.
“I was around the first team at United, then I got the injury, had a few loans in the Championship where I didn't do very well and I started to doubt myself. Wigan catapulted me.
“Before that I should have backed myself. I played with a lot of those lads all the way through, and that's where I was potentially heading.
“If I'd focused on the mental part earlier, it might have been a different outcome.
“Even at times when I picked up injuries, maybe I had a bit of self-doubt which led to something going wrong. If I was in the right frame of mind, maybe one of those bad injuries wouldn't even have happened.”
It is a striking admission: a striker wondering not just about missed chances, but whether his own mindset might have contributed to the very injuries that derailed him.
Kane, certainty and the thin line at the top
On the other side of that sliding door, Harry Kane has become the emblem of England’s modern era: record goalscorer, serial Golden Boot winner, the man a nation leans on.
His old strike partner is not surprised by the finishing. He is struck more by the certainty.
“I remember when we were young, people said he wasn't mobile,” Keane says. “But technically, the time he put into his finishing and his obsessiveness to be the best in terms of shooting, you see it don't you?
“He's so sure of himself, because he's put the work in. He knows he's a complete striker.
“He's obviously got that belief in himself. He might miss one, but he's not going shy away from it. If he didn't have certainty in his mind, he wouldn't be as prolific.
“He's not arrogant, he's just got the confidence that sets top players apart.”
The difference, in the end, is not just talent. It is timing, health, and that unshakeable inner voice that tells one forward to keep demanding the ball, while another sits in a hospital waiting room scrolling through the goals that changed a club’s plans overnight.
Between two flags, waiting for the next call
Keane ended last season on loan at Reading. His contract at Preston has now expired. Once again, he is in that familiar off-season limbo – training hard, waiting for the right phone call.
He is calm about it.
“There's been a few chats,” he says. “I'm sure they're aware of me. They might be looking for A, B and C targets, but when the season does start, if a club doesn't have a great start, there's a bit of panic and maybe things open up.”
He talks about his international split with the same balance. England shirts as a teenager. Green for the Republic of Ireland as a man.
“It's a hard one because I played for England up until Under-21s, and then seniors for the Republic of Ireland, so I've got a foot in both camps.
“I am proud to represent Ireland. My dad was born there and moved to England. But I've also been born and raised in England, and my family's English.”
Two strikers, two nations, two careers that once ran side by side and then veered in opposite directions.
Harry Kane will step into another global spotlight, carrying the weight of a country’s expectation. Will Keane will step onto training pitches at Champneys Springs, chasing sharpness, opportunity and one more chapter.
The margins that separated them back in 2012 have never looked thinner – or more decisive.
