Shayon Harrison lets out a sigh. ‘Honestly? Wow,’ he says.
Until then, the symbolism had been lost on the 22-year-old. When he sat down with Sportsmail last month, he was unaware it was nearly three years to the day since the bittersweet crescendo of his Tottenham career.
In October 2016, Harrison was handed his senior debut in a League Cup clash with Liverpool.
Former Tottenham striker Shayon Harrison spoke to Sportsmail in Amsterdam
It was the chance he had waited a decade for. The forward joined Spurs aged just nine, rising to become a jewel in their academy and forcing his way into Mauricio Pochettino’s plans.
At Anfield, he was thrown on after 83 minutes with Spurs trailing 2-1. On 86 minutes, his chance came.
‘That’s the only memory I ever have of that game, honestly,’ he recalls. ‘It happened so fast.’
With Harrison galloping towards the box in acres of space, Erik Lamela sent a cross high into the Liverpool sky. When the ball finally dropped on to the youngster’s chest, it ran away from him and into the arms of Simon Mignolet. On the touchline, Pochettino fell to one knee and put his head in his hand. For Harrison, the pain lingered for ‘four or five days’.
Harrison now plays his football in the Dutch second division with Almere City FC
‘There were so many things going through my mind,’ he admits. ‘I felt like I’d let a lot of players down and the manager down especially because he’d given me that opportunity.’
With that squandered chance, the game had gone. And so, too, had Harrison’s time in the first team.
He never played for Pochettino again.
‘I could never ask for anything else,’ he says. ‘I felt I’d let him down in particular… to put his arm around me at the end of the game and talk to me and comfort me, I feel like it takes a really good person to do something like that.’
Harrison (second from right) once wanted to follow in Harry Kane’s (far left) footsteps
Instead, that night proved only a harsh lesson in how careers can change on the finest margins.
‘It was something I won’t forget but it’s definitely something that I’ve learnt from,’ he says.
‘There are days when I look back at that chance and think: “If I had scored, what would have happened? Where would I be now?”
As it is, Harrison is sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt square, near one of the city’s meandering canals. Chelsea fans are chanting nearby. They are here for a Champions League clash with Ajax, while Harrison is here to stay.
In July, after 13 years at Tottenham, the 22-year-old joined Almere in the Dutch second division.
Harrison now wants to be the next Vincent Janssen, who convinced him to move to Holland
It was a big decision to leave his boyhood club and the life he had built in England. In a few hours, his girlfriend arrives for a second brief visit since his move.
But upping sticks has helped breathe new life into his career. He lives close to the Johann Cruyff Arena, the scene of Spurs’ finest European night, in a city that has nurtured so much talent in recent decades.
Now the young forward, who once hoped to follow in the footsteps of Harry Kane, has found a different way. Now Harrison wants to tread the same road as another striker who did find the net that night at Anfield.
‘I spoke to Vinny, he was a big part of why I came here,’ he says of Vincent Janssen.
‘He’s a very, very iconic figure at Almere. He scored a lot goals while he was here and the step that he made was from Almere and then he went to AZ Alkmaar in the first division. So that’s a path I’m looking to emulate and speaking to him, he made me feel really confident that I was making the right decision.’
Janssen earned a move to AZ Alkmaar after shining for Almere and went on to join Tottenham
So far, so good. On the pitch, at least. Harrison has netted seven goals in his first 16 appearances and already Almere has proven an unlikely platform for worldwide attention.
Last month, after scoring the opener in his side’s win over Go Ahead Eagles, Harrison was the target of an object thrown from the crowd.
‘As I was hugging everyone something just caught my eye,’ he remembers.
‘I saw a cup of beer coming towards me and my instinct was just to catch it and throw it. Then something just clicked. It was all a bit out of the blue to be honest. I just caught it and thought, “They obviously tried to make a fool out of me to try and throw beer over me so I may as well take a little swig of it”.’
So he did. It was well-earned.
The 22-year-old is the only non-Dutch speaker at a club where team meetings, training sessions and team talks are all in the local language.
The 22-year-old got a first-team chance at Tottenham but failed to take it three years ago
‘I’ve got a little Dutch dictionary and I’m trying to pick out words every day but it’s not that easy at all,’ he smiles.
‘I had to do a little advert with a few of my team-mates. So I had to say a line in Dutch and as soon as I said it, they all burst out laughing!’
He can take the ribbing. Harrison has no regrets about swapping England for Holland, where the ethos of passing football drips further down the pyramid than back home.
But loans at Yeovil and Southend afforded him a welcome reintroduction to football’s physical side, while a spell at Melbourne City opened his eyes to life away from these shores.
In leaving England, Harrison has joined a growing list of young players looking abroad to further their career. He admits Jadon Sancho was his inspiration and that leaving the academy ‘bubble’ has helped him grow as a person, and as a player.
‘You feel like if you don’t make it (at a club), you’re not going to make it and then people’s mindset starts to drop and it’s very easy to fall through the cracks,’ he says.
Harrison caught a beer that was thrown at him and took a sip of it after scoring this season
‘Maybe 10-15 years it was so much easier to do that, whereas now the pathways are so much easier.’
He adds: ‘Look at the likes of (Serge) Gnabry, he’s such a big example for me. When he was at West Brom and Tony Pulis says about him not being good enough to play and he’s found a different pathway, now he’s at the top of his game…. those are really big eye openers for me in the sense that I’m disappointed I didn’t make it at Spurs, of course, any player would be. But at the same time, I believe in myself, in my quality, that maybe I’ll find a different path. And I feel like this is the path for me.’
Nevertheless, it is a road that he hopes will lead back to familiar territory.
‘The ultimate goal is to get to the Premier League,’ he says. ‘Hopefully the next step for me is going to the division above, the Eredivisie, similar to Vincent Janssen honestly. I feel like that was a very strong path that he took and I feel like coming to this league and if I do well enough in this league, I feel like those doors will open up gradually.’
If and when they do, Harrison will hope to be more clinical than Janssen was in England. And more clinical than he was at Anfield, three years but now a lifetime ago.
The forward has a spell at Melbourne City before joining Almere in Holland’s second division
