Sarah Boffin Says 'Available' Is Dangerous and I Hate That She's Right Because I've Already Told 40,000 Followers Kane Is Definitely Starting

Right. So. I need to have a word with myself.

Sarah Boffin wrote that Harry Kane being declared "available" for Bayern vs Real Madrid is statistically nowhere near as reassuring as we all want it to be, and she backed it up with actual numbers from Champions League knockouts going back to 2018/19. Thirty-four cases. Only 14 of those strikers did what we'd consider "properly fit" things on the pitch. It is meticulous. It is thorough. It is devastating to everything I tweeted yesterday afternoon.

Because here's the thing. At approximately 3:47pm on Monday, I posted, and I quote, "KANE TRAINED. HE'S IN. BAYERN ARE COOKING. REAL MADRID ARE NOT READY. GET YOUR BETS ON LADS." Forty thousand impressions. Two thousand retweets. One very enthusiastic reply from a Bayern fan account called @MiaSanMiaForever who said I was "the only journalist who tells the truth." I have never felt more alive and more fraudulent simultaneously.

Now Sarah has come along with her spreadsheets and her methodology and her frankly rude insistence on "checking things" and I am forced to confront the possibility that "available" means about as much as "monitoring the situation," which, as regular readers of this column will know, is the phrase I use when I have absolutely no idea what is happening but want to sound like I do.

Here's where it gets properly uncomfortable for me though. I did my own extremely unscientific check. I went through my own posts from the last three seasons, every time I've breathlessly announced a star player was "fit and raring to go" before a big European night. Fourteen instances. In NINE of those, the player either started on the bench, came off before 60 minutes, or looked like they were running through porridge for the full 90. Nine out of fourteen. That's a 64% unreliability rate. Sarah's data says something worryingly similar, and she arrived at it through rigorous analysis rather than, you know, guessing loudly on the internet.

The worst part? I can feel myself doing it again. Right now. In my bones. Every fibre of my being wants to type "but this time it's different" and "Kane looked sharp in training" and "my sources say he's absolutely flying." My sources, for the record, are a bloke called Darren who once sat three rows behind Uli Hoeneß at a bratwurst stand and a Telegram group that was wrong about Mbappé eleven times last summer.

So here is my official, on-the-record position: Sarah Boffin is right. The word "available" is doing heavy lifting. The data is clear. A striker declared available 48 hours before a Champions League quarterfinal is, statistically, a coin flip at best.

And here is my unofficial, off-the-record, cannot-help-myself position: Kane is going to bag a hat trick and I will take zero lessons from this experience.

I am, as always, a deeply unreliable man. But at least now I'm an unreliable man who has read the spreadsheet. That's growth. That's character development. Sarah, if you're reading this, I'm sorry and also please stop being right, it's really inconvenient for my engagement metrics.