KANE: VERY ABLE
Outside the worlds of Countdown and Scrabble, longevity just doesn’t get the credit it deserves. First-world problems, we’ll reluctantly concede, but we’ve got to talk about something and this football email won’t write itsel … [Football Daily glazes over, then sits lost in thought for a few minutes before walking cordially into The Man’s office to pitch Bored, the world’s first AI teatime football email. Precisely 4.71 seconds later, Football Daily emerges, openly weeping, and returns to its desk].
Where were we? Yes, longevity. The strange thing is that, even though modern sport’s coverage and chatter is obsessed with the quantitative to the exclusion of the qualitative, we struggle to appropriately weight longevity when discussing which goat was the greatest goat of all time. It’s there, you fools, in number form! It’s built into the bloody concept! Whether it’s because we’re obsessed with the here and now, or because we can’t remember last week, we don’t always appreciate how hard it is to do the same thing again and again and again. Take Football Daily’s now sadly destitute predecessor. Sure, anyone can write a shambling, self-indulgent, increasingly derivative football email – but have you tried doing it nearly every day for 20 years?
All of which is a convoluted way of saying: Well done, H! On Thursday night, in Naples, Harry Kane became England’s all-time record goalscorer when he onionbagged for the 54th time. It’s a triumph not just of ability, character, refusal to give up (see all those loan spells) and bottle (most of the time), but also doing the right thing for almost every minute of every day, and resisting the temptations that render most of us a minor disgrace to the concept of maturity. We’re quietly confident Kane has never ordered a self-loathing 1am Deliveroo, or stayed up till 4am playing just one more game of Championship Manager 2001-02, or gone to JD Wetherspoons for a lunchtime coffee and still been there 12 hours later, attempting to engage all-comers in fist-based conversation.
It’s the grandest achievement, even if some of the praise was probably a bit too grandiose. There was much talk of redemption for Kane and England, given that: a) he scored a penalty and b) England beat Italy. In the strictest sense, they redeemed the square root of eff all. As things stand, Kane’s rugby audition against France and England’s Euro Not 2020 final defeat to Italy will be the things that define them. There’s every chance that Kane will break all the main goalscoring records and still be remembered for the things he didn’t do: score that chance against Croatia in 2018, score that penalty against France in 2022, introduce his brother Charlie to the concept of the release clause. But he is still, in black and white, the best in his field that his country has ever produced, ever. Ever. Mind you so was The Fiver, mainly due to the complete absence of competition beyond Hatchet Man, and look how that turned out. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a chatbot to work on. Just don’t tell The Man, please.
LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE
Join Rob Smyth from 7.45pm GMT for hot clockwatch coverage of Friday’s Euro 2024 qualifiers, including France 2-1 Netherlands.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The government raised the price of a train ticket by, in our money, about 20p and it just went mad. They were setting supermarkets on fire and it was like, ‘Wow, I’ve come from Camden, the main thing I see is when someone leaves the cooker on and there’s a little fire in the kitchen’ … When I got there, it was like a war zone. On top of that there are earthquakes almost every few days because of where it is in the world. They’re not that strong but you can feel it, especially coming from England. It was surreal but it is a brilliant country” – Leyton Orient keeper Lawrence Vigouroux reflects on an eventful stay in Chile during his spell with Everton de Viña del Mar.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
Re: yesterday’s Football Daily letters: the standard of writing must have reached new heights if Simon Mazier’s ‘Fenerbahce Sequence’ didn’t win prizeless letter o’ the day. We can only be thankful that there was no prize for him to have been deprived of” – Jeff Lloyd (and 1,056 others).
ChatGPT seems to be all the rage now, supposedly backed by a powerful artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm. It’s pretty impressive, and scary, but that’s an entirely different conversation for another day. I tested it to see if it had an answer as to when Spurs will win the title, and I think it broke. This is what I got as a response: ‘As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to predict the future with certainty. The outcome of sporting events is influenced by many factors, including the performance of the team, the quality of the opposition, injuries, and luck. While Tottenham Hotspur has a strong history and fan base, it’s difficult to predict when they will win the Premier League again. However, the team’s performance in the current season, as well as the talent and strategy of the team, may give some indication of their potential to win the Premier League in the future.’ Bad luck. Also, ChatGPT does not seem to know that the team’s performance this season gives Spurs ‘zero’ chance of potentially winning the title soon. Looks like AI still has a lot to do to catch up to us after all (for now)” – Shpetim Karandrea.
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Shpetim Karandrea, with an honorary award to Simon Mazier.
This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
