Reports say Harry Kane could miss a month or more. Don’t believe it quite yet.

You’d be forgiven if, as a Spurs fan, you were to go into full meltdown mode right now. Harry Kane apparently had his ankle stepped on in the closing seconds of Tottenham Hotspur’s 1-0 loss to Manchester United on Sunday and limped heavily off the pitch and down the tunnel. Now that Son Heung-Min is off with Korea, Spurs are without a recognized senior striker that can lead the line. Mauricio Pochettino even said that he was “worried.”

No kidding. So are we. And if you read the reports in The Guardian by Dominic Fifield and The Telegraph by Matt Law, they certainly didn’t do much to assuage those concerns. Both reports say that Kane is afraid he could miss a month or more of the season as he rehabilitates from the injury.

However, it would be best if everyone just took a step back for a second. The truth is, we just don’t know anything yet.

First, Kane hasn’t had a scan of his ankle yet. Spurs were waiting for the swelling to go down before they did any kind of scan to see if there was any ligament damage. It’s my understanding that this can take a couple of days, and that’s what Pochettino implied in his post-match press conference. Putting out a prognosis before a scan has been performed seems premature.

Secondly, this injury was sustained on Kane’s OTHER ankle, not the one that he’s injured twice already. That doesn’t mean that he’s not still seriously hurt, but the fact that it wasn’t the “bad” ankle and that he was stepped on could suggest a faster turn-around than previous. Also, while the replays of the incident weren’t especially clear, it sure didn’t look like he rolled that ankle the way he did in the past. Ankles aren’t meant to roll. Not rolling is good.

That second item is very “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV,” though, which brings me back to the original point: it’s just too soon to know. Kane probably does have an injury, it probably still hurts like hell, and he will almost certainly miss time. The Guardian and the Telegraph probably have a source within the club, and that source is no doubt worried and fearing the worst. But let’s also not forget that Kane injured his ankle in a cup match against Millwall in 2017, and returned less than a month later.

We are going to be without Kane for a while, that much is clear. But let’s all just wait for the actual prognosis, and try not to wring our hands too hard while we wait — you can pull a tendon that way.