I get it: lots of people don’t like sport. I don’t like it myself, quite a lot of the time. I don’t like caring about it, I don’t like the people who run it, and this season has been disappointing for just about every Premier League team apart from Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, and boring too. But there is no book or show or piece of music that can provide the equivalent of what I felt last night, so you have to accept that if you have no interest in the proverbial twenty-two men kicking a ball around, you’re missing out. Not often, admittedly, but when it happens, there is nothing like it. If that ticket was hot before I got into the stadium, well, today, it’s burning a hole in my heart

It was pressure like I’ve never experienced. I remember crying on the phone to my parents from Milan airport because I was totally spent on day forty, with six stories and two months still to go. Actually maybe I was crying because I missed my plane to Beirut. I’ve never been very good at the twenty four hour clock.