I don't care where you get your football.

Whether you play in the maddest, most dangerous public,

where everybody's overweight, bumping into each other, fighting and still drunk the morning after,

or whether you're playing brilliant, amateur but semi-prol, fight at the side football.

I don't care if you're in a veterans league where everybody's 65 and moves at

the snail's pace. With all the madness and calamity any level of football can bring, you've never seen anything like Benfica 4, Barcelona 5 at the Stadium of Light in Lisbon

under thunderous rain and lightning last night.

Each time I do one of these broadcasts to you,

um, today sponsored by the fight against Alzheimer's, all of us having just lost Jimmy Calderwood and Dennis Law.

Every time I bring these broadcasts to you, I talk about the idea about not making the match reports run of play.

But if you weren't there, they to say where were you when jonette

kennedy was shot where were you when benfica four bus on a five if you weren't watching

please tell me that you were doing something exceptional like open heart surgery or finding a way

to get rid of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, whatever, please tell me it was good,

because this was the most unbelievable mixture of frolics and foolishness, finesse and farce.

And the result is Barcelona having played with atrocious defensive values. Barcelona having played as if they had just been introduced to one another, Chesney turning his anagram name into nut job. That's what it actually says if you rearrange the letters.

Arauj, the Araujo in the Barcelona strip, not Thomas Araujo in the Benfica side.

Araujo looking as he'd just been introduced to a football, never mind his teammates,

defensively slack in the wrong position, unable to keep an offside line. Balde and

Chesney's collision. The temptation is to be drawn into telling you how extraordinary this was

incident by incident. But if I take a Zorro pen to a thumbnail sketch, Pavlides, the strike of

Benfica, scored a 30-minute hat trick, one of which a penalty given away needlessly by

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