This week I bought a ticket for a football match. Remember those? I’d practically forgotten how that whole business worked. But, as it happened, the rudiments came back to me pretty quickly once I got going on it. Basically, you go online and arrange to hand over some money and, in exchange, you receive a seat in the stadium from which to watch the game. In person, that is, not just on television. I know – mad, right? I’m buzzing to think about it.It’s been more than six months since that kind of thing was even a remote possibility, offered in a tiny window of opportunity which quickly slammed shut again in December – and there were nine wholly blank months before that in which it was out of the question entirely. But now, finally, going to the football seems to be coming back. Naturally, in accordance with government guidelines I bought that ticket cautiously but irreversibly. And, as such, I should be there for Leicester in the Premier League next Tuesday.Specifically, it looks like I’ve got a seat in the East Upper and it will be the first time I’ve climbed to the dizzy heights in that particular part of the ground for quite a while. Indeed, I believe the last time I was up there, we were racking up a 3-0 lead against the Barcelona of Luis Figo and Rivaldo in the Champions League in 2000, with two goals from Tore Andre Flo and one from Gianfranco Zola, and we were all hugging ourselves, and each other, with disbelief, hugging being something that was perfectly acceptable in those days and not subject to advisories from the health authorities.

It finished 3-1, which felt ominous even at the time, and sure enough the second leg didn’t end quite as we would have wished. Still, fond memories; and if the game against Leicester finishes 3-1 on the night, I will be happy enough and consider the location to have worked its magic all over again.Of course, we’ll need it, or something like it, after last night’s unforeseeable debacle. I’ll be honest: I had pretty much made my peace with the prospects of no points last Saturday, against Manchester City. What with Leicester coming adrift the previous evening, and what with the goal difference in relation to West Ham looking so healthy… well, if we had walked away with nothing from that one, there were going to be consolations.And, of course, we didn’t walk away with nothing. We walked away with all three points, thanks to a gilded performance that would have been commendable at any time but was even more so at the end of a week which had also contained a Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid.All that, and the added spice of City’s penalty, which was one for the ages - not so much a Panenka, more a gently lobbed panini. And no doubt the sharper social media operatives had attached Martin Tyler’s fabled 2012 scream (‘Aguerrooooo!’) to the footage and started reaping the likes and retweets before the players had even left the pitch for the interval.

Unfortunately, the tiresome reality of league football in a tight finish to the season is that there isn’t much point going to the trouble of beating Manchester City away if you don’t then do the easy bit and beat Arsenal at home. Which is why, I guess, I’ll be a little longer making my peace with that.Bonkers match, of course, squeezed in unhelpfully close to an FA Cup final and decided by an entirely bonkers goal. File it under ‘curse of the commentator’, maybe. Ashley Cole spoke so clearly on Sky Sports before the game about how Thomas Tuchel has eliminated individual defensive errors since he arrived that you wondered whether something was being set up. Low and behold, a few minutes later, and just 16 minutes into the game, Jorginho was passing the ball into a space where he imagined Kepa Arrizabalaga was going to be, the ball was spilling loose in the ensuring kerfuffle and one of Arsenal’s players was somehow managing to scuff it in off the post.Good job he did, in a way, because the administrative crisis which would have been detonated by the attempt to adjudicate on Kepa’s handling of the back pass – a free kick to Arsenal on the goal-line? Just how would that have worked? Ten yards, anyone? – would probably still be going on now, and would possibly even have ended football as a sport with any claim to seriousness at the level of its own rules.

Blessedly, thanks to various considerate crumblings elsewhere in recent days, even now our top-four finish still remains in our own hands. Nevertheless, I would just like to mention that, should the unthinkable now happen and we fail to qualify for the Champions League this season, the six points handed to Arsenal this term in support of their plucky effort to finish in the top half of the table will seem particularly wasteful, and not a little embarrassing when people bring it up. Which they will.The positive, of course, is that as soon as this team starts actually scoring with the chances that look harder to miss than to take (and there were a multitude of those last night, in both halves of the game), then there will be little holding it back and we’ll be amassing basketball scores and thinking nothing of it. And it’s got to start happening soon, hasn’t it? Possibly even as soon as this Saturday at Wembley. And if not, then (please) against Leicester next Tuesday, with some of us back at the Bridge to see it.