One of the enduring challenges in the career of the lifelong amateur footballer is exactly how to describe what it is you do on a football pitch to any new set of team-mates. Where do you play? As an infant footballer the answer to this is simply: “Er … wherever.” In time though we all specialise. You may remain a right midfielder or a centre-forward for decades, but as fitness slackens over time it becomes necessary to show greater flexibility. After a long mid-career as a central midfielder I began a while back to describe myself as an “attacking midfielder” (less running, more wiliness). For some time I called myself “a luxury player”: don’t expect me to track back, don’t ask me to tackle, just let me decorate the fringes. Finally, inspired by a spell spent doing no more than patrol the centre circle and point I began describing myself as “a midfield stroller”, or more specifically “a bit like the old fat John Barnes”, a label inspired by Barnes’s own late-stage slow-motion incarnation at Newcastle.

Old fat John Barnes got me through for a while. At Wembley, however, it presented a new and surely unique problem. If you habitually describe yourself as playing “like the old fat John Barnes”, how do you respond when the person you’re talking to actually is the older, slightly fatter John Barnes, the greatest English player of the late 1980s, who would now be manager of ESPN Blues for the day. “Where do you play?” Barnes asked me, perusing his team sheet. In these circumstances “I play like an old fat John Barnes” suddenly seemed a slightly coarse response, perhaps even a little tactless. So I just said: “Er … wherever,” instead.