I had stood in some extraordinary stadiums. The Etihad, a temple of modern wealth. The Vélodrome, a cauldron of fury. Selhurst Park, the beating heart of everything we had built. But nothing prepared me for the Stadio Olimpico.
We arrived for the warm-up ninety minutes before kick-off, stepping out of the tunnel into the Roman twilight, and the sheer scale of the place stopped me in my tracks.
The stadium was a vast, sweeping ellipse of white marble and faded concrete, designed for the 1960 Olympics, expanded and renovated but still carrying the bones of its original grandeur.
The running track circled the pitch, a moat of terracotta-coloured rubber that separated the grass from the stands by twenty metres, and above it, rising tier upon tier upon tier, Eighty thousand seats were filling with people.
