On this day in Suwan I was able to take in a series of extraordinary toilets and was then treated to seven goals, one of them an overhead kick by a centre-back
What is your happiest memory? Go on, comb those memory banks, give them a good sift, see what falls out. Now, hold that thought. Though I have seen many more football matches on television than I have live (but there have been a few of those), the idea of picking a game I was not present at as my favourite feels equivalent to choosing as my happiest memory the time the little talking pig won a sheepdog competition, The One with the Holiday Armadillo or “you had me at hello”: special moments, happy times, but tarnished because my only involvement was watching them on a screen.
A game of football starts and ends with the referee’s whistle and is played within four lines painted on a big green rectangle, but it is also hours and days of anticipation and conversation, sights and smells, the familiar and the novel and, on the afternoon in June 2002 during which
Brazil gave Costa Rica a royal shellacking, top-end novelty public toilets.