Golden Goal: Roberto Carlos for Brazil v France (1997)

In September 1994, Leeds United beat Manchester United – the first time they had done so since February 1981 – with David Wetherall and Brian Deane their scorers in a 2-1 win. Which is a strange place to begin a piece about a Roberto Carlos goal, but please bear with me: the seamless segue will soon reveal itself.

A couple of days later, I returned from school to find a letter addressed to me – a rarity, given I was 15 – so ripped open the envelope in characteristically clumsy manner to discover what can only be described as hate mail. Accompanying newspaper cuttings of the aforementioned game was a letter extolling the virtues of Phil Ma-sing-ahhhh, along with general vitriol aimed at Manchester United in general and Alex Ferguson in particular.

I knew immediately that its author was a mate from Leeds and discovered soon after that similar had been dispatched to another of our group, a Manchester United fan like me. So, 28 years later, when Leeds returned to the Premier League and were edged 6-2 at Old Trafford, we sent similar – gentler – missives to his teenage son, offering warm congratulations on his team’s epochal achievement. Revenge, as they say, is best served sub-zero and to your friends’ unwitting children.

Such is growing up, your myriad failures and failings enshrined in the collective conscious for merciless deployment, whether daily or after lying dormant for decades – just ladz, being boyz. And because football intensifies everything, it intensifies this way of being: if weekend defeat was annoying, school on Monday was harrowing, a puberty of goons baying animosity and insecurity with righteous, awesome elan. There is nothing like it.

But there is also another side to it. Though football is, by its