To be honest, I still didn't really want to, but the Beloved has more than a passing interest in such things - not least because she still had an outside stake in her office sweep - and it only seemed polite to keep her company despite the potential lateness of the hour.
And so I huffed, and I puffed, and I chunnered away to myself, and I tapped away at the Kindle, not really paying much attention as the shouty nonsense in the park was going on via the telly in the corner.
It was, apparently, a "semi-final" which, much like the term "quarter-final", is a term which I find a tad bewildering, given that I always thought that "semi" meant "half" and this was by no means half of a final.
It was more like all of one of the last games before the final… but I digress.
Anyway, whilst I sat there, not really watching, something very strange happened. A ball seemed to have appeared in the back of what, to all intents and purposes, if you were listening to what the "experts" from teams that hadn't made it to this particular stage of the competition were saying, was deemed to be the "wrong" net.
Then, a few moments later, this happened again, and again, and again, and, by the time this had happened five times in what seemed like as many minutes, and even my disinterest was piqued enough to realise that something unusual might be occurring, to persuade me to lift my eyes from my hand-held screen and wonder what was, as the saying goes, afoot.
From that point on, things did, rather surprisingly, become at least mildly interesting from a psychological point of view.
For example, I began to wonder at what point the average sportist comes to the conclusion in their own mind that the game is utterly hopeless and unwinnable.
After all, knowing that you suddenly need to get six of the round things into the net thing to have any hope of winning, must be a little bit daunting, given how difficult the other side are supposed to make it for you, even if they've just proven to you how easy it could be to do so.
After the intermission, where more "experts" chunnered away meaninglessly about how surprised they were that a game in which one team or the other was supposed to emerge victorious was being won by one of those two teams, that target eventually became eight, and, to be honest, even to a layman like myself, it looked as if it could have been even more than that. Pretty soon it seemed as if there simply wouldn't be enough actual minutes remaining for that sort of mathematical requirement to be a credible option.
But there was no shaking hands and saying "Well played, mate… You've obviously got us beaten!" Instead the whole sorry spectacle just carried on towards its inevitable bitter end.
Meanwhile, the various reactions of the audience also became very psychologically fascinating to me. In general, it appeared, they had obviously been misinformed that the result would be a foregone conclusion for what they presumed to be the "right" team, and then seemed to get more than a little bit upset when this turned out not to be as likely as they had been led to believe.They didn't even win the second half, although, to be fair, that result was a lot closer.
And, even though there hadn't been a fatal tragedy involving their relatives or close friends enacted in front of their eyes, it began to look as if the audience thought that there really had been, rather than recognising that what they were watching was just a game - something involving play which is something that we learn to do as children - in which one of the two sides had to lose.
It just happened to be the team that they happened to like that achieved the losing part, that's all, which seemed not to have been a possibility that had crossed any of their minds beforehand.
Such is the way of hubris, I suppose.
The next evening, and because the other game involved the Beloved's sweepstake team, we settled down to watch the actual last game before the final, if you don't count the other game before the final which is not the final.
This was a far more dull affair, and my head scarcely lifted from my Kindle device. Even the Beloved, who had a whole £2.50 of her hard-earned resting upon the result, went off to bed at the half-way point, which turned out not to be the half-way point anyway.
Strangely, out of a sense of loyalty to her rather than anything else, I hung on to the bitter end of that game too, reminding myself in the process why I don't really have much interest in the game of ballfoot as a rule, before retiring at around midnight and subsequently having a lousy - and very brief - night's sleep.
She won't be winning the sweepstake, by the way, just in case you were wondering.
I hardly ever watch the football but watched this too. For ninety minutes there it was 1966 and I was a nine year old boy again, no idea what I was watching but knowing I was watching something great.It was so good I hardly care that it was Germany and not England scoring all those goals.
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