I have been very hopeful.

Their words may not have been arraignable by law, (though in many cases they were so) but they were such as their hearers could give but one interpretation to.

This was pure theatre, with a 60,000 crowd at Wembley adding colour to the fight to face either England or Denmark in Sunday's final, the stadium splashed with the red of Spain at one end and the victorious blue of Italy at the other as crowds flocked back in ever bigger numbers after pandemic restrictions were lifted.

His defence was so compact and effortless, the feet always in position so swiftly and so correctly, and the bat so brushingly close to the front foot or the body that it was again as of old as if each ball had been forejudged uncannily by some cricketer's act of clairvoyance.