For some it's all or nothing.

I took pity on the old fellow as we sat side by side in Brussels airport waiting for our separate flights back to the UK. He was unsuccessfully nursing his fifth whiskey since I’d been near him and I began to regret the direction our conversation had taken. I felt pangs of guilt that his sobbing and inebriation had been mainly down to me.

Perhaps I’d become irked with his boastful chatter shortly after we’d first sat down next to each other and swapped pleasantries. It wasn’t as if we had anywhere else to go once we were airside and the bar stools’ had been comfortable. I tried to placate him, gee up his confidence within himself once more before my flight was called.

There will be others I offered but he shook his head in a disconsolate fashion. She was that last one he cried. The missing piece in his entire life’s ambition. He was incomplete with out her.

I saw my flight being called on the boards and I’ll be honest; I wanted away. Sure, his life was amazing and I told him that. He had so much to look back on with pride. He sobbed loudly and pushed me away. I didn’t fight back this time but let myself be pushed out the picture.

As I walked away from him I heard him wail ‘The Intertoto Cup! It’s gone forever!”

I never met Sir Alex Ferguson again but the meeting will be forever ingrained in my mind as a haunting episode.