I hate football!
After England crashed out of the World Cup, I declared that football was no longer the game for me.
I'd spent more than a year planning the World Cup editorial coverage for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport website and to watch England go out on penalties yet again was a huge disappointment.
So how did we handle the pressure back at the website nerve centre?
We had a crack team of football journalists covering the game - and I was really proud of them all.
Charlie Henderson produced another of the action. He really brings the game alive for those of you who were unable to watch live TV pictures.
Some lovely phrases in there, plus juicy tit-bits from ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport pundits and our chief football writer Phil McNulty inside the stadium.
And well done to Saj Chowdhury for providing all the pre-match build-up before Charlie took over the live action.
The game's turning point - - was big news so we had to quickly get on to that. Good, quick work from Frank Keogh.
Although there were no goals during the 120 agonising minutes, there was still plenty to write about and Andrew McKenzie produced a superbly-written, yet concise which summed everything up perfectly.
As we also produce all the content for Ceefax Sport, we need our match reports to be finished and ready for publishing on the full-time whistle. No pressure there then!
I already had headlines ENGLAND BEATEN ON PENALTIES AGAIN and PENALTY SHOOT-OUT WIN FOR ENGLAND all ready to go the second the final whistle was blown. Shame I couldn't use the latter one.
While all this was taking place, Pete Scrivener from our Communities team, was producing a live which again helped illustrate all the drama from Gelsenkirchen.
Our popular new live were marshalled by Ian Hughes and you chose wisely - picking Owen Hargreaves as your England man-of-the-match.
After the despair of the penalties, we had Nathan Mercer keeping an ear on what the had to say about England's sad exit.
And John May was soon bashing out a quick as the sun set on the Swede's reign as England boss.
Amid the chaos of all of this, the game was about to get underway so we left John Sinnott across this while Charlie H dashed off to grab a sandwich in time to take over the live updates from that game.
We do aspire to produce great content that is also of the highest grammatical standards, so well done to sub-editor Lewis Wiltshire, who was my right-hand man.
And what did I do? Well, having a great team around you is one of the arts of management so I was able to sit back and watch most of the game (while of course keeping a close eye on what was being written).
After that, I went into rapid planning mode to produce our master plan to cover the fall-out from England's and Eriksson's exit and start planning for a new era under Steve McClaren.
This has almost turned into an Oscar's speech-blog. So I will stop. Feeling a bit better now, so maybe I don't really hate football that much after all.
There's always Euro 2008!
