I'm actually grateful that there were no rock bands before the match, or during the half-time break. Fortunately in calcio the half-time break is only 15 minutes, so there wouldn't have been time. The sort of razzle-dazzle (perhaps better described as over the top garishness) that you see in American football matches does not apply here, and for me the experience is all the better because of it.

There were a couple of unnecessary and annoying components of the pre-match ceremony, but barely enough to mention. The national anthems of both Italia and Australia were performed, and performed well. But of course that is never enough by itself these days, and so naturally we had to have... PYROTECHNICS! Boom! Whoomf! Fire! Smoke machines!

And of course there was a little bit of audience participation to get the audience revved up. You can't see it clearly in this shot (it's clearer in the next one), but we were all asked to turn on torches on our mobile phones and hold them up.

How well did that work? We'll come back to that.

Regardless, this is far from the worst opening ceremony that I've seen. If I had one minor gripe about it, it's that when you see a Serie A match you usually see the captains and the managers greeting each other, exchanging match pennants and so on, but in this case they didn't seem to be any organisation at all in relation to that and no indication of what was happening. I did see acting Roma captain Chris Smalling presenting something to match officials but nobody was giving any indication of what was going on or why, and the Milanesi were nowhere to be seen while this was going on.