Friday 8 March, 2024. I receive information that my home town team, AS Roma, is to play a friendly match against AC Milan. It will be played in Perth. Only in Perth. And it will happen on Friday 31 May.

Obviously my preference would be to see them at home at lo stadio Olimpico, but this is as close as I'll get for a while.

Arrangements are made. Leave is applied for. A hotel room is booked. Plane tickets are bought. Then I wait. For just under 3 months, which feels more like 3 weeks as time is wont to do these days.

This is the story of my time at the match.

(Yes, I know that the descriptions contain a lot of gibberish characters. That's due to the PBase uploader being built to the finest standards of 1998 technology where everything was encoded in 'MURICAN ASCII! and the rest of the world did not exist. Which is rather pathetic a quarter way into the 21st century. I'll have to fix it manually when I have time.)