Football and Theatre.

During the 1990s, Michael Robinson ( himself a former Ireland international ) forged a career on Spanish TV with a programme en abierto on Canal Plus called "El Día Después." The format, Robinson's own creation, was genius : every Monday evening at 8.30, his team would report affectionately about the week's football games, focussing on everything except what happened on the pitch.

So instead of the usual round of  interviews with dreary superstars, they'd tell the story of a couple who spent the afternoon of their wedding, still in wedding dress and morning suit, watching Real Madrid in the Bernabeu; or the Rayo employee who explained his job, with the intense happiness probably only attainable by the harmlessly mad : on match days, he broadcast through the stadium loudspeaker system, every time Rayo scored a goal, the first five bars of the greatest  song ever recorded : "The Final Countdown."

My favourite story from the Día Después was this : a Betis fan who every year bought two season tickets to watch his team. One for himself, and one for the ashes of his dead father. Which he took to the ground, Sunday after Sunday, in a milk carton.

Once you accept that normality is a mosaic of this sort of thing, nothing you put up on a stage can be too far-fetched.

I guess because they're two of my main interests, I've always enjoyed the similarities between football and theatre. They both have their little pre-match rituals, both in terms of psyching up the performers to give their best, and the kind of conventions of behaviour the spectators follow. They both depend on teamwork ( for 3 demented weeks in January 2011, I rehearsed the Crucible with the Players in the morning and trained with the Harps, Madrid's GAA team, in the afternoon : the groups share a number of warm-up exercises, all designed to promote teamwork ). And they're both spectator sports.

The Parting Glass lasts for 90 minutes, and it's a game of two halves : and I believe in theatre which grabs the audience emotionally and doesn't let go from start to finish - like an Atlético-Barça from the old days, or a Wales - Ireland rugby match...