They were on the pitch and it was all over – how I wish I’d been there at Cambridge

From the other side of the world, party at the Abbey Stadium transported me back to my own end-of-season joy as a teenager

It is fascinating what football can do to you. Twenty minutes after the full-time whistle had blown in the final games of the League One season I was alone in silence in a tiny radio studio at 11.30pm in Melbourne with tears in my eyes, watching Cambridge United players being held aloft by fans on the Abbey Stadium turf after they had avoided relegation.

I looked at those fans, running on the pitch in random directions like a mob of meerkats released from a pen. Going this way and that, hugging strangers, not really knowing where to go before congregating in a disorganised mass in the middle of the pitch. I wished I was there.