• Inter defeat Barcelona after seeing off Bayern in quarters
• Inzaghi: ‘Arsenal or PSG, it’s going to be a great final’

Simone Inzaghi claimed that his Inter team had beaten “the best two sides in Europe” on their way to the club’s seventh European Cup final.

Inter beat Barcelona 4-3 in extra time here, and 7-6 on aggregate in a spectacular semi-final. Inzaghi’s side also put out Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals, and although the Inter coach was wary of the threat posed by Paris Saint-Germain or Arsenal, he was also keen to recognise the scale of their achievement so far.

Fittingly, after three-and-a-half hours, the 13 goals and the three invasions from the substitutes’ bench, the heavens opened: a downpour that also felt like a kind of baptism. Inter and Barcelona had drained themselves many times over, and discovered every time that they still had more to give. We were in a place beyond plans and maps, beyond shapes and tactics, beyond sanity.

And so ended what turned out to be less a Champions League semi-final and more of an elongated scream, the sort of game that emerges when both sides give up on perfection and in so doing somehow manage to produce it.

Booing and flashpoints are commonplace in a sport further along on a journey that others are taking to varying degrees

Let me tell you the moment I realised Boris Johnson was fucked. It was late 2021 and there had been some talk about parties in Downing Street during Covid, but in these febrile siloed times, when the entirety of human existence has blurred into a single personalised scrolling feed, who even knows what constitutes “the news” any more? Who knows what fragments of reality ever emerge from Westminster’s furiously spinning vortex of unintelligible jargon: prorogue, backstop, Aukus, Slapps? What is a Morgan McSweeney and what time does it start?

But then came the magical night, a few days before Christmas, when the darts crowd turned. As Florian Hempel swept to a routine first-round win against Martin Schindler (bit of an upset, to be honest, but you never write off Flo at the Palace), Alexandra Palace rocked to strains of “Boris is a cunt”. Fans held up signs reading “Work Event”, drew pictures of cheese and wine and gleefully held them up to the cameras. And you realise, with a piercing we’ve-lost-Cronkite clarity: oh wow, he’s fucked.

• ‘If we want top five, we need Cole,’ says Chelsea manager
• Liverpool’s Arne Slot on defeat: ‘The margins are small’

“The kind of player who can do things that no one expects,” Enzo Maresca said of Cole Palmer after this game. Still, pretty much the last thing anyone expected Palmer to do in mid-January was to go 18 games without a goal in all competitions.

Now, with the drought finally at an end courtesy of a late penalty against Liverpool in a 3-1 win for Chelsea, Maresca said that Palmer was “not happy” with his lack of goals in the last few months, and backed him to help the side “reach something important” in the crucial last few games of their season.

There used to be a rivalry here, once. Two decades ago this was genuinely the most foreboding fixture in English football; a decade ago it was still deciding the destiny of league titles; five years ago it was still appointment viewing. Here, amid a fiesta of missed chances and offside flags, a deeply unserious Chelsea beat a Liverpool team that clearly couldn’t care less.

The score could have been 5-0 or 5-5 or 0-0 and frankly nobody would have been any the wiser. There was a guard of honour at the start. There were triumphal odes from the away end. Chelsea fans retorted with the Steven Gerrard song, and the “you’ll never get a job” song, and the “always the victims” song. What was it people were saying about football becoming ever more predictable, ever more rote, ever more uninspiring?

Two worst Premier League teams still have something to play for, not least to recognise the resilience of their fans

They’re calling it the worst Premier League game in history. They’re calling it El Chaffico. El Crapico. The Derby Della Mediocre. They’re calling it the first Premier League game in which both teams somehow manage to lose. They’re posting memes of old men playing walking football and Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.

They’re mentioning the fact that none of the three relegated teams have won more games against Premier League opposition than Paris Saint-Germain have. The fact that since Leicester scored their last league goal at home, Southampton have sacked a manager, appointed an interim, appointed a permanent replacement, sacked the permanent replacement and re-appointed the interim from earlier.

The former Leeds forward was on the periphery but is now key to Hansi Flick’s team thanks to his hunger for goals

To score, first you have to learn how to miss. Raphinha, to be fair, misses a lot. Most common of all, perhaps, is the low screamer, dragged across goal with the left foot, disappearing into the advertising hoardings with an unseen thud as the goalkeeper calmly strolls off in search of a fresh ball. If you close your eyes and try to picture Raphinha missing, this is almost certainly the miss you are imagining.

But Raphinha can miss in a plethora of other ways, too. The wild slice at the back post is another favourite. The free-kick into the wall. The mistimed header sailing harmlessly over the bar and Raphinha has never been the greatest header of a ball, but he is going to keep making the run nonetheless, again and again, all night if he has to. If it feels weird to begin a discussion of one of Europe’s most prolific forwards by listing all the ways he can miss then one helps to explain the other. Raphinha is a winger rather than a pure striker, but the trait he has in common with all the world’s great goalscorers is the ability to prize volume over grace, to put the last miss out of his mind, to keep coming and keep shooting with a ruthless, relentless hunger.