The weekend had really been about going back to Liverpool, where I was a student in the ‘70s, and staying with John, a friend from those far-off days, and his family.

I travelled up from Euston at the crack of dawn on Saturday and at Lime Street remembered getting back there once at about two o’clock on a January morning after watching Liverpool play a Cup replay at Crystal Palace, my main team then.

With no sign of a taxi I had to walk the three miles back to hall in blinding snow. It was eerily quiet the whole way. Liverpool had won 3-2, with Steve Heighway scoring twice.

After lunch John unexpectedly produced two tickets for the "Liverpool International Tennis Tournament" at Calderstones. It was just five minutes in the car and off we went.

We were part of a packed crowd who saw a couple of tense semi-finals, both won by gigantic Croatians, and a jokey doubles match involving legends like Pat Cash and Ilie Nastase. It was highly entertaining and though the sky was often black, miraculously the rain kept off.

There’s a table football game that you find in pubs - you work the players with levers along the sides - and I played it hundreds of times during my three years in Liverpool. Invariably it was "doubles" with Mike, Rich and Dave from the philosophy group.

I was never once on the winning side, which sounds (and is) extraordinary - but my cerebral approach to the game, devising defensive systems that I genuinely thought were foolproof, sometimes had the others laughing until the tears were rolling down.

If I said to our opponents "there’s no way you can score", we would be 3-0 down inside the first minute.

I mention this because John has one of those games in his living room, and history was made just before Sunday lunch when a team comprising "The Barber" and John’s daughter Katy, aged eight, took on the youngest of his three sons Peter who is twelve. On behalf of our team I requested, and was granted, a six-goal start in this "first to ten goals" encounter and it proved to be a titanic struggle for supremacy.

You wouldn’t have believed all the screaming, the tantrums and the stamping of the feet that went on - and that was just from me.

If you don’t want to know the score, look away now…10-7 to us!

John is a vicar and his sermon that morning had made a brief reference to our trip out to Warrington in the afternoon for Germany v France. One of his congregation took him to task afterwards for watching sport on "the Lord’s Day". But soon after two we were speeding along the motorway (and I mean speeding) to join nearly 4,000 fans inside the Halliwell Jones Stadium.

Germany, with two wins, had already qualified for the semis; France only needed a draw to join them. The first half was distinctly cagey and though the French girls put together some decent attacks, they kept getting caught offside. The rain came slanting down in the second half and with the game looking destined to finish goalless, it was all a bit miserable.

But then, in the last 20 minutes, the powerful Germans stepped up a gear and cracked in three goals, one of them a penalty. And they were all scored at our end. Afterwards we both thought we’d seen the eventual European champions.

Coming out of the ground I heard several dads with daughters say: "It was much better than I thought it would be". Let’s hope a legacy of the tournament is that a lot more people take women’s football seriously.

What’s next for "The Barber"? Probably a pre-season friendly between Poole Town and AFC Bournemouth on 9th July. Yes, I know it’s more than three weeks away. I’m trying to be brave.