Three days before Christmas, we went to Huddersfield, and it was so cold that the air hurt.
Not the polite London cold that I had grown accustomed to: the damp, grey chill of South London that made you zip your jacket and complain about the central heating.
This was a Yorkshire cold. A cold with teeth.
The temperature at kick-off was minus two, the wind driving down from the Pennines with the casual brutality of weather that didn't care whether you were playing a football match or herding sheep, and the John Smith's Stadium: a modern, functional bowl dropped into a valley between rain-soaked hills, was wrapped in a mist that clung to the floodlights like gauze.
The breath of twenty-two thousand people rose in white columns above the stands, and the pitch, despite the undersoil heating, had a faint crystalline sheen that made every first touch an act of faith.
I stood in my technical area in a Palace overcoat, gloves, scarf, and the conviction that my ears were about to fall off.
