At 7 we trained at the stadium. UEFA lets the away team do that, the night before, for an hour.
The Wanda Metropolitano was empty except for the stewards and the people who cut the grass. It is a new ground, open since 2017. From the middle of the pitch the roof seemed to go round us like a hand.
There were people outside. You could hear them through the gaps at the corners, chanting the club's name, and when Kovačić and James walked out to warm up the noise outside changed. It came in through the gaps as whistling, long and high, and it went on for the whole session.
Kovačić did not look up. He did his stretches with his back to the noise.
"I told you," he said to me on the way in. "Same people."
The press conference was in a room under the stand. Neves sat beside me and answered every question in English, then in Portuguese, then once in Spanish, slowly, and the Spanish journalists laughed and wrote it down.
