Sorry seems to be the hardest word when it comes to football, and it seems that the higher you go in the game the less chance of that word being uttered.
Watching what has been a fairly dull Champions League group stage draw to a halt this week, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for a number of clubs who saw their hopes of prolonging their Champions League campaign disappear through little or no fault of their own.
Top of the list of teams due an apology, for me, has to be Juventus following a game in Istanbul that yet again makes you question those who run world football.
Juve needed just a point to qualify for the knockout stages and Galatasaray had to win, so the stakes were understandably high on Tuesday night.
Nobody had told Mother Nature though and the game ended up having to be suspended on 32 minutes with the score at 0-0 due to heavy snow making the pitch unplayable.
That was undoubtedly the correct decision, but then it started getting a bit bizarre.
When a game is abandoned in the Champions League, competition regulations say the remaining match time should be played which, although something I don’t necessarily agree with, is fair enough in principle.
But to then play the game the following afternoon, when the conditions were equally as farcical, is just beyond me.
There is the age old argument that it was the same for both teams but, when you see Juve manager Antonio Conte berating the officials at half-time when the scores were still 0-0 and clearly mouthing the words ‘This is not football’, there’s something wrong.
It wasn’t sour grapes because Juve would have gone through at 0-0.
The guy was just highlighting a fact.
The pitch was cutting up badly, the ball repeatedly stopped moving on the sodden surface, and all the hard passing drills both teams no doubt put in on the training ground effectively went out of the window.
As it was, Wesley Sneijder got on the end of a Didier Drogba headed flick-on to score, and it was the Turkish side who went through.
Conte probably wished he’d pushed harder at half-time, but you won’t see UEFA coming out with much sympathy. (*at least I haven’t seen any yet)
Then there’s the plight of Swiss side Basel, who travelled to play German outfit Schalke knowing that a point would see them through alongside Group E winners Chelsea.
Basel’s woes are slightly different in that they probably deserved to go out, having seen Ivan Ivanov sent off after just half an hour and then conceding a Julian Draxler strike six minutes after the break.
But it was Schalke’s second that probably had most of Europe open mouthed.
Not because it was necessarily a great finish by Juan Matip, but that it could be allowed to stand when officials are supposed to be of the highest level.
At least four players were clearly offside when Matip slotted home, and I’m fairly sure bemused Basel boss Murat Yakin is still waiting on an apology.
Football is a game of fine margins and yes, whether it’s Mother Nature or human nature to blame, decisions or incidents that change games happen.
But fans paying their hard-earned money to go and watch their teams across Europe in the continent’s premier club competition deserve better if not the best.
And if all else fails, the least they deserve is an explanation for when things go so badly wrong.