For fans, and reporters, this is the best bit of the football season

For football fans this is the best part of the season, when a whole year’s worth of emotional investment and hope is cashed in on the pitch. And so it is for our team of football reporters too: all the games and press conferences and pieces were all building up to this. This is especially true in the Champions League, which is now down to Europe’s eight best teams. By next Thursday we will be down to four.

At The Independent we pride ourselves on our coverage of the global game. We always send reporters to the best games across Europe, and we know readers come to us for insight about the foreign leagues. It’s part of the pro-European ethos of The Independent, just like our campaigning for a Final Say on Brexit.

We know the British football media has a reputation for insularity, and for trying to view everything through a Premier League prism. We know this is natural but hope we can avoid it. This week we have already run stories about why Lionel Messi is, in fact, underrated, ahead of his performance at Old Trafford on Wednesday night, and a look back at the Juventus doping allegations surrounding the match in which they beat Ajax in the 1996 Champions League final.

Then we will have reporters at both legs of all four quarter-finals before hopefully doing the same again in the semis. Plans for our coverage of the final in Madrid on 1 June are already in place.

In practical terms this means spending most of our midweeks in spring on the move, getting back from games at 1am and then getting up a few hours later for the next flight. It means surviving on whatever’s left in the sandwich fridge in departures, and learning far more about the layout of Cologne/Bonn airport, or Schiphol, or Milan Malpensa, than we might have ever expected.

But like covering a World Cup or a European Championship, the buzz of excitement at covering these set-piece games for our readers delivers a real sense of privilege that outweighs everything else.

Yours,

Jack Pitt-Brooke

London football correspondent