Atlético Madrid v Inter: Champions League last 16, second leg – live

Football is demanding. We didn’t always know it, thanks largely to its HARD MEN and LEADERS OF MEN, able to effortlessly conceal their feelings from everyone, including themselves. Nowadays, though, our enlightened selves are entirely unsurprised when a manager turns it in citing the pressure of a job whose stresses are fathomable only in their unfathomableness unfathomability inability to be fathomed.

All of which makes Diego Simeone even more a marvel of psychological engineering than we previously discerned, his smouldering, explosive fury somehow nourishing and invigorating, rather than exhausting and tormenting. On the one hand, people love to be loved and perform best when relaxed; on the other, fancy returning to his dressing room having served up a 2/10?

In the entirety of football history, rarely has a side so embodied its manager as Cholo’s Atléti … but they’re not what they were and tonight, they meet Simone Inzaghi’s Inter, in a sense the them of a few years ago. They are not as confrontational, it’s true – though who is? – but they are a traditional power reasserting on a budget and in a manner that only their manager can commandeer, players turning up at apparent random all over the show, to end up exactly where they need to be. They may not be the best side around, but they’re a confident, settled and bloody good one capable of beating anyone on a good day.

And though they lead this tie 1-0, their advantage far less significant now that every goal is deemed equivalent to every other goal. This is going to be intense.

Kick-off: 9pm local, 8pm GMT