

What a release!

There’s seeing your team score a last-gasp winner – which is, of course, just about the greatest pleasure football-watching can produce.

But then there’s seeing your team score a last-gasp winner when you’ve already seen your team score a last-gasp winner, only then to see that last-gasp winner ruled out for offside.

Because once you’ve seen your team score a last-gasp winner and known, very briefly, the full, seat-departing elation of that moment, just before having that elation guttingly hollowed out by the glimpse of a linesman’s flag out of the corner of your teary eye… well, it’s very hard to imagine that you’re going to see your team score another one in the time remaining, last-gasp winners being, of their very nature, not the kinds of things that come along in bunches.

Instead, those are the moments when you start thinking things like, ‘Well, that’s what a cushion’s for, I guess,’ and ‘Five points isn’t so bad, really.’

Don’t forget, this was after the best part of 90 minutes of agonisingly thwarted attacking play by your team, probing and trying to find a way through an Everton defensive line which was so wide and so well-constructed that it must surely have been visible from space.

And this was also after yet another ungiven penalty in the first half. We seem to be making quite a collection of those this season. Maybe there should be a sticker book, or something.

Incidentally, had the penalty been given, as it ought to have been, it would most likely have led to an Everton red card, too. But there you are. We had to wait until the second half for one of those. On the topic of which, Roberto Martinez claimed after the match that Gareth Barry was sent off ‘just because of the reaction of the Chelsea players.’ It would be more accurate to say, surely, that Barry was sent off for the second yellow card offence – and that without that second yellow card offence, there would have been no reaction from anybody. It’s a cart and horse situation, really, if you look at it rationally. Or certainly a player and card situation.

Anyway, once all that has gone on, and once you’ve thought the game was won at the last, only to be proved wrong, it’s not easy to imagine that your battered nervous system is ready to be winched that high on the roller-coaster again, in the event that a second last-gasp winner – one that counts this time – comes along immediately afterwards.

But such was last night, as the ball fell to Willian in the 88th minute. What a game, and what a pleasure – a doubled pleasure: the joy of a last-gasp winner, twice.