So on Tuesday it came to pass that your editor accepted an offer to sample the surroundings of Stamford Bridge as Chelsea hosted Bolton Wanderers. The difficulty in this was completely to do with my own allegiances to north London rivals Arsenal, meaning that the occasion felt a little like an extra-marital affair.
I am a Chelsea fan. There you go I have said it, you probably realise my motivation for the article already. For those of you that are still reading I shall continue.
Apologies once again for our hiatus, we’ll be back more regularly from now on! Football may not have a winter break in the UK, but here at 90minutesonline circumstances led us to follow in the footsteps of some of Europe's other top leagues.
Time to catch up on some of the latest action from the Premier League. Snow may have affected a number of matches during the first fortnight of the new year, but barring any more blizzards the fixture list is getting back on track. Wednesday night saw two previously postponed games finally kicking off: Liverpool versus Tottenham and Arsenal versus Bolton.
Today saw the draw for the last sixteen of the Champions League, or if you like, when the competition starts to get juicy. The knock-out stage means that there is little chance for a respite if a team has a poor result, and for the neutrals at least, there is always the chance of enjoying a penalty shoot-out.
There are two clear stand-out ties to whet the appetite, Manchester United will face AC Milan and Chelsea will come up against Inter Milan. Both fixtures will be heavily built-up by the press, with the focus on returning 'heroes'.
The draw for next year's World Cup in South Africa took place on Friday evening amid an expected amount of pomp and hype. There was endless build-up to the coverage, followed by the actual coverage of the draw itself on Sky Sports News. The broadcaster is never one to miss an opportunity to milk an event.
Personally I ended up plumping for watching it live on BBC 2. Not that I'm a big fan of Jonathan Pearce's commentary, but I could at least bare the clichéd platitudes of Lineker's motley crew.