The clock was ticking. Eintracht Frankfurt, two goals up on aggregate, looked comfortable but not impregnable. And even with 10 men, West Ham were enjoying plenty of possession and had four substitutes left to deploy. And so, with a European final at stake and the climax approaching, the world eagerly awaited David Moyes’s next move.
As it turned out, Moyes’s next move was to attack a ball boy and get himself sent off. So close. The margins in this game, and all that. And although this tie was probably already gone by the time he was slinking down the tunnel, the angry veins in his temples finally receding, the departure of the West Ham manager felt like a bizarrely fitting epilogue to this semi-final, one that began in east London in a bouquet of bubbles and euphoria, and ended on the banks of the River Main in ignominy and anticlimax.
