Mid-air between Italy and England, columnist Giles Smith typed up his traveller's tales of away form, pistachio and pasta.

Well, that sucked. I blame myself, in a way. In all honesty, I don't have a great record away in Europe. Maybe I shouldn't travel to these matches at all. It rarely seems to work out for the best. My presence has resulted in defeats in Berlin, Barcelona, Moscow and now Rome. See the great cities of the continent and die.

And let's be frank - last night, I wasn't really match fit. I think we'd have to agree on that. I was full of Italian ice cream. And pasta. And not the healthy kind of pasta. The stuff with bacon and egg all over it. And then more ice cream. Rome can do that to you. It meant I lacked half a yard, pace-wise. At least.

Yet it had all been looking so good, in the run-up to kick-off. Unseasonably warm and sunny weather (on the Monday, at any rate), great buildings all over the place, nice people - plus the exciting sense, from talking to those nice people, that Roma, who had lost their five previous games, were whatever the Italian is for 'a busted flush' (una flucita bustarda?) and ripe for the taking by a team such as ours, high on the aftermath of another spectacular 5-0 Premier League demolition job.

And that impression continued right up until the 34th minute of the match when our central defence suffered an extremely rare brain-freeze (not ice cream related - at least, I assume not) and allowed Panucci, of all people, to walk the ball into the net.

Panucci! That Chelsea legend! What a fickle game football is. You would think he'd have had the decency not to celebrate. But unfortunately that kind of class isn't given to many. It's given to Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. And to Cristiano Ronaldo, funnily enough. But not to Panucci, it seems.

Thinking back now, though, there were one or two omens before the match - signals of a darker outcome to the trip that I probably shouldn't have ignored. Like, for instance, the freak own goal that denied Napoli the point (at least) that they deserved at AC Milan on Sunday night (a match I watched on television in the apartment of righteously dismayed Napoli supporters).

And like the torrential downpour and the ominously angry thunder and lightning that hit Rome during yesterday afternoon. And like the fact that my third ice cream, though good, wasn't really as good as the first two.

Extraordinary venue, though, the Stadio Olimpico. It boasts, on account of the running track that surrounds the pitch, what must surely be the biggest technical area in Europe. You've seen smaller farms.

And it must have an astonishing atmosphere when it's full, though, these days, in Italy, not even the Champions League seems to bring out the punters. Not on a rainy evening, anyway, when the average Roman apparently chooses to stay at home and sponge down his Vespa.

If you're ever in the Stadio, be aware - you'll need a steady nerve for explosions. Those Italian football fans and their fireworks. Periodically a banger will go off that, judging by the scale of the noise, was, before it was lit, the approximate size of a dustbin.

Spectators of a nervous disposition, caught at the wrong moment, have been known to jump so high they ended up in another tier altogether and had to go out and come in again, lower down.

The other unusual feature of a big-match experience in the home of Roma is the stadium's habit of playing a burst of the Champions League anthem every time a goal goes in during one of the night's other ties. The score at the match in question then appears on the big screens.

In this way, the anthem is made to work a bit like the call-signal over the tannoy in a supermarket. Bing-bong-bing. "Atletico Madrid have scored at Anfield. And could a cleaner please go to aisle seven for a spillage."

But however you look at it, this is a worrying development. It's bad enough when stadia play bursts of music after goals in the match that you happen to be watching. When they play a burst of music in Rome because Basel have just scored in Barcelona, the whole music-for-goals situation is clearly completely out of control. Pray this doesn't catch on across Europe.

How to explain the mystery of last night's unpleasant and entirely unpredicted result? The game was men against boys for the first half an hour, until the boys somehow nicked one and then were given two more by the men, courtesy of uncommon slip-ups in midfield. And after that, at 3-0, it was all over.

Or was it? Ten minutes to go and we've got a free kick, with Deco standing over it. If something comes from this, it's 3-2 and the last 10 minutes become very interesting indeed. Deco takes the kick quickly - and gets a second yellow for not playing to the whistle.

But he was in a hurry, wasn't he? Understandably, in the circumstances. So that's like being penalised for not time-wasting. The law is an ass.

Maybe we'll just have to mark this result down as one of those strange blips that seemed to happen all over the Champions League last night, what with Basel drawing in the Nou Camp and Inter Milan being held by Anorthosis (which, incidentally, sounds like some terrible ailment affecting the legs.) 3-3: imagine how José Mourinho must have enjoyed the thrills and spills there.

Meanwhile we didn't bother getting too excited about the fact that, the last time we heard before our own match ended, Liverpool were losing to Atletico. Something, after all, was bound to turn up in injury time. A dubious penalty, more likely than not. Because this is Liverpool we're talking about.

What's that? Liverpool equalised from a dubious penalty in time added on? Somebody buy me another ice cream.