TUESDAY night showed the power of football at its best.

After days of some of the most horrible news imaginable, an international friendly was the ideal symbol of fraternity and normality.

For all the concerns about playing so soon after Friday’s horrors, here was the right venue for mass catharsis.

Football, like most sport, has an ability to unite and to uncork unsaid emotion.

After the quiet contemplation of so many poignant moments of silence, this was noisy communion.

The wonderful thing was that the football didn’t matter – and perhaps it never truly does - but its irrelevance is something to be celebrated.

For many of us, Friday saw the horrific crumbling of the ordinary.

It was an outrage against ordinary people, doing ordinary things, living ordinary lives, going to restaurants, bars, gigs and yes, a football match.

What could be more ordinary than going to a football match? We all did it the day after.

Because football is all about the familiar and the ordinary: long journeys with the old friends, a fixed routines of pubs and pies, the same seat, the same groaning, the same feeling of winning, together.

It can also be deeply personal.

There is the story of Notts County’s former manager Jimmy Sirrel leading his team the morning after his wife died.

He told no one at the club of her passing until after full time, because here was a man, rightly or wrongly, finding comfort in the unremarkable.

I’ve found the same release. When my then six-week-old daughter returned safely from hospital after a life-threatening illness, the first thing I did was check the fixture list.

That is what most football fans will find familiar: the safety of 90 minutes.

That precious time when the only thing wrong with the world is an offside decision or a bad backpass.

Football is our world for that time, a world with rules that everyone understands and follows.

Defeats must be taken on the chin, but wins can be celebrated with friends, and even that afternoon’s rivals – as I did on Saturday.

It was powerful and yet normal, just as football should be.