Thick fog settled over Altrincham's Moss Lane ground on Saturday evening and stayed there, leaving an FA Cup first-round tie against Notts County to be played, televised and decided in conditions in which almost nobody present could see the ball.
The match was live on BBC Two. Altrincham, of the fifth-tier National League, led the League One side 2-1 and were on for an upset before a late Callum Roberts equaliser took the tie to extra time. County won on penalties.
For the broadcasters it was an unusually testing evening. "One of the more challenging of my long career, that's about 35 years now," said the BBC Sport commentator Steve Bower, who was positioned opposite the dugouts.
"From where we were, opposite the dugouts, once the play went to the centre circle and beyond, we couldn't see a thing," he said. "We couldn't see which team had the ball, let alone which player had the ball after about the 60th minute. Bearing in mind it went to extra-time, it was challenging."
On BBC Radio Nottingham the commentator Adam Hassell reported a similar problem. "I can just about see the bright white numbers on their shirts, but I am struggling to see what is happening on the far side of the pitch," he said. His summariser, the former Notts County striker Mark Stallard, put it more bluntly: "We're looking around, and here in the press box no-one knows where the ball is! It's like a spot-the-ball competition."
Stallard added: "We genuinely cannot see the linesman or the players on the far side. It's slightly farcical having to commentate for radio listeners."
The fog also removed the managers from the contest. Bower relayed the account of the Altrincham manager, Neil Gibson: "We were trying to get down to pitchside to look tactically at what they had done after those four substitutions. Have they changed shape? Is it a back four? Have they gone to a box midfield? But we just couldn't see." Bower said the Notts County manager, Martin Paterson, had told him, laughing, that Altrincham were the better side in the first half and that he could not see the second.
The players adapted. Long diagonal passes disappeared and the game became a matter of five and ten-yard exchanges, because nothing further was visible. Some told Bower afterwards that from the centre circle they could see neither goal nor the corner flags. According to Bower it was "very, very close to getting called off".
It was not called off. That is the part this newspaper wishes to dwell on, because the laws of the game have been applied here with unusual purity.
A match is abandoned when the referee judges that it cannot continue. The referee did not so judge, and so the tie continued, went to extra time, went to penalties and produced a result that is now entered in the competition records alongside every other first-round tie.
The result is therefore official and, by common consent, unobserved. Bower noted that on the penalties he was "having to rely on the crowd's reaction before committing to the tale", and the crowd at the far end was relying on the reaction of the crowd at the near end. The scoresheet is the only witness that saw the whole thing.
Our analysts regard this as the most rigorously sporting fixture of the round. Nothing could be decided by the appearance of a challenge, the theatre of an appeal or the reputation of a shirt, because none of these was available. Tactics were suspended. Shape was suspended. What remained was two sets of players and a ball that could be located by touch.
There is also no recorded case of a refereeing error at Moss Lane on Saturday, and there cannot be one, since an error requires a witness. The competition has accordingly staged its first fixture with a perfect officiating record.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has asked the Football Association to consider the implications for the rest of the calendar. If a result holds whenever nobody can establish that anything went wrong, then the fog is not an obstacle to the integrity of the competition. It is the only known guarantee of it.