At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Theresa May appeared to read from a piece of paper as she started to talk about Liverpool’s remarkable comeback against Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final the previous evening.

But instead of simply praising the club’s accomplishment, she – admittedly goaded into it by a soft question from the leader of the “opposition” – gleefully seized the chance to score a spectacular own goal by likening the outcome of the match to the prospect of achieving a similar victory against the odds in her efforts to secure Brexit. As her cabinet colleagues guffawed dutifully, many of those watching picked their jaws up off the floor.

Even Jeremy Corbyn looked stunned.

Of the PM’s many cringeworthy statements since moving into Number 10 with a vow to implement a policy she had campaigned against, this was easily one of the cringiest. It was almost like she was blissfully unaware that the Reds’ amazing victory meant they were staying in Europe.

In a tweet, commentator James O’Brien called it a “horribly cynical attempt” to co-opt the team’s success and pointed to the PM’s “utter failure to acknowledge the role teamwork, cooperation, freedom of movement & management played in it. Can’t think why.”

As if one great escape wasn’t enough, later on Wednesday the second installment of this week’s fantasy football show took place when Tottenham Hotspur went to Amsterdam in the other semi and stunned an outstanding young Ajax team – and, if truth be told, most of their own fans – by staging a brilliant second-half resurgence to overturn a three-goal deficit. It was a game that had echoes of their victory in the previous round over Manchester City in that both games were, simply, bonkers.

Of course, the resulting “all-English final” which will doubtless dominate pundits’ vocabularies until the teams meet in Madrid on June 1st will be anything but.

While Liverpool and Spurs are among England’s most storied clubs, their modern success is built on the free movement of talent from across the footballing world. All their goals in the semis were scored by foreign-born players: two by a Dutchman, two by a Belgian and three by a Brazilian (who admittedly may have some controversial political leanings himself, but that’s another matter).

And amid the metaphors for Brexit as a triumph of the underdog which inevitably surfaced on Twitter – some of which outdid even the Prime Minister’s ill-advised analogy – it helps to remember that the two finalists are teams from cities that voted to remain by a solid majority, while both clubs have managers – a German and an Argentinian – who are outspoken critics of leaving the EU.

Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp has backed a second referendum, saying Brexit makes “no sense at all.” He told The Guardian last year: “The EU is not perfect but it was the best idea we had. History has always shown that when we stay together we can sort out problems. When we split then we start fighting. There was not one time in history where division creates success.”

Tottenham’s Mauricio Pochettino, meanwhile, told The Independent that Brexit was like a car crash “where you continue to hurtle into trouble instead of swerving out of the way” and said he felt sorry for voters that had received ‘manipulated information’ during the referendum campaign.

The two managers, among the best coaches in the game, have built a platform for success at their clubs as part of a “project” including global scouting networks that have enabled them to compete with much wealthier teams in the Premier League. That they should meet for European football’s top prize is testimony to both their skill in assembling a squad and their tactical and motivational abiilties.

As a further measure of how the Premier League has benefited from foreign talent on the pitch and in the dugout, tonight’s semi-finals of Uefa’s consolation tournament, the Europa League, could see Chelsea and Arsenal – managed by an Italian and a Spaniard respectively – meet in another English-ish final.

The global game

I became a Spurs fan in the 1970s largely because of Pat Jennings –  as a kid I saw him play many times for Northern Ireland at Windsor Park but never actually got to see him play for Spurs.  I even forgave him for signing for Arsenal in 1977.  I was too young to remember the great Danny Blanchflower as a player, but enjoyed his wit and personality on television and of course his quotations about the game while playing for Spurs have passed into club legend.

“The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”

Like most football fans these days I’ve watched my team in the flesh and on TV in bars across the globe; from Flannery’s on 14th Street in Manhattan, where I used to be chairman of the local supporters’ club, to the Tom Mayes pub in Dublin. In both places, Spurs fans from far and wide are guaranteed a warm welcome; something that is replicated for every major ‘English’ team in bars and clubs in every major city.

Like it or not, the game is global, and marketing it is a global business. You could reasonably argue that abandoning the European Cup for a rebranded Champions League in 1992 has diluted the position of the winners of each country’s league – after all, this year’s final will be between two teams that have not been “champions” of their domestic competition for a combined 87 years.

Certainly the television revenues and sponsorship money the competition has brought into the game has been responsible for already rich clubs getting richer and consolidating the wealth among a relatively limited group. Spurs, who in 1963 were the first British club to win a European trophy, will be the first “new” club to reach the final of the premier competition for more than a decade. The prize money for this year’s winner is some 19million Euro, with 15million for the beaten finalists.

Shares in Ajax, on the other hand, fell by 20 per cent after their elimination, knocking more than 100million Euro off their market capitalization.

Money aside, of course, the roller-coaster of emotions associated with the game are – and always will be – priceless. For Spurs fans last night was everything; almost to the point where it doesn’t matter what happens on June 1. But… of course it does.

Before that, though, Liverpool go into the final weekend of a wonderfully entertaining Premier League season still with a chance of snatching the title from defending champions Manchester City. Who among us wouldn’t take that offer on the opening day?

It’s all about getting into Europe

At the same time as Spurs were playing in Amsterdam, the BBC was airing the first of a two-part documentary, Brexit: Behind Closed Doors, which offers a frank insight into the world of the EU negotiators, filmed over the past two fraught years.

As for Brexit itself, who honestly knows where we’ll be by time the final takes place. We’ll probably have had the European Parliament elections and yet more exposure to Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, as well as more opportunities to figure out what Change UK might actually want.  We’ll undoubtedly also be further into the mire of a Tory leadership contest, with one of the likely leading contenders having his own contentious history with the city of Liverpool.

Meanwhile, today – Thursday – is Europe Day; the anniversary of the 1950 Schuman Declaration which prompted post-war industrial co-operation between France and Germany and laid the groundwork for the creation of the European Economic Community.

If nothing else, Mrs May’s desperate attempt at humour in the Commons this week illustrated how we’ve changed since then in terms of political and diplomatic erudition, not to mention the value we place on the importance of trans-national interdependence.

Basically, our politics becomes more of a laughing stock by the day (although let’s face it, we’re hardly alone there) but at least we still have the – truly – beautiful game as an escape from it.

As Mauricio Pochettino said in his emotional post-match press conference last night: “Thank you, football.”