"Rui Costa wasn't just a fine player, he was a leader."

There's a brilliant documentary that's usually wheeled out on Portuguese TV before major tournaments - it's a warts and all behind the scenes insight into the Portuguese squad during Euro 2004. Seeing as Rui Costa was very publicly dropped in that tournament for Deco (rightly so, in my opinion) you'd expect Rui Costa to keep a low profile in the documentary and be a sulky and negative presence. On the contrary, he was the heart and soul of the squad, a veteran player with an incredibly youthful spirit, approachable to absolutely everyone in the squad and outside it. There's a lovely recurring theme in the documentary where Costa has a superstition about leaving the room after team meetings, he has to be the last to leave otherwise he believes he jinxes the team. So the camera would pan to Costa after team meetings, going nuts (in a nice way) as two absent minded officials stood near the door of the meeting room chatting whilst Costa would wait for them to finally leave.

He's director of football at Benfica now and sometimes I actually feel bad for him because he puts so much work into the position that I believe it probably affected his private life - he got divorced shortly after returning to Portugal. But he takes his two sons with him everywhere, the youngest one is still a ball-boy at the Luz.

A final anecdote, I went to Sporting a couple of weeks ago to watch Benfica play them in the League Cup. The police were really nasty to the visiting supporters on the way in and we were kept back for ages after the game. After 40 minutes still being kept back, Rui Costa came out of the tunnel, onto the pitch, stood in front of the travelling and applauded us, then started off a few songs and signed autogrpahs until the police decided we could leave.

He makes mistakes and is not above criticism sometimes, but in my opinion you cannot put a price on a player and figure as important and unique as he was and still is.

Final thing, Broken Clock, I'm glad to hear you're safe and well. The whole experience of this weekend must've been awful.

And they've both scored absolute belters against England in European Championships:

Figo

Costa

Figo's is a slightly better goal.