I LOVE it when a plan comes together. So said Colonel Hannibal Smith in my childhood TV favourite The A Team.

I used to sit in my jimjams watching Hannibal, BA et al shoot Colombian drug barons with cabbages out of a tube of a Saturday teatime as a nipper.

The baddies would lock our amazing band of Vietnam vets in a cave with a huge amount of hardware and equipment to stew before ‘offing’ them – but invariably the goodies would create some sort of non-lethal weapon and bust out righting the wrongs that had previously been perpetrated.

The plan, one could conclude, was key to the whole affair.

As a younger man I was my own Hannibal. I had plans coming out of my ears.

Do you remember exams? Revision plans were the key to the whole affair, apparently. I created a revision plan which was a thing of beauty to behold. It had a key with different colours for different subjects and different methods of revision.

I was so intent on the plan I spent about a week creating my revision calendar – think of it as the Taj Mahal of revision plans – that I didn’t revise in that time. Obviously, the exam didn’t go so well – there didn’t seem to be many questions on colouring in on the biology A level paper.

Throughout life we’re told about the value of plans. Being prepared. Ready.

What a load of cobblers. It’s all right to be relatively aware of what you want to do, but to be a pragmatist is the real skill.

You need to be able to think on your feet and adapt to the changes with are presented to you.

I’d planned out my trip to Wembley on Saturday with military precision. It was a properly arranged affair. I’d even checked the oil and water in the car on Friday night.

The plan was as follows: Leave my house at 7.20am to pick up a friend and his family. Leave their house at 7.30am. Stop for a break at 9.30am. Park up in London at 11.30am. Get to ground for midday and soak up atmosphere.

I left my house at 7.35am and on autopilot went to my son’s nursery (I drop him off in a morning). Realising I was in the wrong place I went to my friend’s house. Collected him and family.

Realised I’d left my directions back at my house.

We eventually left about 8am after retrieving said route map.

On the motorway we went making good time. Reports that the M1 was closed came on the radio. “Aha,’’ I said. “We’ll get off at Northampton and go that way.’’

After a brief break at Northampton Services off we went – for about half a mile until I smelt an acrid odour in the car. My co-pilot pleaded innocence.

Then we spotted steam coming out of the bonnet. Pulling over, lifting up the bonnet and being covered in water vapour like a scene from a Chinese laundry I realised I’d cross threaded the radiator water reserve cap and it all had leaked out as steam.

We pressed on, pulling off the A43 to what we hoped was a village. It was a collection of houses around a green – no shop to procure water. Unflustered, I asked a man tending a lawn outside a great big house. He was a friendly gardener and poured water into (and over and around) the required hole.

Off again we managed to get stuck in the lovely Towcester, the horrible Dunstable and get back on the M1. It was about midday at this point. The plan, frankly, was not so much in tatters as obliterated. Entirely.

We managed to get to London and spent an hour at Junction 4 of the M1. Our directions being absolutely useless, we then spent an hour driving around London.

After parking up at 2.30pm and managing to get a Tube we managed to get to the stadium at 2.55pm. When I got there my laptop wouldn’t work properly.

Following a brief nervous breakdown in which the press box nearly saw a grown man burst into tears, I regained control of myself and said: “Nobody died, nobody got hurt and nothing got damaged.”

Then I felt a lot better. I’d set my targets too rigidly and having failed to meet my own (unimportant) milestones I became stressed over nothing.

I will now be adopting a less rigorous planning style. It has three points.

1) Know roughly what’s happening but don’t plan too deeply.

2) Screw the radiator cap back on.

3) Learn how to make a gun that fires cabbages to cover the eventuality that I ever become locked in a cave by South American drugs barons and need to escape.