Plenty of things get me angry in life – middle-lane drivers, malfunctioning electronic equipment and corners that fail to beat the first man are just a few.

There are, however, some things that don’t anger or amuse me, they simply boggle my mind.

One of those things is people who devote their entire lives to a sporting cause, funnel money and time and emotion into their fandom every day of the year, then, inexplicably, the moment game day arrives, they leave their seat five minutes before full-time to beat the traffic.

I have zero sympathy for these people, who will have spent hundreds on their tickets. Whatever happens, they deserve it.

On Sunday, hundreds of Seattle Seahawks fans watched their stunning comeback in the final three minutes of the NFC Championship game (the Superbowl semi-finals, if you will) on TV from the car park as they had given up on their team and their chances of beating the Green Bay Packers a little too early.

They can join the growing and frankly shameful, club with the Man City fans who will never remember what it was like to see Sergio Aguero winning the title in injury-time as they were outside the ground on their way back to the pub.

I personally know Spurs fans who were already on the Victoria Line when two late goals earned a 4-4 draw at the Emirates some years ago.

I have also seen the embarrassment on a dad’s face a few weeks back when a kindly old woman on a packed train asked his tiny son, maybe six or seven, if he’d enjoyed the game.

The little boy wore an Arsenal scarf and hat and told her ‘yes but it was 0-0’. Another chap in a Gunners shirt whispered to the dad ‘did you leave early? You know it was 1-0, right?’

Is the price of watching the last knockings of a defeat and being stuck in a crowd for an extra 10 minutes really so high that you’d risk missing these moments... moments that you’d remember for a lifetime. A real ‘where was I when...?’ moment.

There are not many people who can truly claim to have revolutionised the world of sport.

Dick Fosbury with his backwards flop can legitimately claim to have done so to the high-jump but while Michael Jordan, Pele, Wayne Gretsky and Muhammad Ali were global icons with names that transcend their own sport, their prowess did not have any particularly great impact on other pursuits.

One person who did have an impact across the board was Tony Verna, a man you’ll probably never have heard of but to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.

Verna, a TV producer, invented the instant replay and used it for the first time on December 7, 1963, during a college game of American Football between Army and Navy on CBS Sports.

Verna died in California on Sunday aged 81 after a battle with illness but left behind a gift to the world, a legacy which has settled more disputes and answered more previously unanswerable questions than NASA, the UN and Stephen Hawking rolled into one.