Half an hour after his ordeal in the rain in Manchester, Eddie Howe sat in a chair in a press conference room and it must have felt like a refuge.
No more did he have to stand and watch his weary players being pulled this way and that by Manchester City in the same way that a cat plays with a piece of string.
The questions Howe faced were not entirely comfortable. They were about the future and what it holds and deep down Howe knows that no manager can ever really know, can never really be sure.