The day the world watched Portsmouth in wonder: fifteen years on from setting the Premier League standard

It was one of those occasional fallouts which used to happen back then about something or other no one can remember now.

I’m certainly glad that was the case, though, because it meant we were afforded front-row seats for a game etched in Fratton - and Premier League - folklore.

Rather than being tucked up in the press box at the back South Stand, it was my role to sneak into Fratton Park incognito and deliver a report on the 2007 clash with Reading.

So with my beanie hat pulled low and collar turned up I took my seat right at the front of the Fratton End before kick-off. Little did I know, I was being afforded a ringside berth for the most bonkers game in the 30-year existence of the Premier League.

Pompey 7 Reading 4: the highest-scoring match in football’s most celebrated league.

There were 20,102 there for a game which felt like the Twilight Zone, Ripley's Believe It or Not! and the Bermuda Triangle had descended on PO4 at the same time. In time-honoured Pompey fashion, it seems five times that attendance claim to have been there these days.

The numbers say a goal was averaged every 8.18 minutes on an autumn afternoon those present will never, ever forget.

There was little suggestion of what was to come, at the end of a first half in which two Benjani goals had seen Harry Redknapp’s men assume the ascendancy.

Pompey were in good form and unbeaten at home, with the Royals yet to have enjoyed success on the road.

So pretty much business as usual then, before Stephen Hunt wrested a degree of control back for the visitors in the half’s death throes.

‘Game on,’ said the match commentator. How prophetic.

Three minutes after the break and Steve Coppell’s side were level through our old friend Dave Kitson, as David James went rogue and the striker fired into an unguarded net.

But then came the five-goal salvo in front of the Fratton End, kicked off by the Hermannator, as he headed home and went fist-pumping and somersaulting in celebration.

Well, we all know what happened next.

Benjani-Kranjcar-Long-Ingimarsson(OG)-Muntari-Campbell(OG) was the insane sequence and, in fact, the 11-goal aggregate could have been even greater with Papa Bouba Diop having a legitimate diving headed scrubbed off for offside.

No wonder Reading keeper Marcus Hahnemann looked shell-shocked, as he received a sympathetic embrace from James in the game’s aftermath.

So a decade-and-a-half on, where does that one crazy afternoon rank in Pompey’s storied history?

It's tough to say but in an era when we were spoilt with what we were watching every week, it captured the zeitgeist of that period.

There, of course, have been many greater achievements, but few more memorable.

And the fact any time a top-flight fixture goes close to reaching that magical 11-goal landmark there’s a hope they don’t get there, suggests it’s a record which does mean something to most of us.