Following your team over land and sea can be testing, but not normally this testing – I will have swabbed myself to tears for seven Covid tests in a month just to attend Chelsea’s two finals.
Being a football fan can take you to the deepest depths of despair, but not nearly as deep as the Portuguese nurse thrust her swab down my nostrils.
Simply entering the stadium at the moment requires a testing regime an Olympic cyclist would shrink from.
And the trial by travel doesn’t stop there. Ordinarily, you would have to be one very lost traveller to set out for Istanbul and end up in Porto, but these are tricky travel times for football fans in the UEFA universe.
Anybody pitching up in Portugal has already overcome this city substitution that, thanks to a red list red card, left fans like myself to scramble for further flights and hotels 1,900 miles from their original destination on two weeks’ notice.
At one point, it was like a hotel hokey cokey trying to pre-empt the price hikes of another announcement (You put your Porto in, Your Lisbon out, Then UEFA shake it all about).
After all the pre-flight preamble and so many months of travel being unilaterally outlawed, there was a surreal simplicity to the fact that the destination lay just one budget airline dawn dash away.
The soothing sight of people chugging pints of Guinness at 7am on a Wednesday morning in airport bars was a reassuring reminder of normality.
After all the faffing, there will always be the football, and there’s an added sweetness to the sound of familiar chants heard from across the river echoing off the walls of ancient squares. Finals are there to be savoured, by players and fans alike, and there’s a supreme sense of that after such an enforced absence.
It has been 444 days since supporters last attended a European away day, so just to make the trip feels triumphant. Regardless of the result, there’s an added understanding that what matters more than voicing a future “we were there” is simply that now “we are here”.
There are still moments that get the goosebumps going: catching a glimpse of the stadium from the metro, stumbling upon the construction of the final’s fan park, having elderly proprietors cheer “José Mourinho” at me with a thumbs up from across the street.
Porto is bejewelled in blue tiles, it’s almost written into the buildings that this match between sky blue and royal blue ended up here.
With the recent reminders that above all football is a game of emotion, to be immersed in the multifaceted and multisensory experience of that against such a postcard perfect backdrop is, to borrow an adjective from one of UEFA’s sponsors, truly priceless.
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from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3uvu5tE
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