Baku is a serious football trip that demands military precision

This does not yet feel like your average European football trip and I suspect that won’t change the closer we get to the Europa League final kick-off

As Arsenal correspondent for The Independent, my football season began back in August, when I travelled from London to Ireland to watch Unai Emery’s fledgling side take on Chelsea in a money-spinning friendly at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium.

It was a peculiar feeling, picking up my passport and jumping on a plane to watch two clubs from just down the road play against one another in a match hundreds of miles from home. Little did I know that, by the end of the season, an hour-long flight to see these sides square off would seem like child’s play.

My journey to Baku began at 6pm on Monday evening: just enough time to ensure that I would be in Azerbaijan for the Europa League final press conferences some 24 hours later. That’s an awful lot of effort to hear Unai Emery talk for 20 minutes.