Aston Villa's journey to Warsaw showed us the soul of football

Aston Villa's trip to Warsaw through my eyes in a nutshell? Here you go.

I'm on a plane and somehow snag a divine pocket of luck that has gifted me an empty row. The sun dazzles me through the window and a toddler grapples with the back of my seat for the entire flight. I'm on a train from Poznan and there's an uncomfortable silence in my booth the entire way that isn't even interrupted when a bottle of sparkling water explodes over me. I'm in an Italian restaurant that is only offering table service drinks due to an influx of Villa fans - some of whom are climbing the rickety scaffolding outside an Irish-style pub. I'm stepping out of an Uber on a packed highway at the wrong side of the Stadion Wojska Polskiego, wading through a horde of white shirts as the sweltering sun sets over Poland. I'm marshalled against a gate and frantically searched for drugs, the fiscal contents of my wallet dare to drop against the floor. I'm staring at a tifo draping down the 'Razor' as Legia fans welcome the Villans. I'm watching Jhon Duran score - again. I'm witnessing Villa get shown the way by Legia.  I'm being kettled into a crowd against a fence. I'm being kettled to wait for a bus that won't come. I awake in my accommodation in a former Soviet housing bloc. I'm stuck in a lift for what feels like an eternity. I'm on a train and everyone has their shoes off. I'm flying back to Birmingham.

In a nutshell, that was Villa in Warsaw. A nutshell wastes it. Welcome to the jungle.

Entrance is planes, trains and automobiles. Many charge in on metal slugs surging towards the capital on tracks from Lublin, Krakow, and Poznan. The lucky ones flew into the Polish capital and left the same way. Some were already there, and remained long after the final whistle. My own transit? Train. Bus. Plane. Car. Train. Bus. Stadium. I believe that is barely even close to the most convoluted of claret and blue journeys to the Polish capital.

I start in Luton (but really, I start in Birmingham, then Milton Keynes, then Luton). People are asleep on the floor. Before long, Poznan comes into view on the back of an £11 flight. The beauty of the place is interrupted by improvement works, but it still stands. There's barely time to take it in before a half-five wake-up to head on a train to Warsaw. Meetups take place, accommodation is checked-into and then it actually begins.

Villa in Europe is a thing.

A pub. It's always a pub, isn't it? No matter where you go in the world, you'll be based - or someone will base you - at a pub. A 'home' away from home, where the free market has decided to hyperfocus on that one locale and charge double - if not triple - the local going rate for drinks and food. This one is called Molly Malones. Villa have put us here, and I suppose in the Italian place next door, and the bar next door to that. I could swear that these 'Irish pubs' are fluid across dimensions, simply appearing when you're looking before disappearing when you're no longer paying attention.

Walking to the place, you can hear the chants from around the corner, and you know exactly where to go. If your ears failed, you'd just follow the mass of flashing blue sirens.

Then you’d see us.

Some climb the scaffold to show their flags, the rest have packed the confines of a tight outdoor space to make a lot of noise. Locals laugh and film, one policeman even cracks a smile when they recognise the name ‘Matty Cash’. Drinks flow, and waiting staff rake it in.

Shuttles take hordes of Villa fans, barely staying inside the confines of the bus, deeper into the city Stadion Wojska Polskiego. I see no chance that I’m getting onto one, so it’s an Uber.

To the wrong side of the stadium of course. We get out on a jammed road, and walk through what amounts to every Legia fan going to the game. Someone following us is doing it in an Under Armor Villa shirt. Don’t worry, I saw him again after.

Then we join the pocket of late Villa fans getting in, it’s a frustrating bottleneck capped off with a deep search. I’m asked where I’m hiding drugs, and they rifle through my pockets and wallet. Class.

Fans were expectant of a burst of pyro to open the game from the Legia end (A flight of fancy considering UEFA’s recent warnings), but the tifo - a Gorilla - welcomed Villa. Our lot told them to shove it up ‘their arses’.

With kick-off and back-and-forth goals, there was but one constant in a sticky match. The noise.

God. The noise. I'm not talking about their chanting, or the racket during the tifo display nor the loud bursts after momentary quiet. I'm talking about the screeching.

The Legia horde decided that they didn't really want Villa holding the ball in their half. Their half being defined as the side backed by 'The Razor' - a ferocious wall of white shirts that barely stop roaring. When Villa held the ball in defence in the first half, the noise rose. When they progressed into it in the second half via Leon Bailey, Matty Cash et al, the screeching rose again. It was incessant, belligerent, obnoxious - and loud. I make no exaggeration when I say that I couldn't think during its extent - topping minute after minute of continuous whistling and screeching. A billion angry crickets infuriated by your demands for more and more territory.

Unai Emery called it a tactical mistake. He's right - but the atmosphere created in Warsaw also had an effect. The sloppy final ball in the Legia half became proof of that. We were fazed, boxed-in and bullied. If only Jhon Duran and Lucas Digne’s goals could’ve been replicated. Dream bursts that sent shock through the stadium but for split-seconds.

Fans in the Villa end roared until veins protrude on foreheads. It mattered not. Villa fans were individuals and proud. Warsaw fans were one single mass, well choreographed into violent bursts of noise and sound. The Villa tried, they were loud, but it ended up swallowed in a near non-stop burst of noise. 1700 can be noisy. 28,000 united are noisier. Simple.

I left feeling slightly envious. Villa Park can be loud. More often than not, the loudest noise is someone moaning about something - you're standing up too much, the game isn't going well, Watkins misses again. In English football, more so than elsewhere, there's an expectation that even a bang-average side needs to come away from games with a win. If it doesn't, it's seemingly pointless. I wonder what it'd take to make an atmosphere half as loud as Warsaw. I then realise that the last group to even bother trying were chased out of the club.

Digression. Thinking about such things when being locked in a fenced off bubble for 'your own protection' is pointless. All you actually want to think about is getting to genuine safety - ie, anywhere but here. Much was made of Legia fans being a danger post-game.

The police one-up them easily.

We were held back for 40 minutes, and then another forty minutes, and then what felt like another 40. Firstly, in the fenced off away section and then for a long while outside in a tree-lined park avenue. Buses were put on (a whole five - one broke down, and one was apparently bricked but I cannot confirm that as of writing) and we were 'free to leave.'

That theory was laughable. Some who had hotels booked on the roads surrounding the stadium were refused exit. The police simply walled up and let sections out at a time when buses turned up. Some said they were let out, others said showing an Uber booking. I saw no evidence of this occurring at all with the final third of fans to be let out of police control. I thank my lucky stars that crowded situations don't induce panic in me, and then I think about how actually, that segment of time was pretty grim.

Credit to any Villa fans with me. It'd only take one idiot to create a horrible spectacle when we're all cramped in. Any pushing or shoving would've been dealt with - possibly quite violently. The only way out was to wait until the buses turned up, and get on it. The police were having none of it when it came to the other options. Standing in the dark, pushed up against others, with a van behind you and a wall of police in front of you isn't great. Thoughts evaporate from your head when you're squeezed against your fellow fan, with your warm breath blossoming on the face of a riot shield.

The bus awaited, and then a bizarre police escort followed with three or four riot vans. If you want attention, you've got it. We fly out in the cloak of night, over the Vistula with sirens blazing. It was odd - bizarrely diplomatic or presidential. This is what it felt like to be important.

Every head on the street turned to view the buses, including the briefest of skirmishes outside a bar packed with Legia fans - with one plucky lad trying to encroach the bus and spit through a window.

And then you're back at square one. The Irish pubs. The 'cheap' bars (that were seemingly affected by a massive change in exchange rate judging on the prices they charged pre-match to the prices they demanded post-match). You leave into a quiet night, back to your accommodation, dwelling on the experience, thinking of more than just the football.

I headed back to the rented housing unit. It looks like some of the buildings in Possession (which makes sense, with the director being Polish). The lift threatens me with death. The lobby is a Soviet liminal space. An old lady is wandering around my floor. I go to sleep rather shaken, awakened by the bowels of the building as they churn with every toilet flush. It's hot.

Another half-five wake up time for the way back. I get stuck in the lift. Then I'm stuck in a train carriage back to Poznan, with no time to take anything in. Train booths full of sleepy voyagers, drifting off in their heads with their bare feet caressing opposite seats. A dog walks from booth to booth, revelling in the cheery pats it receives from the people on the end seats. My work laptop is using the ends of my knees as a desk. It's a trip.

Poznan sends me and two other Villa fans (Richard and Martin) to Copenhagen. Then back to Birmingham in a sweltering plane berth that lacked air conditioning for the first 30 minutes of boarding/sitting.

It was all graft, really. I doubt my journey was the most complex - or even close to it, but apart from taking in three hours of Poznan pre-Warsaw, then enjoying bubbled 'hospitality', it was a slog. An enjoyable slog at that, but nonetheless.

And I'd do it all over again, like everyone else here. It was a privilege to go to Warsaw to watch Villa. Even for Villa, you have to earn the chance to play (and lose) in Europe.

It’s a labour of love and I think a lot of people forget the depth of both of those words.

People travel up-and-down the country to watch this football team. They pay for travel, tickets and drinks. They can be promised a good time, for a bit, but not good football. There’s 4am wakeups for some coach journeys, now there are flights involved.

It’s a privilege, but that also goes for being in love, and in love you also have to graft and make sacrifices. Villa’s a fiscal sacrifice mostly, but there’s also these types of journeys that don’t always have the room for a non-stop party. People drop weekends of their lives on this football club. They drop other paths of life just for Aston Villa FC. Just so that they might involve themselves fully, and totally commit to something bigger.

English football in general is losing sight of that. Fans like our away support keep that dream alive in pockets of space, and from weekend to weekend. They paid to be kettled in Warsaw, they paid to be bullied by boisterous opposition, they paid to fall deeper and deeper into this dream.

I think that’s a beautiful thing.