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. 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. Finals are there to be savoured, by players and fans alike, and there’s a supreme sense of that after such an enforced absence. 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.

Source: Metro May 28, 2021 14:26 UTC