It's Champions League Final day - and who'd have believed - Chelsea are there! Who better to set the scene than columnist and supporter Giles Smith.


I don't think anyone will accuse me of exaggeration if I describe tonight's fixture in Moscow as 'fairly big'.

You could say the entire season has been leading up to it. Indeed, you could say the story of the club in the last five seasons or so has been leading up to it. In fact, in a sense, the whole history of the club since 1905 has been leading up to it.

Actually, you know that Guinness advert - the one where the drinkers travel backwards through the history of evolution, eventually regressing to the state of fish on the edge of a primordial swamp?

Well, those fish had their eye on tonight, too, in a long-term, ideal-scenario kind of way. It's fairly big.

So, tickets? Yes.

Passport? Yes.

Visa? Don't alarm me. I don't need one.

Directly after writing this, I shall begin a journey which wouldn't have seemed very likely to me, on certain cold and miserable afternoons in the 1980s: a journey across the continent to watch Chelsea take part in the final of the Champions League.

I shall climb aboard a plane bound for Moscow - via Germany, of course, because independently-sourced direct flights from the UK to the Russian capital quickly became about as easy to organise as a lift on the back of Shergar.

But if you think I'm complaining about that, you're wrong: not when I know that any kind of flight to this occasion is a privilege, and that some people are going in by train, bus, bike and, if necessary, sealed tea chest. And they won't be complaining, either, because something deep inside them tells them it's worth the trouble.

After all, how often in any of our lifetimes will we get to see Chelsea compete to stand astride the whole of Europe? Well, 'five or six, with any luck' is probably the answer most of us are secretly mumbling in response to this one. But how often have we got to see them do so thus far? Answer: none. This is our first time. It's a once in a lifetime experience, so far.

And how often does one get the opportunity to go to Moscow? Very rarely, personally speaking. Never before, in fact. Yet, since Chelsea and United qualified for the final, we've heard the city ritually derided as a location for 'club football's biggest showpiece'. Too expensive to get to, too hard to reach, too disorganised. Well, it certainly is expensive, and it certainly is relatively complicated to reach in this particular instance. And we'll see how the place copes very soon now.

At the same time, this is the Champions League we're talking about - a pan-European competition and not, in the end, organised solely to safeguard the interests of people who live in Manchester and London. The idea that the final should have been switched at the last minute to a more convenient location was breathtakingly arrogant, not to say ignorant about the whole idea of a European Cup.

Also, let's face it, Moscow doesn't exactly have the monopoly on expensiveness. Euro 2008 is taking place in Switzerland, for heaven's sake, and you can't get a cup of hot chocolate there for under £5 unless you make it yourself.

Indeed, have you tried to buy a burger at Wembley recently? Much change from a tenner?

So, Moscow: why ever not? And because I am an optimist at heart, I shall assume that the tales of what awaits me when I get there (a 'gulag', according to the Daily Mail, in which I will be held without food or drink, or even a programme, for up to nine hours; 'a rat-infested prison', according to the 'Mirror') are exaggerated and examples of the traditional panic induced in sectors of the British press by things which are foreign.

Here's one thing we've already won: in The Guardian newspaper's assessment of which of the two finalists is less popular with non-partisan supporters, we finished marginally ahead. Yay! Take that, United! Eat our unpopularity!

Once upon a time United would have been a dead certainty to sweep all before them in any most-hated contest. Not any more. It's a mark of how far that club's stock has fallen, and how much, by contrast, ours has risen in the same period.

At the same time, in the ownership category, The Guardian somehow managed to rank Roman Abramovich more irksome to the neutral than the Glazers. And, that. I'm afraid to say, looked like a woefully poor and inaccurate reading, on the paper's part, of the public pulse.

Ask United fans (any fans, in fact) what they would prefer: a football-obsessed owner who came to games, kept on stumping up for things and held tickets prices at the same level for three consecutive seasons? Or the Glazers? I think we know the answer.

Anyway, to The Guardian's distinguished vote of confidence, let's now add the most coveted cup of the lot. And see how they'll all love us then.