The end of August is a very significant time for Chelsea fans when we are in the Champions League.  As the UEFA bigwigs enjoy their usual jaunt to Monte Carlo for the Super Cup and the various cup draws you sit there and wait to find out all your European games right through to December.  So it is quite a different sort of draw from a domestic cup draw, six games home and away against three opponents.  It is also far from being an open draw as not only is everyone seeded but teams are also paired up for television viewing to divide things evenly between the Tuesday and Wednesday prime time slots.  This year was a bit different as the draw featured quite a few newcomers to the league stage of the competition including the first time teams from Cyprus and Belarus had qualified.  So pot four was of especial interest if you wanted to go somewhere new or potentially awkward.  I won’t bore you with the details of how they did the draw as it took absolutely ages and when your Internet access is limited it seems even longer.  Chelsea fans should have been fairly pleased with a return trip to Rome (first Italian opposition in five years and AS Roma this time) plus a new place in Bordeaux and a whole new country with Romanian champions CFR 1907 Cluj.

I looked up Cluj on a map, as all I knew was it was in Transylvania, and asked my friends what they were thinking of doing.  It looked like a one night trip with Flight Options was the favourite, so I booked my other trips and sat back waiting for the details to go up on their website.  After a while I telephoned to find out they were not doing anything, as they couldn’t get a trip booked at what they believed was a decent price.  By then the only direct flights, Luton to Cluj with Whizz!, were extortionate.  I did look at indirect routes via Budapest and Milan but the timings were not great, plus there didn’t seem to be a lot of hotels.  So reluctantly I booked with the club’s official travel partner Thomas Cook on a day trip.  This was the first time I’d booked only a day trip since my first visit to Sofia in 2001.

With an early flight on match day it also meant the best option seemed to be to get to Gatwick on the last train and hang around.  So getting there just before 1 a.m. I met Clive and we sat around drinking coffee and chatting until we could check in at about 3.30.  What did surprise us was the number of European regulars who seemed to be on the same trip as us.  Obviously among these regulars there are quite a lot of different types of fan.  Trying to classify these is quite difficult, but fun too!  Given the earliness of the hour it is fun to think of The Breakfast Club tagline of  "a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse".  So wandering around the airport we had the geeks, the dodgy geezers, the obsessives, the couples and the odd loner.  No sign of any hooligans or pissheads though, but a club trip isn’t really their scene.  However there are plenty of European virgins around, but luckily for them they’re not going to Transylvania to be sacrificed.  Instead they’re Pompey fans going on their first ever European trip to Portugal.  It doesn’t seem that long to me since my first trip to the Czech Republic until I think abut it and realise it was in 1994!  Mind you at least my second trip didn’t turn out to be only 15 miles down the road from my first!

To my mind to be a geek football fan means you need to have glasses, probably have thinning hair and carry a plastic bag or two.  You go to most of the games but tend to keep to yourself and definitely won’t mix with other types if you can avoid it.  Having said that a bunch of geeks together is quite a scary thing in itself even if it seems a bit out of place at football as opposed to on the end of a railway platform.  On the whole other types of fan will ignore the geek and won’t persecute them as you might expect.  (Not everything in this article will relate to a Hollywood view of high school!)

There are some dodgy geezers on the trip who have been going for years.  They’re talking about the trouble after the game at Stoke on the Saturday though by the sound of it trouble would be overstating it.  Sounds like some mild shoving at some point and a lively discussion with the local plod about what train they would be getting home.  To these guys the football is the main reason for going but they’re not averse to the possibility of trouble though what form it takes may not matter.  By now they’re talking about someone they know who will be going again as his ban has finished.  The opportunity to wind up other team’s fans won’t be missed by this type but they won’t go out of their way to fight just for the sake of it.  We know some of them, just through travelling round for a couple of decades, and get talking about the logistics of three away games in Europe and how it can be hard to get time off work for them all.

We talk to a half of a couple and find his missus is giving this one a miss.  Having seen her reaction to Moscow and knowing what she thought of Sofia I am not surprised.  We will meet some of the other regular couples but this guy is rarer in that he will still go on his own and she tolerates this too. 

My attempt to typecast everyone is being strained by the approach of someone whose nearest definition would be geek except that she is female, looking for her friend who we call the hillbilly.  She did used to travel with us but we got fed up with the zero input to any ideas of what to do, what to eat, how to get from a to b and anything else you can think of!  So I guess the hillbilly should be thanked for living near her in the deepest, darkest Medway towns.  He is supposedly into country music and descriptions of his driving sound like the truck driver in “Duel”.

There isn’t an awful lot to say about Cluj, as I didn’t find it a very exciting place.  We decided to wander out of the centre and up towards the ground and the main impression on this walk was that the whole place could do with a lick of paint and general spruce up.  When we got up near the ground there was a steep hill and it is quite a height difference between one end of the ground and the other though it turned out the pitch doesn’t have a slope.  The locals had been determined to stage the match at their own ground and had been working to increase the ground capacity and make the grade with UEFA.  This had gone down to the wire, as you could still smell the newness as you wandered round the ground and a few workmen were still adding the final touches.  The locals hanging around were polite and even offered to sell us tickets!  Seeing another ground in the distance we decided to investigate, though the path down the hill wasn’t the easiest to negotiate.  We walked up to what turned out to be a ramshackle stadium that initially looked unused.  It was a typical East European bowl but looking through the fence you could see the front rows had newish seats on them and the rest was empty.  The team that plays there are Universitatea who were relegated as their neighbours were winning their first ever title.

After that we went to look at the sites, which mainly consist of a couple of cathedrals and a surprisingly ornate opera house.  There is also a statue of some famous local called Avram!  As ever a lot of the Chelsea fans had not moved far from the coach drop off, as there were some handy bars there, so the local economy was getting a boost.  Someone shouted across the road at me and I recognised Danny amongst his mates, the only surprise being that they were NOT in a bar, though they must have been in transit as they weren’t sober either.  Looking for somewhere to eat we saw some blue shirts through an archway and went through into a restaurant.  Turned out we knew about half the people in the place and all but two tables were taken by Chelsea fans and one of the others had English journalists sat at it.  There was plenty of chatter going on about football and travel matters most thinking the place was quite pleasant but nothing special.  This was probably where I felt at home, amongst the obsessives!  Several of the people in this small space will turn up almost anywhere Chelsea are playing.  Some take this further going to reserve and youth games, others here are ground hoppers who will have to see another game if Chelsea aren’t playing

Chelsea hadn’t sold out completely but it was a reasonable turnout given the relative inaccessibility of the place.  Most of the types you normally see were there though thankfully no one who wanted to cause any trouble.  The locals had been far too nice and welcoming to have anything bad inflicted on them by so-called fans.  The real fans had turned up though, largely the hardcore in their various guises.  Next time out I’m doing all the travelling to Rome on my own, but according to my mates this doesn’t make me a loner as I’m bound to bump into someone I know for a chat at some point!