And this it it. The waiting’s over as we start our Champions League campaign, a phrase which still has an air of surreality about it. We’ve got as straightforward a game as we could have hoped for against a club and at a ground that have inspired many a comment over the years. They’ve all been repeated time and again but nobody has yet explained why anyone thought the name was a good idea. Does it mean anything in any of the half a dozen languages spoken in Switzerland or did someone in charge really hate them?

The ground holds 32,000 so we’ll get 5% of that and probably not many without tickets will bother going to a country that’s so expensive, for a game so early in the competition. If you’ve gone, good luck and try not to spend too much. One of their ex-players was Andres Escobar, the Colombian who was murdered for scoring an own goal in the World Cup and a Villa connection comes from Jimmy Hogan having been their manager after World War One.

Young Boys have won the Swiss league six times in the past seven years, which is Manchester City levels of dominance but without the 115 charges. Whether that says more about them than it does their league we shall find out on Tuesday evening, at the unfashionably early time of 5.45. Their squad is a mystery to all but the saddest football obsessive and Unai Emery, who within an hour of the draw probably knew all about them, their families, pets and where they went on their holiday. They’ve also got a plastic pitch and our record on them isn’t exactly great.