As soon as the draw was made you just knew there would be problems around playing Maccabi. We had petitions, calls for Villa to refuse to play and for Maccabi to be banned. The signs were there but when the announcement came that their supporters were, indeed, to be banned, I don’t think anyone could have expected the wave of media interest that came out immediately and almost a week later seems to have no sign of ending.

Unsurprisingly the first statement came from Nigel Farage, who might have known what football was this time last week, but don’t bank on it. He was equally unsurprisingly followed by Kemi Badenoch, who also got enraged by something she probably didn’t care about the day before. Then the stakes were raised, in the person of Keir Starmer. I don’t know much about Parliamentary procedure, but I’m sure that saying the government would try to get the decision reversed is pushing it. The Prime Minister directly interfering in the running of a football club – that’s another first for the Villa.

Then the fun really began. We found out that we had a Jewish Villans Supporters Club, who were naturally against the ban and said they’ve had lots of other Villa supporters offering seats to Maccabi fans, which is against ground regulations and likely to lead to some severe bans being handed out. The Jewish Villans also have a honorary president who turned out to be a questionable Villa fan at best and an IDF fan for definite.

Other groups seemed to spring up, such as UK Lawyers for Israel and Campaign Against Antisemitism, who started talking about judicial reviews and discrimination cases. They were joined by the ever-available Jonny Gould, the man who put the shite into gobshite. Jonny’s a Villa supporter of many years standing, although he spends a lot of his time accusing us of being racist and anti-semetic (that word’s been doing a lot of work lately). He’s never been so busy as he was over the weekend, saying Villa deserved to be prosecuted. With friends like that…

Then just as you thought it couldn’t get any better/worse along came Tommy Ten-Names Robinson, the self-appointed Maccabi Supporters Club (Luton Branch), who intends to be supporting them at the match. At least if anyone knows about being banned from football grounds it’s him.

On the other side were local MP Ayoub Khan, who also seems to have found out that he supports the Villa, and an assortment of MPs and community leaders for whom the opportunity to promote their own personal obsession was a gift. You’d have thought Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn might have had more to do with their time, such as deciding who’s going to be in charge of whatever their party might be called, but no.

As the debate raged, it was easy to see that underneath the argument lay a deep amount of Islamophobia. Despite what the Safety Advisory Board and the police might had said, the accepted narrative was that it wasn’t safe to allow Jewish football supporters into Aston, or for that matter into Birmingham. The amount that many of those shouting the loudest know about the subject was summed up by the number who said that we should be banned from the return leg, which isn’t happening.

Maccabi’s match with Hapoel being abandoned calmed the situation a bit, as did their announcement that they wouldn’t be taking any tickets. Hopefully it will all will start to die down and we can get on with watching Villa take another step towards winning the Europa League.

It is, though, just so downright infuriating. It’s a no-win situation and every time I think I’ve come up with an answer another question springs up. For a start, it didn’t help that the decision has only been made now. It should have been done as soon as possible after the draw. The recent political climate has worsened the debate but was always possible, another reason why everything concerning this match should have been sorted by now.

As to whether the ban is a good thing or not, it’s a real heart versus head situation. Ideally it would be the chance for another set of football supporters to see the city of Birmingham and Villa Park at our best. Realistically, though, it would have caused all sorts of unique problems. I’ve been going down the Villa for more years than I care to remember. In that time I’ve picked up a fair idea of which matches where there might be problems and if so, when and where it’s likely to happen.

For this one, I’d have no idea. There’s as much possibility of trouble in the city centre on Wednesday night as there is on Witton Island on the day of the match. And nobody knows quite who the problems might come from. Pro-Palestinians and Muslims (which isn’t a mutually inclusive group), Maccabi supporters and protestors from both sides are likely to want to make a show; it’s an unholy and volatile mixture.

It is true that the police have had similar problems to face when Small Heath are in town. The difference there, though, is that if we ever have to face them again there’s a tried and tested operation that will be put into place to control them virtually from when they leave the house until they’re tucked up in bad at night, and anyone causing a problem is likely to have their front door kicked in at dawn a few weeks later. That’s never going to be an option here and to make it more interesting, Maccabi’s hooligans aren’t like our breed. Plenty of them are IDF veterans, used to causing proper damage with proper weapons. They’re not going to be content with throwing bottles of brown sauce down Witton Lane.

But whatever happens, you know the Villa will come out of it looking badly, dragged into a problem that wasn’t of our making. And that’s what really grates – the way in which my club and my city have been denigrated by people who know nothing of either and have probably never set foot in them. To read the BBC’s website saying that the affair “casts doubts” over Birmingham hosting future sporting competitions is both sad and annoying. To read Birmingham Live saying the same thing, but only about Villa Park, was depressing and inevitable.