We were less impressively attired in battered chinos and shirts that still bore the signs of our endeavours at the supra. Our cars swept up the hills above the city, high above the sparkling Caspian Sea. We stopped to buy flowers; then stepped out into the muggy sunlight next to the state cemetery.Tofik Bakhramov died 10 years ago. Our odyssey was reaching its heroic climax: the meeting with The Linesman.The next morning, two Mercedes drew up outside our peeling Soviet hotel. Our friend the Football Association man emerged, accompanied by minders in the usual dark suits of the Azeri male; and a cameraman from the local TV station. That performance, followed by some intricate footwork in the dodgy nightclubs of Baku (oxymoron, that), was enough to see him stroll the coveted Man of the Tour title.So it was we found ourselves in the Lancaster Gate, legs weary, livers creaking, our bags weighed down with pirated CDs.

The poor bloke had to take a 150-mile taxi ride back to the Georgian capital followed by an internal flight to Azerbaijan. Then there was the unusual trauma of losing a player at the border because some twit in T’bilisi had failed to stamp hi-s visa properly. There was the normal trauma of being stuck in an un-air-conditioned carriage with locked windows alongside 14 snoring footballers. There’s nothing like huge oil revenues and pricking the strategic interest of the United States to keep your streets and squares in good order.We did the groggy emerging thing at 7am at the station after a traumatic journey overnight from T’bilisi.

There are signs of new Pragueness – our hotel, the bright Hotel Tori for one The old town is beautiful in a decrepit kind of way. Wandering the streets, you glimpse a sunny Caucasian bohemia. Then you round a corner and another wall has fallen down and there are more child beggars in the ruins.Baku, by contrast, has been very thoroughly renewed commercially and culturally. The guidebook tells us the place has been sacked 30 times over the past 1,500 years, but has always been able “to renew itself commercially and culturally”. Maybe, but they haven’t gotten around to mending the walls yet.

We made speeches, sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, tried to do Cossack dancing, fell over, and went back to our sanatorium happy.T’bilisi is a beautiful city, but knackered. There are a host of important rules associated with the supra, of which I only remember two Never make a toast with beer – that’s for enemies And don’t drink red wine – that’s for girls The blokes get stuck into the hard stuff: the white. The speeches are hugely entertaining, especially if you don’t understand a word and you’ve spent six hours drinking Georgian wine and brandy. After an hour, we were ready wholeheartedly to embrace the legacy Comrade Stalin (who was born just down the road in Gori): anything to get fed.The Georgian football lads made up for it that night with a supra for our benefit in a local restaurant A supra is a feast with speeches It goes on for about 10 hours.