Wednesday marked five years since Tottenham’s miraculous comeback at Ajax in their Champions League semi final in 2019. I came across a few tweets from Spurs and football fans alike reminiscing about the night and this thread from Adam Powley struck a chord with me:

“The old TL is gratifyingly full of people joyously remembering That Night In Amsterdam. Proving, once again, that football really isn’t about trophies. It’s about moments, experiences, thrills and (broadly) happiness. Trophies are the bonus, if you’re lucky enough to support a club that has the means and opportunity to win them. The vast majority of clubs don’t win shiny things. It’s always, always the journey, hoping you might get something but not making your support dependent on it.”

As Villa’s European adventure came to a crushing end at the semi-final stage vs Olympiacos the following night, I needed to remind myself of this. Having had accommodation booked in Athens for the week of the Conference League final since the start of the season, I truly believed this was the year I would finally get to see my team win a trophy with a night that I could cherish forever. 

But, as James Rushton brilliantly puts in his article covering his European experiences with Villa “football isn’t about me. Like music, songs are not written about listening individuals, it’s not my song, or your song, or our song. It’s not always about us. There are other teams involved, with their own stories to write.” It’s easy (and completely natural) to always look at football through a selfish lens, but Olympiacos have an incredible story of their own and this is their time. If anything, their journey to their first ever European final further strengthens the case for the Europa Conference League as a competition that is worth taking seriously.

Of course, the sense of an opportunity missed is a hard one to shake. It will be a while before we go into any competition as favourites again, and that is in part due to our own overachievement in the league. But travelling around Europe to watch Villa with my Dad has been special regardless of the ultimate outcome. With such a long wait for European football again and the euphoria of last season’s final day qualification, we’d have happily taken going to just one away game abroad this year. So we will look back and consider ourselves lucky to have had three memorable trips to Warsaw, Amsterdam and Lille all in the same season.

Any criticism of our players at this stage feels futile. It’s evident by now that the team have completely emptied the tank and we should be nothing but proud of the monumental effort they’ve put in to get to this point. With exhaustion well and truly set in and rumours of only having 11 senior players currently available, the prospects of even gaining another point in our remaining two league games feel slim. But we may well have enough to qualify for the Champions League already, and I’d rather rely on a title-chasing Man City beating Spurs than our depleted squad right now.

Thanks to Sky moving our last home match of the season against Liverpool to a Monday night (a decision taken before Klopp had blown his chance of an unbearable goodbye), many fans – particularly those with young kids – will understandably need to get away from Villa Park before the traditional end of season lap of appreciation, which is a great shame. Regardless of the result, this group deserves to feel the love at home one last time this season.

It’s comforting that irrespective of how the last two games play out, Aston Villa will be playing European football in some form again next year and after we’ve all had a much needed break, I can’t wait to do it all over again.

After all it’s always, always the journey. And Unai Emery believes this one is only just beginning.