Buzz absent as season ends in Ukraine's temporary base

Dublin airport was flocked with football fans in the early hours of Sunday morning, but not of the Boys in Green variety, rather the Tartan Army, licking their wounds and rubbing their heads after an eventful but ultimately disappointing trip to the Irish capital.

Thankfully for our Scottish brethren and for all looking to get through security lines, the horror stories of out-the-door queues and understaffing did not materialise, and we were all through to Duty Free land with the minimum of fuss.

But wait. Were these kilt-clad sobering soldiers deserting the ranks and joining forces with their Celtic cousins?

The flight to Warsaw was full of Scots, as it happened, but while it was the Polish capital that was the route, it would only prove their first stop on the monster road to Yerevan, with a ten-hour wait and an airport change to negotiate, still leaving plenty of time to mull over that disappointing performance against the Irish.

The two-hour road trip to Lodz did not seem so bad now as we rolled towards Poland's third largest city, located slap bang in the centre of the country – the Athlone of Poland, perhaps, midway between Warsaw and the town the Irish took over in 2012, Poznan.

Two nuggets of knowledge were proffered from our genial driver as we wound down the journey to city centre hotel; Lodz is famous for its national film school – Roman Polanski a famous graduate – and the town of Lodz is not how it might appear, for it is pronounced Wudge!

A town that grew up in the industrial revolution and also experienced its fair share of World War II horror, it is also famous as the setting for the 1899 novel The Promised Land by renowned Polish author and Nobel laureate, Wladyslaw Reymont.

The book is about a Pole, a German