IT WAS 2.36am in Lisbon old town. Too early to sleep. Too late to go to bed. 

“What time do you close?” I asked a genial barman, vivid blue tiles, known as azulejos, formed the backdrop behind him. “When you stop drinking” came the reply, with a smile. 

Although it was late October, the majority of revellers were in short sleeves, gathered convivially around outside tables balanced on cobblestones. 

The facade of the grand building opposite boasted handsome wrought iron balconies.

The neon lights of equally busy bars around us caught the eye, as much as the evocative arch to the left, built after the 1755 great earthquake that had razed a previous incarnation of this beguiling city to the ground. 

It was October, 2018. Unai Emery’s Arsenal had beaten Sporting Lisbon 1-0 thanks to a Danny Welbeck goal in the Europa League hours earlier, after pouncing on former Liverpool defender Sebastian Coates’s error to seal victory. 

I had reported on the game for an Islington-based newspaper. On-the-whistle report and reaction duties duly filed as well as post-match interviews in the bag — which as I recall consisted of mainly asking Aaron Ramsey in the mixed zone about his future at the club — I eventually found my Gooner pals in a wonderful bar, in a wonderful part of this wonderful city. 

In the pleasantly warm, early hours air, a crowd of boisterous — though utterly well-behaved and peaceable football fans from London — mixed with debonair locals, bon-viveurs, sophisticated night owls and all manner of late-night chancers, dancers and prancers. 

And there we stayed drinking and talking football, sport, life, politics, music and everything in between, until it was nearly dawn, in a city that is a bewitching tangle of past and present.

Life was lived to the full with old friends in a seductive setting and life was good. 

I recalled this moment with a smile thanks to yesterday’s Europa League draw that pitted Arsenal once again with Sporting Lisbon. 

Notwithstanding the fact that it will be a north London reunion of sorts with Sporting’s former Spurs academy forward Marcus Edwards, who scored against the Gunners for Vitoria Guimaraes back in 2019, Lisbon will provide a tough challenge. 

Even if the Leoes (Lions) are fourth in the Primeira Liga table, 14 points off leaders Benfica, who they share a city with, they still have six Portuguese internationals in their squad.

Not to mention tricky Brazil left-winger Arthur Gomes, who, you may recall scored in Sporting’s 2-0 Champions League victory over Spurs back in September.

No wonder I absolutely love savouring trips to European away games — on and off the field. 

If you have a chance to watch your football team abroad, I would suggest you take it if you can. For the experience and adventure. The fun and excitement of soaking up new places, while making new memories. 

As a disclaimer, it doesn’t always go right. If you ask the legions of innocent and well-behaved Liverpool fans who went to Paris for the 2022 European Cup final it can, sadly, also be dangerous. 

Yet, thankfully, it’s more the mishaps that remain in the memory, rather than anything more sinister. 

My mate Mozzy’s Ford Capri (complete with go-faster stripes) broke down on the way to the Parc de Princes in Paris in 1994 — which resulted in us being towed all the way back to Blighty the morning after the game. 

Not to mention having to once sleep on a busy roundabout in northern France for reasons far too obtuse to regale here. 

It can also be hairy at times — the riot in Copenhagen before the 2000 Uefa Cup final between Arsenal and Galatasaray after two Leeds fans died in Istanbul in the semi-final wasn’t much fun. 

A stark contrast to the Parken Stadium six years previously in the same city, that prompted the Miracle of Copenhagen — and my book of the same name detailing Arsenal’s never-to-be-forgotten run and triumph in wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. 

I would estimate I’ve done more than 100 continental matches since English teams were allowed back into Europe in the early 1990s. 

So much has changed since my first trip abroad to watch Arsenal, at Standard Liege in November 1993. 

For a start it’s a bit more organised now. My friends and I drove to Liege with a toothbrush, a fistful of hard-earned cash and not much else. 

We certainly didn’t have match tickets, or accommodation booked. Pre-satnav times we didn’t even have a map. 

But we got there. Found accommodation, picked up match tickets and still laugh about the trip now, which, improbably saw Arsenal win 7-0.

We still chuckle about how, in our naivety having just left our teens, we thought every Euro away game was going to be like that.  

I could go on. The atmosphere at Sampdoria’s ground, Luigi Ferraris, in knavish Genoa, during the 1995 European Cup Winners Cup semi-final second leg was incredibly powerful the night I was there. 

Memorable Milan, terrible Turin. Mullered in Munich. Mashed in Moscow. Grim Gelsenkirchen. Victory in Vigo. Lost in Lens. Stuck in Stockholm. Bowled over by Bodo. Agony in Eindhoven. We’ve all got our favourites. 

Sometimes the darker episodes are the most memorable. I still kick myself for missing Arsenal’s odyssey in the Ukraine a few years back. The stories told to me afterwards confirmed the camaraderie and chaos. 

Which is why I spent most of yesterday lunchtime in various WhatsApp groups working out who was going, where they were going from and how they were going. 

Thanks to Uefa the road to Lisbon is scandalously short. Fifteen days to be precise.

But faithful Gooners will be there in their thousands as they always are. As will Manchester United fans be travelling to San Sebastian in their droves in the same competition. Along with West Ham fans working out the cheapest way to get to Larnaca in the Europa Conference League. 

Whatever team you are, if you know, you know: European away days are something else. Even more so after two wasted years being stuck at home during the debilitating pandemic. 

Of course, many of the personae dramatis of mid-March’s eagerly awaited clash between Lisbon and Arsenal will have changed over the course of the last four-and-a-half years.

Ramsey, for example, was to leave in tears at the end of the 2018-19 season. As was Emery, a matter of months into the next campaign, as Arsenal were to veer from calamity, to calm, via mediocrity to the genuine hope and excitement that exists right now, sparked of course, by Mikel Arteta.

2019 was a seismic season that saw the Gunners ease past Rennes from Brittany, Naples in southern Italy and Valencia on Spain’s eastern coast on the mouth of the Turia River on the way to the dismally underwhelming 2019 Europa League final in Baku.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s never-to-be-forgotten hat-trick during the 4-2 evisceration of Marcelino Garcia Toral’s Valencia at the captivating bear-pit that is the Mestalla springs to mind — indeed, such was the joy it was one of the rare times I’ve let out a yelp of delight in the press box, during a decade of covering Arsenal matches. 

Enduring football moments abound, yet memories roll down towards the trips themselves, reminisces on and off the pitch entwined in pleasant recall. 

A late-night club in the timbered centre of a medieval city in Brittany after Arsenal had lost 3-1 to an Ismaila Sarr-inspired Rennes at a fevered Roazhan Park, complete with spectacular pyro in the first leg. 

The intimidating thrill of Naples old town at 3am, dark alleys, foreboding streets, scooters buzzing haphazardly, late-night bars and the church of Maradona. 

And, yes, the Barrio Alto of Lisbon old town too. 

The yellow Number 28 tram with the faded grandeur of its varnished wooden seats, shuffling and wheezing and grinding its way uphill from the spectacular vista of the Rio Tejo, through the mesmerising old citadels of Alfama, Baixa, Estrella and Gracia, accompanied by the eerie soundtrack of mournful Fado music, as haunting as the firecrackers at Sporting’s 50,000 Estadio Jose Alvalade were ear-splitting. 

For me it is these memories — and the thought of making so many more — that entice as much as the football. 

Especially when it’s too early to sleep and too late to go to bed on a European tour. 

See you in Lisbon. 

*PS: If you look at my Instagram account @laythy29 you can still find my pictures from that October 2018 Lisbon trip, including a photograph taken at 2.36am in the bar I described.