You hope Maurizio Sarri enjoyed his first trophy in professional football – but this, surely, was not how he imagined it when he whiled away the hours working on the foreign exchange desk at a bank in Florence. Perhaps he had dreamed of one of the great citadels of European football, of Wembley or San Siro, of the Camp Nou or the Luzhniki, but instead he got the Olympic Stadium in Baku. It is a place so ill-conceived that not only is the stadium inaccessible to most of Europe but the pitch seems inaccessible from most of the stands, laid out like a Subbuteo cloth on a snooker table, as though somebody had seen the London Stadium and thought: “We’ll do that, but more so.”
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