An Aston Villa cousin’s wedding, in 2003: Harvey Nicks’ rooftop garden in Knightsbridge.

Gathered in awed clusters around him, he casually asks me where I’m from. Just arrived from Poland, I tell him: “Warsaw.” He proceeds to quiz me about streets I’ve not heard of.

I struggle to process what Big Ron is on about, but it slowly dawns on me he is talking about Walsall. The Walsall Uprising of 1944?

My mate Gav and I have been the claret and blue army in Warsaw since the mid-1990s. We’ve waited a long time for Villa to be back in Europe, so when we heard they would be visiting our adopted city first up in the Europa Conference League group stage, we were, well, Holte Enders in the sky.

It was Gav who taught me the words to the Villa classic “Allez, allez, allez… we’ve even conquered Europe… in 1982.”

With two relegations since then, 13 years without European football and 26 without a trophy, we’ve seen some hard times.

Now Villa are back and coming to Poland – but Gav, a 53-year old sociologist at Kozminski University, can’t be there.

“I’ve lived in Warsaw for 30 years and I will be in Athens when the game is on – typical Villa,” he says, the humour pure B6.

Gav and I have spent many long and disappointing evenings in Warsaw pubs watching our Villa boys on the box. Legends bar, run by a perennially annoyed Evertonian, and the Bulldog Pub on Jerozolimskie Avenue are the only two still standing. Champions bar, opposite the Central Railway station, is gone, as is Kevin Bradley’s great Irish bar, Bradley’s, which was once tucked away behind a Holiday Inn.

One low was watching Paul Lambert’s Villa in Kevin’s empty pub. We lost 8-0 to Chelsea in December 2012, and it could have been 28.

We saw Villa lose the 2015 FA Cup final 4-0 to Arsenal in Legends. Belarusian Arsenal fans sang outside in the street, seemingly unaware of the Gunners’ library code.

It was a period of decline for Villa, which happened as those of us in Poland lived through a period of political turmoil.

For Villa, the dip that followed Martin O’Neill’s exit as manager in August 2010 was inversely mirrored by the rise of Law and Justice (PiS), run by Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

He gained influence on the back of a nationalist populist surge; PiS came to power in 2015 during our relegation season. Twin lows.

Villa returned to the Premier League in 2019; our first full season back was interrupted by Covid.

In January 2020, just before Poland went into lockdown, my three Anglo-Polish boys had their christenings in Warsaw. A grand event for the twins, then aged six, and their younger brother Oliver, then five.

For the post-event meal, a group of us moved en masse to an Italian restaurant in Warsaw’s New Town, where we watched Villa hammered 6-1 at home by Manchester City. For some of us, it was the last time we would meet before lockdown. We wondered if we’d have a Premier League team to come back to – but Dean Smith kept us up.

Holte Enders in the sky

Villa runs in the family. My mum and dad moved south to London and then Sussex in the late 1960s. So Villa Park was a homage to the homeland, the Brummie diaspora reunited. Mum, a Quaker from Bournville, knitted us Villa scarves and talked of players of old.

In the late 1970s, the family would meet on the Holte End, and after the game, have a cigarette in my uncle Keith’s car. We’d discuss if Des Bremner should play deeper or Gary Shaw wider, and then go our separate ways.

Keith’s booming voice and his presence was always with us on the Holte End. He died on 1 September, aged 86, but the memories will always be with us.

Those memories include wonderful European nights, and great Villa teams of years gone by.

We saw Villa play Gornik Zabrze in the Uefa Cup in 1976, on grainy black and white TV screens.

The 1980-81 season brought us Bremner, Peter Withe, Gordon Cowans, and a first league title for 71 years. We lost only eight league matches that season – and I managed to be at five of them. Keith called me “the Jinx”.

A year later, we were European champions. The win over Bayern Munich in Rotterdam in May 1982 comes with memories of being drunk on Guinness and champagne, and of Russian cigarettes.

Miracles on the Vistula

My three boys aren’t much into football. They call the Villa, Aston Billa. But slowly they are coming to understand. Matty Cash’s hilarious television ads for Polish banks have helped.

We live over the Vistula from the Legia stadium. Our neighbourhood, Goclaw, is Legia territory.

“We will be fighting on all fronts in this campaign,” says my neighbour Klaudyna, half in jest, with the Ukraine border a mere three hours away to the east.

Legia Warsaw have their roots as an army team, formed four years before the nation’s military halted the Red Army’s advance in 1920, in a battle that has come to be known as the Miracle on the Vistula.

Villa fans will need to be on their best behaviour in Warsaw. But the Varsovian wing of Big Ron’s claret and blue army will be there and you’ll even hear us singing: “Allez, allez, allez!”