UK Edition
Did Cologne take football back to the dark ages? Not from what I saw
It was obvious from the sheer volume of Cologne fans outside Highbury and Islington tube station that there was going to be trouble at Thursday night's game.
They outnumbered home supporters by a huge margin, particularly the closer you got to the stadium.
The majority of them also seemed to have tickets. I saw one man wearing a leather jacket emblazoned with 'Cologne f------ rocks' on the back casually queueing up for Club Level - the ring of highly expensive, largely corporate seats around the centre of the stadium - before scanning his ticket and being allowed into the stadium. It was fairly obvious by that point that stewards was just waving anyone with a genuine ticket through into the stadium.
Despite that, plenty of those outside were wearing Arsenal merchandise, presumably in a bid to fool the stewards - although the fact they were signing in German gave the game away.
This was around half an hour before the scheduled kick-off, shortly after the order had been given to delay the game and close the gates.
The atmosphere at that stage was fairly calm, mainly because no-one was quite sure what was going on. Announcements were being made inside the stadium but there was nothing outside the ground. Twitter was the primary source of information.
I saw no signs of violence or intimidation. It was loud and raucous, but nothing more. That seemed partly because the Cologne fans queuing up for entry clearly had legitimate tickets.
They had no reason to cause trouble because they couldn't be denied entry to the ground, although others saw them attempting to storm the gates earlier.
It never quite seemed likely to boil over outside the ground, with the two sets of fans getting on well enough even when trying to get through the same turnstiles. If there had been just the 3,000 Cologne fans it would barely have merited comment, with the sheer number of them the main issue, rather than their behaviour.
Nonetheless, by the time kick-off approached inside the ground it was clear Cologne fans had taken over large sections of the Clock End, while plenty Arsenal supporters had seemingly gone home. It meant the strangest of atmospheres on a very strange night.