Struggling to get to the all-English Champions League final in Moscow? Finding it hard to pin down flights and rooms at reasonable prices? Worry not. We still have a variety of travel packages available at prices to suit most pockets. But hurry.

Exclusive “Total Oligarch” Premium Champions League Matchday Experience

Private jet to Moscow, departing from your garden on the afternoon of May 21. Transfer to stadium by silver-plated helicopter. Watch match from prestige, individually air-conditioned, recline-o-matic armchair, with at-seat trolley service of drinks and light refreshments and your own personal pedicurist. Shake hands afterwards with large number of inscrutable people in full-length leather coats. Take-home Prada goody bag includes programme, Breitling Chronomat Evolution watch, Porsche 911 Targa, portfolio of shares in a formerly nationalised utility and set of commemorative velvet-lined thunder sticks. £4.7million per person.

The “They Think It's All Ova” Corporate Liggers' Special (originally offered as the “Sarnitch Prawnsk”)

Business-class chartered flight out of Gatwick on the morning of the match, returning directly after the game. Three-course pre-match dinner in the Olga Korbut Suite at the nearby Leninsky Ramada with half a bottle of table wine and entertainment from Arthur Albiston and Kerry Dixon (subject to availability and visas). Courtesy shuttle bus to stadium. Worth £1,500 at least, but free if you know the right people.

The “And Leicester” Diehard Supporters' Overlander

Series of minibus departures from Manchester and London to Harwich. Overnight ferry to the Hook of Holland (includes disco), then onwards by road to Moscow. Departs May 14. Returning October 9 at 12.30pm. Bring passport, visa and sandwiches (no egg or onion). £64 per head, plus tolls.

Independent “Up Periscope” Ocean Explorer Package

Retired Captain Lieutenant Borislav Korsakov and his crew welcome you aboard decommissioned Russian nuclear submarine K-53, departing Severomorsk at 04.00 hours on Sunday, May 4 and cresting in neutral waters off the coast of Newfoundland 16 days later, fuel rods and international incidents permitting. Thereafter to the Luzhniki Stadium by military airlift. All bunk beds are now taken but a limited amount of “scramble” spaces are still available in the torpedo tubes on a first-come, first-served basis.

Uniforms and rations supplied. Please note that smoking is not permitted in the vicinity of the reactor coolant system.

Pavel of Moscow's Stretch Zil

“You go footsball match Champions League, yes? Manchester Uniteds! Chelski! Ronaldo, how you say in British? Didier Drogski! Car is big. Very luxury. I drive. You party in back lovely Russian girl. You need visa? Is cheapest 500 dollars Americans only.”

Afghan Mule Train

Meet at Baghdad bus station this afternoon. Musad and his hand-picked team of qualified guides have years of experience in ferrying visitors quickly through the mountains to the border and beyond, and sometimes back again. Warning: can be dusty, so possibly not suitable for allergy sufferers. Match ticket and mule not supplied.

Latest flight news: at the time of printing, easyJet was still showing availability on a plane departing Bristol for Toulouse. From there it should be possible to make your way up to Paris, connecting with a flight into Frankfurt and joining the Singapore service, before going on to New York and flying non-stop to Moscow from there. But unfortunately, this only gets you in four hours after the kick-off.

Latest hotel news: accommodation in Moscow and its immediate vicinity remains hard to come by, but the good news is that one or two rooms can still be found in Novgorod, which is just eight hours from Moscow by train. Enjoy the match!

Lobe's labours could be lost on unsuspecting

If Cristiano Ronaldo had only known the controversy that he would unleash by buying his girlfriend a pair of earrings, would he have gone for something simpler, like chocolates? Nereida Gallardo was at Old Trafford this week with “R7” spelt out in diamonds on her lobes - an advance into new territory for the personalised number plate that led one of the more easily ignited prints to contend that the model from Mallorca looked like “branded cattle”.

We're not sure. Had the “R7” been written in waterproof ink on a cumbersome but hard to detach triangle of blue plastic, one would take the point more readily. But these were relatively snugly fitting diamonds, and you don't often see cattle out in those, even round Alderley Edge.

We concede, though, that it's a potentially tricky area, and one in which we can only urge caution. A similar initial-and-shirt-number move by Nicolas Anelka, of Chelsea, for instance, would produce a pair of earrings reading “A39”, leaving room for interpretation about whether the wearer was demonstrating devotion to the much-travelled French striker or paying an expensive tribute to the road linking Bath and Falmouth. Sexual politics: it's a minefield.

More losers than winners in games of the mind

Mind games: will we ever fathom them? And will any football manager ever definitively consider himself a master in their dark and elusive trade?

Consider Rafael Benítez. The Liverpool manager spends the run-up to the deciding leg of a Champions League semi-final discussing the tendency of Didier Drogba to fall over - not, Benítez later explains, in order to dishonour a player for whom, in fact, he has ample respect, but to “ensure a level playing field” by alerting the referee in advance to an aspect of Drogba's game that may (had the referee flown in that morning from a cave in Mongolia, perhaps) have eluded him.

In addition, Benítez publicly records his “concern” that, of the six Champions League games controlled this season by the night's appointed referee, five have finished as home wins, and in only one did the away team triumph - that team being (of all sides) Chelsea, against Valencia. Hmm. It's a two-pipe mystery, Watson, and no mistaking.

So the trap was cunningly set. Except that, the next time Benítez sees Drogba is when he comes hurtling towards his dugout on his knees in pointed celebration of the first of two patently anger-driven goals. And the referee, far from ending a statistical run that might leave him vulnerable to unhelpful suspicion, merely continues it.

But thus do mind games bedevil a manager - bedevil all of us, in fact. Take the situation in which Alan Curbishley, the manager of West Ham United, just before a pivotal meeting between his side and Manchester United, describes Sir Alex Ferguson as “Mr Amazing”, adding, “I would raise a glass if United win the title. It would be, of course, a toast to Alex Ferguson, the best there is and may ever be.”

Now, you or I read that and we lightly dismiss it as harmless, boilerplate sycophancy. But then the thought strikes: no one could be that sycophantic, surely, without an ulterior motive. So it must be a ploy to destabilise United by luring them into complacency ...

See how mind games ruin football for all of us? Suspect no one and everyone is the only available course.