Eleven hours to go. It hardly seems plausible that a Champions League final will kick off at 10.45pm local time, but that is what will happen, given Uefa’s desperation to take its showpiece event around Europe while ensuring that television audiences in its key markets do not suffer.

Several of the players have admitted it will be “strange” to be playing so late – with the Manchester United squad attempting to combat that strangeness by sticking to British Summer Time – but it will also be strange for the travelling supporters and the media. It promises to be a long day and indeed a long night.

The benefit is that it gives a few extra hours to explore Moscow. As a journalist, you can travel the world without ever getting the time to see much beyond airports, football stadiums and hotels. I have been in Moscow for almost 48 hours, but only this afternoon – and only briefly – will I get time to visit the city and to have a wander around Red Square, the unlikely focal point for the supporters’ pre-match festivities.

It is a curious situation here. Last season’s Champions League final in Athens felt like a carnival. You could barely move for Liverpool supporters, with tens of thousands travelling without any hope of getting in to see the match. This season, with the final in Moscow, the exorbitant costs of flights and hotels – not to mention the strictness of the Russian authorities – have kept the number of travelling supporters to a minimum. You could be forgiven for not realising there was a Champions League final taking place.

There is a feeling among many of the English visitors – supporters, journalists, club officials – that bringing the final to Moscow was a mistake on Uefa’s part, but there is another side to this argument which has been largely ignored. The Russian authorities were very unhappy with some elements of the organisation of last week’s Uefa Cup final between Zenit St Petersburg and Rangers in Manchester. Reports in the British media have centred on the flare-up between Rangers supporters and the police in the city centre, but there was also a Zenit supporter stabbed just outside the City of Manchester Stadium, something that the Russians feel could have been avoided with better security arrangements and better segregation.

The one thing that the Russian authorities will have to deal with this evening – or, more accurately, in the early hours of tomorrow morning – is a set of unhappy English supporters. I would love to predict the outcome, but this contest really does seem too close to call. Manchester United have, over the course of the season, proved themselves to be the better team, but there is something formidable about Chelsea.

Last night’s press conferences at the Luzhniki Stadium offered an interesting insight into the two teams: the Chelsea contingent – Avram Grant, John Terry, Frank Lampard – were intense, whereas the United contingent – Sir Alex Ferguson, Rio Ferdinand, Wes Brown – appeared calm, relaxed and ready to express themselves. Some said that they had never seen Ferguson so calm, although he did still manage to call a Spanish journalist an “idiot” for asking whether he feared losing Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid and called a female GMTV presenter “a nosy bugger” for asking who was trying to call him when his mobile phone rang mid-conference.

A prediction? All feel confident enough to say is that it will be extremely close and that it may well go to extra time, which will mean a very, very late finish – not least for us journalists, who can expect to be at the stadium until after 3am if that is the case.