On Tuesday October 12 2004, the sky was blue, the weather warm, and the sun shone. The prospect of covering an Azerbaijan-England World Cup qualifier seemed a pleasant way to earn a living.

Baku, though, is not known as the city of the winds without reason. By Wednesday morning, the sky was sepia, and 70mph gusts and squalls of rain were pummelling the city. This, we were told, was the khazri. Covering a football match suddenly seemed a dreadful punishment dreamt up by a malevolent god. There was a roof on the press box at the Tofik Bakhramov Stadium, but the wind was blowing straight across the pitch, driving the rain horizontally, so it hardly mattered. There was water on the desks, there was water on the chairs, there was water in our laptops. The marquee where the post-match press-conference was supposed to be held had been blown down.

It was so windy that even when there was a phone signal, it was virtually impossible to hear the person at the other end. The FT had to text me the number of words they wanted me to write. Then, just as I was panicking about how to send my story, an Azerbaijani man in a beehive hat turned up with a cable to connect to the local Ethernet, which miraculously worked.

It didn't stop the cold, though. My hands were a pale mauve by the time the game came to an end, but I'd got enough of my match report done that, once the crowd had thinned, it seemed safe to nip off to the toilet. It wasn't the best convenience I've ever used, a badly tiled hole in the ground that was full to the brim and more. But it was only after I'd finished that the real flaw in the design became evident: as well as a bolt on the inside of the door, there was one on the outside, and somebody had locked it. I hammered on the door, to which a child’s voice replied: "Ten dollar."

In retrospect, given that there was urine and worse slopping about my feet, it doesn't seem that bad a deal (particularly if I could have got a recipt off him to claim expenses), but, quite aside from the fact that I had no money on me, after three hours of shivering frustration I wasn't about to be held to ransom, so I attacked the door with fury. Much pounding of fists and several screamed threats later, I realised that the kid had slipped the bold. At that moment, though, a battalion of the Azerbaijani army decided to leave their positions around the perimeter of the pitch and return to the car park by a route directly between the toilet and my laptop. As I stood on a concrete outcrop watching the soldiers stream past, the office rang. I explained I'd file as soon as the army had got out of my way, and held up the phone. I don't know how many of the 1,500 pairs of feet they heard tramping past, but by the time the last soldier was out of the way, they'd hung up.

It was, I confess, a relief to get back to the hotel and warm up that night, but by morning I was feeling sorry for Azerbaijan. The fans who had packed the press stand in the belief the roof might somehow keep off the rain had been remarkably good-humoured. They greeted every 30-yard drive (and there were many) from an Azerbaijani forward with a sharp intake of breath as though it had skimmed just wide, before laughing uproariously because sometimes it hadn't even reached the goal-line. The antics of Jahangir Hasanzade in the Azerbaijan goal - unorthodox, bordering on the inept - were treated almost as a form of stand-up comedy.

The stadium in Baku, coincidentally, is named after Tofik Bakhramov, the linesman who judged that Geoff Hurst's shot on the turn 10 minutes into extra-time in the 1966 World Cup final had bounced down off the bar and over the line, putting England 3-2 up against West Germany. Crassly, English fans have spent four decades being grateful to a "Russian" linesman.

All the technological evidence now suggests that Hurst's shot came down on, rather than over, the line, but it would be a brave man to say that in Azerbaijan. When Gamid Gamidov, the sports editor of the Azeri Echo, suggested Bakhramov had got his most famous decision wrong, he was deluged with letters accusing him of, to use Hurst's phrase, bringing the nation into disrepute. Arguably Bakhramov did that himself with a comment he is supposed to have made on his death bed. Asked by a reporter for his final thoughts on the controversy - how he could have been certain the ball had crossed the line? - Bakhramov apparently answered with a single word: "Stalingrad."

By Jonathan Wilson, an FT football writer. This is an edited extract from "Behind the Curtain"

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