CHELSEA face a staggering 5,000 mile round-trip to face Qarabag on Wednesday.
The Blues squad departed from Luton on Tuesday afternoon and will land back again at six o’clock on Thursday morning.
The Azerbaijani capital is four hours ahead of London and Chelsea are making some alterations to their schedule to aid the players in adjusting.
Enzo Maresca and his squad trained in Cobham on Tuesday morning and had special dispensation from UEFA to hold their pre-match press conference at home instead of in Baku.
In addition to this, the players and staff are expected to stay on UK time while they are in Azerbaijan – effectively having breakfast while the locals eat their lunch.
Chelsea have done just that on their previous two visits to Baku, a 4-1 Europa League final win over Arsenal in 2019 and, two years earlier a 4-0 win over this week’s opponents.
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Maresca said: “Because of the amount of games we used yesterday to recover after the Tottenham game.
“It was important to be in our facility, to use our facility for all the treatment that the players need.
“Probably if you go there, you don’t have exactly the same.
“We try to balance both situations.
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“Be ready for the game, recover all the energy, knowing that the flight, the four hours ahead, these kinds of things, especially when we arrive here.
“We will arrive back here Thursday morning, six o’clock in the morning.
“We have a game Saturday night. But it’s the schedule and we’re going to try to adapt.
“We’ll stay on English time.”
