Saturday 14 May 2011

THE FA CUP FINAL

So, it’s FA Cup Final Day again. For me, it’s one of the magic days in the annual calendar. It’s up there with birthdays, Christmas and the first day of school summer holidays. For the true football fan it was ever, and will forever be, thus.

It brings to mind magic days with my mates as an older teenager and into my twenties where we would meet early on the Saturday to have a few quiet beers, maybe a game of snooker and to discuss the forthcoming game.

It was always sunny and warm, of course, as all Cup Final days are. Well, except for the ones that were a bit colder with drizzle in the air, but they were few and far between.

Black & White Football

I can think further back, to the games I used to watch with my parents; games in black and white in the earliest case, with the curtains drawn against the sun reflecting across the TV screen and obscuring the view of one of the few, and most times only, live game shown on television at the time.

The first Cup Final I can remember clearly, coincidentally enough, was the 1969 Final between Manchester City and Leicester City (1-0 to Manchester with Neil Young – not the singer – being the scorer of the solitary goal). I can vaguely recall bits of the 1968 Final but it’s the ’69 version that sticks in my mind.













All Day Event

I can remember an ‘all-day’ Cup Final, with “It’s a Knockout”, cameras on the team coaches to Wembley and much discussion and prediction from the experts ‘back in the studio’.

The immediately post-adolescent years sent us on a quest to find the most accommodating parents with which to watch the game as brothers in arms. Brothers in Arms, in some cases genuine brothers, who had all played the game at some level both at school and since we left to make our way in the world.

Excited by the coming match and choosing one team about which we had to be partisan – you just CAN’T watch a Cup Final as a true neutral, can you? Except, of course, for the games where OUR team was IN the Final, in which case we didn’t have to choose to be partisan, we just were.

The accommodating parents, having determined to accept this rather large gathering of youngsters, could generally expect us to arrive some 30 minutes before kick-off, traditionally carrying some variations on a theme from the nearest chip shop. Later in life, when we had secured our own abodes one of us in turn down the years would be the host for the afternoon.

It was my turn to be the host, at my flat near the station, for the Coventry City versus Spurs Final, the majority of us supporting the underdogs Coventry and cheering in unison, when they went ahead, whilst at the same time sharing the pain of the two Spurs fans in our midst.

1983

I can remember being fascinated by the tradition and emotion that was, and still is, Abide with Me. I recall how, when Brighton & Hove Albion met Manchester United in the 1983 Final, crass and ignorant journalists condescendingly castigated Albion fans for singing, with gusto, the Cup Final hymn. We were inexperienced and naive, some said, in the following days’ papers. Maybe we were, but it was OUR Cup Final to live – theirs only to observe and report as mere bystanders to the passage of history.

Oh, and for the record; Smith DID score !

Time moves on and the group of friends have gone their own ways – some live close by still, but some are in foreign lands. Some are still here in England and one, whom we miss and remember, is no longer here.

But wherever we are, though we may be apart, I hope we are all watching the game together and recalling the shared memories of the games and the fun, the joy when our team won and the disappointment when we lost. The nonsense we talked when we analysed the game and the cases we made for why the team we cheered had lost.

It’s a Kind Of Magic

A day in the calendar, that’s all it appears, but they live in the memory every year it comes round. And that, my friends is why they call it The Magic of the FA Cup.