Cast my mind back the best part of 50 years and I am at my gran and grandad’s house waiting for the action to begin. My mum works every Saturday, as well as most of the preceding days of the week, and she drops me off at my paternal grandparents for the day. And today, it’s FA Cup final day, an indispensable part of the sporting calendar which everyone watches because it’s that TV rarity: live football. Everything else about the day proceeds as with every other Saturday.
In the morning, I read my comics or magazines, which as time passes morph from the Beano to Shoot and eventually the NME while grandad potters away in his garage which is several hundred yards away and grandma spends hours in the kitchen doing I don’t know what. It certainly isn’t cooking. That’s a sixpenny bag of chips from the local chippy – open, please, with salt and vinegar.
Grandad returns after lunch and we wait for the big event. Yes, the pre FA Cup final wrestling match on ITV between the biggest stars in the business. Professional wrestling is real, of course, a genuine sport and grandad won’t hear a word against it. These stories in the Sunday papers, that it’s fixed. Of course it isn’t. Even as a child I have my doubts as to its authenticity but the old boy is full of wisdom.
Once Mick McManus and Jackie ‘Mr TV’ Pallo have fought themselves to a double disqualification or Big Daddy has splashed all over Giant Haystacks and we’re back to the BBC for The Main Event. The tiny black and white crystal box crackling away in the corner brings us live pictures of the game and guess what? I cannot remember a single game we watched, not one. Maybe the excitement of the wrestling was just too much and what followed was a huge anticlimax. Or is it that most FA Cup finals are shit?
Before long, grandma is bringing in the thinnest sandwiches you have ever seen, with a wafer thin meat substance inside, and the game has passed into a history we will never remember. Mum arrives at the door, I collect my comics and magazines and we walk home, never once discussing The Big Match. She’s not interested and neither am I. It’s just another Saturday, same as all the other Saturdays.
In truth, I can barely remember anything about any of the FA Cup finals I watched back in the day, except one back in 1976 which I watched at home with my first serious girlfriend, and this being a family blog I’d best not go any further as to why I remember it. Bobby Stokes’ winning goal for Southampton versus Manchester United should be my main memory but I only know that because I looked it up. Anyway…
These days, the FA Cup, as Midge Ure might put it, means nothing to me. Yes, I watched last year’s final which Liverpool won on penalties but that was the exception. This year’s derby match between an American Hedge Fund and Abu Dhabi would not attract my attention even if it was being played on the local village green. But then, that’s more to do with me than the football. The slow decline in my levels of interest in the game mean that I watch less TV football than I have for many decades and games between two teams I don’t like or don’t care about are increasingly a no-no. Let’s put it this way: the amount of negative energy required in willing a team to lose is not helpful to my mental health. I’ll go to the pub instead.
The FA Cup final isn’t and has never been an essential part of my life and today’s game is as inessential as any game I can’t remember. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, particularly when the past wasn’t as great as you thought it was. Except when Bobby Stokes scored.
