The Weekend Review: The Henderson Final

You need certain things to make a Proper FA Cup Final, and this year's had a surprisingly high number of them.

Readers may or may not be aware of the fact that, while I live in Worthing in West Sussex, I’m not from this area and as such have never quite been able to consider it ‘home’. As such, while I might have a degree of sympathy for Brightonians in anguish at them lot winning the FA Cup, my own personal Brighton sympathies can only be stretched so far.

This is a double-header, as ever. Everybody gets the FA Cup final, but if you want to know more about what I’ve been up to these last couple of weeks or so you’ll have to enter the winners’ enclosure.

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Everybody has talked at length about the debasement of the FA Cup, about abandoning replays, and about the apparently random usage of VAR at different stages of the tournament, about small crowds and teams putting out the reserves.

Heck, it was entirely fair on Saturday to complain about it kicking off, for some goddam reason, at 4.30 in the afternoon, and even then pre-match coverage being almost entirely perfunctory. They used to pull out all the stops on Cup Final day. A lot of it was horseshit, but at least they tried.

And yet, there was something about this year’s FA Cup final, between Crystal Palace and Manchester City. There was something extremely FA Cup Final about it. You need a pre-match narrative, and this one had it. North versus south. The most dominant club team in the history of the game’s last chance to win a piece of silverware this season against a team playing for their first in the 120 years of their existence. It even had the long-time club legend playing his last cup final.

And once the game began, those FA Cup final things kept on happening. Because that’s a key detail about the FA Cup final; very seldom is it a good game. Everybody’s nervous. Everybody’s tired, at the end of a long season. No-one wants to lose. It’s hardly an ideal recipe for an entertaining game of football.

So great FA Cup finals come and go in moments, and this one had a pile of those too. It had the early goal for the underdogs, a sweeping 16th-minute move on the break and a wonderful finish from someone who pre-match interviews had confirmed as essentially the nicest young man in the world. It had the moment of controversy, in the form of the inexplicable decision to not send Dean Henderson off for palming the ball away from Erling Haaland outside the penalty area.

These two would also be involved in the afternoon’s other moment of high drama, which came five minutes after the Palace goalkeeper’s non-sending-off, when Manchester City were awarded a penalty. Erling Haaland, who we might have expected to take it, pressed the ball into the hands of Omar Marmoush, who’d missed his last penalty for City in the Fifth Round of this very competition at Bournemouth. He stepped up and, because the narrative demanded it, Henderson saved it.

There was even time for a it of pushing and shoving at the end of the match between Henderson and Pep Guardiola, which is all the more welcome becauase there is simply no-one in football funnier when they’re angry than Mister Pep. You have to have have a degree of sympathy for Eberechi Eze, the Stan Mortensen character in what we should henceforth probably be calling The Henderson Final.

And at the full-time whistle, it meant everything to the winning team. It wasn’t a ‘consolation at the end of an otherwise disappointing season’, or the seventh component of an octuple, or anything like that. The stadium shook with the tens of thousands of Palace supporters singing along—many of them, by the looks of it, in tears—to Glad All Over.

(Don’t worry about stands moving that way, by the way, as was pointed out by BBC radio commentators after the match. They’re designed to move; it helps to redistrubute the weight and other impacts of tens of thousands of people moving at the same time. They’d be far more dangerous if they didn’t.)

These are precisely the constituent parts of a great FA Cup final. The egregious refereeing mistake which is pretty funny because it happens to the favourites. The goalkeeper who should have been sent off saving a penalty five minutes later. The striker giving the penalty to his colleague, who then misses it. The handbags at the final whistle. The first trophy in 120 years. This, I humbly suggest, it what it’s all about.

There do remain things that can be changed. Just put it on at 3pm, you cowards. And for goodness sake, make FA Cup final day special again. Get the TV broadcast starting at noon—earlier, should you wish—because I want to be there while they’re having their bloody breakfast, and if that’s not feasible then let’s be on the coach on the Wembley with them. We’ll bring a couple of washed-up stand-up comedians with us, if it helps to sweeten the deal.

I want interviews with supporters outside grounds, I want tin foil FA Cups (which I’m glad to report have absolutely made a return in earlier rounds of the competition), and I want a 7-a-side celebrity match on the pitch an hour before kick-off, preferably with half of them visibly drunk. I want Abide With Me, and I even want God Save The King, so long as I can make out to anybody listening that, “They’re singing that about me, you know”, as soon as it starts playing. I want banners with convoluted messages printed on them which feature puns that make no sense whatsoever.

I actually want to know that the ‘Road to Wembley’ was for the two finalists. Actually, I want to ‘Road to Wembley’ to start with the Extra Preliminary Round at the back end of July. It’s not like they haven’t got time, if they broadcast is starting at 9am. I want to meet all the players, and learn things about them that I didn’t know while they shuffle around uncomfortably because there’s a camera nearby. I want to see the goals from the Scottish Cup final at half-time and full-time.

I want the winning captain to collect the trophy with at least three scarves hanging round his neck. I want some old boy in severe glasses offering sincere congratulations and offering an unreciprocated handshake. I want uncomfortable looking jig around the pitch by the winning team, and I absolutely fucking DEMAND that one of them wears the lid of a trophy as a hat. And I want at least one interview in which a player swears profusely into the microphone before collecting himself and apologising, all while swigging from what’s clear an already almost empty bottle of champagne.

To put it another way… I want to be young again.