Liverpool edged past Chelsea on penalty kicks in a match that will surely come to be known as The Kostas Tsimikas Final…
1. The FA Cup, we are frequently reminded, doesn’t matter any more, and the surest sign of the actual decline of the competition might well be that those who do still enjoy it have do so against a background of white noise from those who consider this particular competition to be somehow below them. You even got a sense of this from the pre-match coverage of this year’s final. On the BBC, there seemed to be a barrage of reminders from the past about how much it used to matter, of how much of an occasion it used to be, and with precious little being said about this year’s finalists themselves.
Perhaps this is an inevitable reaction to the media saturation of the game in general. We no longer need pen pictures of all the players and lengthy conversations about how these teams set up tactically. We already know. The pre-match television coverage was diverting, certainly for those amongst us who were teenagers during the mid-to-late 1980s, which was arguably the last time that the FA Cup final was consistently great, but it could have done with being held together under one umbrella. Considerably less time seemed to be given to today’s sense of occasion, even though the competition was being shown simultaneously by both the BBC and ITV for the first time since 1988. (The thought of switching over to ITV did not occur to me; some things never change.)
2. But it did matter to both of these teams. The players are all professional athletes. Competition matters to them in a way that they perhaps can’t even control. They are bred as both players and competitors, and from an increasingly younger and young age, winning is everything. When you’re in a cup final, it matters. Furthermore, winning the FA Cup would be part of a bigger narrative for either team. This has been a rotten 2022 for Chelsea so far, with the Roma Abramovich era and…
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