The cover of this year’s big-match programme. Ten pounds! [grumbles in the aged style] Don’t get us started on the price of the burgers and bottled water.
Cheap at half the price. Photograph: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC/Getty Images
Leicester, forced out of the blue shirts in which they lost the 1949, 1961 and 1969 finals – they wore white in 1963 – will this time try their luck in Heart of Midlothian maroon. Let’s hope for their sake they channel the late-50s pomp of Dave Mackay and Alex ‘Golden Vision’ Young, as opposed to, say, 1986’s distinctly more unfortunate John Robertson and John Colquhoun. Hats will be very much off if any of Brendan Rodgers’ men reference Hearts maestro Tommy Murray by taking a seat on the ball in the build-up to the deciding goal.
Third colour lucky? Photograph: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC/Getty Images
Chelsea will sport a mind-bending new shirt today. It’s a homage to Op-Art, an illusionary visual style which has its roots in the Bauhaus, the famous German art school, so Thomas Tuchel doubtless approves, and was popularised during the swinging Sixties, for example in the fashions of the nearby Kings Rahd. The concept stretches a point beyond the limits of a £104.95 recycled polyester shirt, but to be fair, it does look lovely and you’d need a heart of stone not to enjoy the accompanying film, which could only be more Sixties if it concluded with Tuchel driving off in an E-type Jag with a leggy model.
Soundtrack features Time of the Season by the Zombies, from their 1968 album Hudson-Odoissey and Oracle.
Going to the match. A crowd of 21,000 will be allowed in Wembley this afternoon, this year’s cup final having been designated as a pilot event for the plan to get big crowds back to the biggest events this summer. Both clubs have been allocated 6,250 tickets for their supporters, while the remainder of the tickets go to key workers and local residents, plus stadium and FA folk. And here comes everyone, down Wembley Way. Each and every one of them has been missed. Lowry couldn’t have painted it any better.
Apologies to LS Lowry. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
OK, maybe he would have. But you get the general point.
Going to the Match (1953). Heavily influenced by Bolton’s Burnden Park, and painted the very year the team lost to Blackpool in the Matthews Final. Photograph: PA
There have been 139 FA Cup finals so far. Chelsea have contested 14 of them, winning eight. The last time they lifted the trophy was three years ago; the previous occasion at which they finished runners-up was August just gone. This will be their fourth appearance in the final in the last five years. There’s no real need to relive their oft-told story yet again, though if the short-term memory isn’t what it was, or you’re simply always jonesing for Pensioner-related nostalgia, this retro MBM of their first-ever win in 1970, a gloriously entertaining stramash with their old pals Leeds United, will hopefully slake your thirst.
Leicester City, by comparison, hold a truly unenviable record: the most unsuccessful FA Cup finalists of them all. They’re reached the Wembley showpiece on four occasions – 1949, 1961, 1963 and 1969 – and have lost every single one. The only other clubs to have reached multiple finals without recording a victory in the tournament’s 150-year history are Queen’s Park, Birmingham City, Crystal Palace and Watford, and all of those have only lost two. The Foxes really need to shake this monkey off their back.
To be fair to Leicester, they’ve been underdogs in three of their four finals. In 1949, they were battling relegation to the old Third Division when they faced Stan Cullis’s Wolverhampton Wanderers, and were without their injured star playmaker Don Revie. Nevertheless, they put up a good fight in a 3-1 defeat that could have ended differently had their striker Ken Chisholm’s effort from a tight angle not been flagged marginally offside at 2-1.
In 1961, they ran out of luck after 18 minutes when right-back Len Chalmers injured his right leg in a tackle with Les Allen of the newly crowned English champions Tottenham Hotspur. Leicester had been good value up until then, with Spurs uncharacteristically nervous, but with Chalmers reduced to hobbling uselessly on the left wing, defeat was almost inevitable. Spurs secured the double with an uncharacteristically workmanlike 2-0 win.
And then there was 1969, an affair not wholly dissimilar to their defeat 20 years earlier. Manchester City, champions the year before, were expected to win; Leicester were again battling relegation, this time from the First. Manchester City did the business as expected, Neil Young scoring the only goal past a young Peter Shilton, but Leicester pushed them hard. “We made the chances but couldn’t get the ball in the net,” sighed their manager Frank O’Farrell afterwards. “Andy Lochhead might have scored four goals any other time. But we will not have any time for disappointment. We now have to fight to stay in the First Division.” They couldn’t manage it. Another bittersweet stroll down Wembley Way.
So here we are, FA Cup final number 140. Can Chelsea win their seventh FA Cup since the turn of the millennium? Or will Leicester finally break their duck at the fifth time of asking? Thomas Tuchel and Brendan Rodgers are both bringing entertaining sides to the party, so here’s to the first seven-goal FA Cup final thriller since Blackpool and Bolton put on the Matthews Final. We’re more than due another, right? OK, then: Chelsea, Leicester, you know what to do. Be about your business! Entertain the nation! It’s on!
Kick-off: 5.15pm BST.
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