Flashback Friday: The trials and tribulations of being a fan

I'm not entirely sure how one conveys the experience of being an Arsenal fan if you’re not a follower of the English Premier League, or soccer in general. To compare the experience to that of being a Chicago Cubs fan is too extreme; Arsenal’s had nothing like 110 years of futility. There’s a similarity to it, though, the sense that no matter how well things might be going at a given time, the Gunners are going to find a way to screw things up. For the last decade or so, Arsenal has been the dictionary definition of “good enough,” a team which has gone a dozen seasons without winning the championship* but always manages to finish in the league’s top four, which qualifies them for the lucrative Champions League.

*Virtually no one expects them to prevent this from becoming season number 13.

It’s not that Arsenal lacks good players, or the money to buy more. It’s that their players often fail to rise to the level required for a championship side, and the team’s management seems intent on bargain shopping, passing up the chance to acquire top talent not because they can’t afford it – like every other team in the Premier League, they have plenty of money thanks to the League’s new television contract – but because they can’t justify to themselves that the cost is worth it. They’re like the old lady who’s lived in squalor for as long as anyone can remember, only when she dies it’s discovered she had two million dollars stuffed in her mattress, and another million or so in bonds hidden in a cookie jar. They may be quite right in judging that Paul Pogba, for example, isn’t worth anything like $116 million, but as long as their competitors are willing to pay that amount, then Pogba’s objective value is meaningless; it’s his subjective worth, that of being a player who can bring the title to Manchester United, that is the only thing that matters.

Last year was perhaps a defining stage in Arsenal fandom, at least from this fan’s point of view. For the first time in years Arsenal was actually favored to finish in first, and even the team’s followers seemed ready to put all doubts aside, particularly since the League’s traditional powerhouses – Manchester United, Manchester City, and Chelsea – were all struggling. If ever there was an opportunity, this was it.

And yet, we all know how that turned out – 5,000:1 shot Leicester City pulled off the upset of all time and won the title; Arsenal finished second, its highest finish in years. But even when Arsenal threatened, shortly after the first of the year, it was difficult to cheer them on; Leicester had already captured the hearts of soccer fans worldwide with their Cinderella run, and it seemed somehow more compelling, more important, to root for the Foxes than to waste the energy on an Arsenal title bid that would likely end in failure anyway. The fact that Arsenal’s 2-1 victory over Leicester on February 14* was actually somewhat disappointing seemed to confirm the Arsenal fan experience – or lack thereof.

*Leicester’s third and final loss of the season, which explains why they won the title; Arsenal, by contrast, lost seven. At three points per victory, the four extra defeats amounts to 12 lost points. For a team that finished 10 points behind in the final standings, that makes all the difference.

Arsenal’s majority owner is the American Stan Kroenke, who also owns the Los Angeles Rams. This article, although it pertains to the Rams and doesn’t once mention Arsenal, goes a long way toward explaining how a once-powerful side could wind up mired in mediocrity for so long, and how hard it is to root for a side owned by, to be blunt about it, a creep. These two articles, on how long-time manager Arsene Wegner has failed to adapt to the times (so much so that his name has become a noun in the Urban Dictionary for being unwilling to spend money), shows how why he’s become the perfect Kroenke manager, just as Arsenal has become the perfect Kroenke team. When “good enough” means making the Champions League every season and turning a profit, rather than spending the additional money required to win the League Championship, when a soccer team evolves from a fan’s passion to a sober businessman’s profit-and-loss statement, then it becomes time to assess what it means to be an Arsenal fan.

It doesn’t mean selling the jersey or burning the scarf, it doesn’t mean casting aside years of support, even though that support has been destined from the outset to end in disappointment. It does, however, call for a break, a hiatus – a sabbatical, if you will – in that fandom. If that means rooting for Leicester City to make lightning strike twice or seeking out another Cinderella team’s bandwagon to jump on, if it means finding another team with an attractive style and dynamic manager (Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp),  even if it means identifying the most hated team – Manchester United, in other words – and pulling for whoever can stop them from the title (Manchester City, in all likelihood), so be it.

Eventually, Arsenal supporters, who already pay the highest ticket prices in Europe, will find that the only effective weapon they have is their wallet, and they will make their displeasure known. Eventually, Stan Kroenke will find Arsenal’s resale value to have peaked, and will unload his shares before their value can sink, probably to some Asian or Middle East potentate willing to spend whatever’s needed to regain past glories. Eventually (likely after this season), Arsene Wenger will step down, leaving an illustrious legacy nonetheless tarnished by the last decade-plus, and a new manager looking to create his own legacy.

When that happens, the Arsenal fan will find that the red-and-white colors on the jersey and scarf have not faded for having been in the closet for a few seasons. And then it will be time to break them out and let them show once again; after all, the colors we currently see on the pitch week after week have faded enough as it is. By then, it will be nice to have something fresh to look forward to.

Originally published on August 24, 2016. Things have only gotten worse for Arsenal since then. But thanks to some new acquisitions during the Transfer Window, maybe we have a future worth looking forward to!

The hapless lot of a fan

I'm not entirely sure how one conveys the experience of being an Arsenal fan if you’re not a follower of the English Premier League, or soccer in general. To compare the experience to that of being a Chicago Cubs fan is too extreme; Arsenal’s had nothing like 110 years of futility. There’s a similarity to it, though, the sense that no matter how well things might be going at a given time, the Gunners are going to find a way to screw things up. For the last decade or so, Arsenal has been the dictionary definition of “good enough,” a team which has gone a dozen seasons without winning the championship* but always manages to finish in the league’s top four, which qualifies them for the lucrative Champions League.

*Virtually no one expects them to prevent this from becoming season number 13.

It’s not that Arsenal lacks good players, or the money to buy more. It’s that their players often fail to rise to the level required for a championship side, and the team’s management seems intent on bargain shopping, passing up the chance to acquire top talent not because they can’t afford it – like every other team in the Premier League, they have plenty of money thanks to the League’s new television contract – but because they can’t justify to themselves that the cost is worth it. They’re like the old lady who’s lived in squalor for as long as anyone can remember, only when she dies it’s discovered she had two million dollars stuffed in her mattress, and another million or so in bonds hidden in a cookie jar. They may be quite right in judging that Paul Pogba, for example, isn’t worth anything like $116 million, but as long as their competitors are willing to pay that amount, then Pogba’s objective value is meaningless; it’s his subjective worth, that of being a player who can bring the title to Manchester United, that is the only thing that matters.

Last year was perhaps a defining stage in Arsenal fandom, at least from this fan’s point of view. For the first time in years Arsenal was actually favored to finish in first, and even the team’s followers seemed ready to put all doubts aside, particularly since the League’s traditional powerhouses – Manchester United, Manchester City, and Chelsea – were all struggling. If ever there was an opportunity, this was it.

And yet, we all know how that turned out – 5,000:1 shot Leicester City pulled off the upset of all time and won the title; Arsenal finished second, its highest finish in years. But even when Arsenal threatened, shortly after the first of the year, it was difficult to cheer them on; Leicester had already captured the hearts of soccer fans worldwide with their Cinderella run, and it seemed somehow more compelling, more important, to root for the Foxes than to waste the energy on an Arsenal title bid that would likely end in failure anyway. The fact that Arsenal’s 2-1 victory over Leicester on February 14* was actually somewhat disappointing seemed to confirm the Arsenal fan experience – or lack thereof.

*Leicester’s third and final loss of the season, which explains why they won the title; Arsenal, by contrast, lost seven. At three points per victory, the four extra defeats amounts to 12 lost points. For a team that finished 10 points behind in the final standings, that makes all the difference.

Arsenal’s majority owner is the American Stan Kroenke, who also owns the Los Angeles Rams. This article, although it pertains to the Rams and doesn’t once mention Arsenal, goes a long way toward explaining how a once-powerful side could wind up mired in mediocrity for so long, and how hard it is to root for a side owned by, to be blunt about it, a creep. These two articles, on how long-time manager Arsene Wegner has failed to adapt to the times (so much so that his name has become a noun in the Urban Dictionary for being unwilling to spend money), shows how why he’s become the perfect Kroenke manager, just as Arsenal has become the perfect Kroenke team. When “good enough” means making the Champions League every season and turning a profit, rather than spending the additional money required to win the League Championship, when a soccer team evolves from a fan’s passion to a sober businessman’s profit-and-loss statement, then it becomes time to assess what it means to be an Arsenal fan.

It doesn’t mean selling the jersey or burning the scarf, it doesn’t mean casting aside years of support, even though that support has been destined from the outset to end in disappointment. It does, however, call for a break, a hiatus – a sabbatical, if you will – in that fandom. If that means rooting for Leicester City to make lightning strike twice or seeking out another Cinderella team’s bandwagon to jump on, if it means finding another team with an attractive style and dynamic manager (Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp),  even if it means identifying the most hated team – Manchester United, in other words – and pulling for whoever can stop them from the title (Manchester City, in all likelihood), so be it.

Eventually, Arsenal supporters, who already pay the highest ticket prices in Europe, will find that the only effective weapon they have is their wallet, and they will make their displeasure known. Eventually, Stan Kroenke will find Arsenal’s resale value to have peaked, and will unload his shares before their value can sink, probably to some Asian or Middle East potentate willing to spend whatever’s needed to regain past glories. Eventually (likely after this season), Arsene Wenger will step down, leaving an illustrious legacy nonetheless tarnished by the last decade-plus, and a new manager looking to create his own legacy.

When that happens, the Arsenal fan will find that the red-and-white colors on the jersey and scarf have not faded for having been in the closet for a few seasons. And then it will be time to break them out and let them show once again; after all, the colors we currently see on the pitch week after week have faded enough as it is. By then, it will be nice to have something fresh to look forward to.

Those Fantastic Foxes

The Premier League seasons has ended, and it's tempting to wonder what the world's most popular soccer league has up it's sleeve for next season. Leicester City, the miracle champions, weren't really the 5,000-to-1 shot that the bookies established; we know that the odds were simply set to get someone to put a longshot bet down on them. Had the oddsmakers really thought Leicester had a chance to win, they probably would have given them the obligatory 100-1 figure that usually typifies a team with no chance at a title. In reality, we'll probalby never know what the actual odds were - a million-to-one perhaps? - because you can't post odds on the occurrence of an impossibility.

Considering the millions of words from the thousands of stories written since the victory of those fantastic Foxes, it hardly seems as if there is anything more that could, or should, be added.  And yet, so astounding was their achievement, it almost compels one to say something, if only to provide further demonstration as to how inadequate words are when describing an event such as this.

Joe Posnanski's article shortly after Leicester clinched the title says it about as well as anybody can, when one is trying to describe an impossibility. As pundits struggled to come up with comparable examples of upset championships, their comparisons inevitably fell short. It wasn't like the Miracle on Ice victory of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a team that had shown flashes of brilliance during the months leading up to the Olympics and displayed a work ethic that made them a difficult team to beat, particularly in a short tournament. Win seven games and you've got the gold medal, but try doing the same thing over the course of an entire season.

Others looked to the New York Mets of 1969, the Miracle Mets, who shockingly won the World Series after never having posted a wining season (or anything close to it) in the previous seven years of their existence. And yet that is ultimately found lacking as well; for in taking the title, Leicester had to overcome the so-called "Big Five" of the Premier League - Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool* and Manchester City, teams that had so dominated the league over the years that only one team outside of that group had ever won the championship in the league's 23-year history. During the 122 years the competition has been held, those five sides had, between them, won the top-flight championship 65 times. So the Mets comparison pales; imagine the Mets winning a league that contained not one but five New York Yankees teams, with a couple of Boston Red Sox thrown in for good measure. Yes, the Big Five may have had down seasons, but the point is that Leicester did not.

*Although Liverpool has yet to win a title since the formation of the Premier League in 1992, they took the championship 18 times before that.

European soccer's system of promotion and relegation makes the accomplishment that much more impossible; Leicester spent almost all of last year in last place before going on an improbably run of seven victories in their final nine matches to escape relegation; nonetheless, they were the consensus favorite to be one of the three teams relegated this year. Their new manager, Claudio Ranieri, a journeyman coach who had never won a major title, was favored to be the first manager sacked. At the beginning of this season, Ranieri's goal was simply to stay in the Premier League. Had he even mused about the possibility of winning the championship, he probably would have been locked up.

It's not as if Leicester bought themselves a championship, either. The payroll for the entire team was roughly equal to the salary of one of the big team's star players, and with no salary cap in European soccer, most teams are able to buy up promising players on the off chance they might turn out to be stars.Their roster was comprised mostly of players unwanted by other teams and picked up for relatively low prices. Some were late bloomers, others had simply gone unnoticed by bigger sides, most of them had never been given much of a chance.

It's safe to say, therefore, that one of last year's worst teams came into this season competing in a league that was basically rigged against them, set up so that only a member of the Big Five could win. There are no odds on that happening. You can't bet on the impossible.

Soccer fans are a loyal lot, living and dying with sides they have grown up supporting since birth, in many cases being the latest in a long line of family members rooting for their club. During the course of this season Leicester became almost everyone's "Second Team," and as their own side's title chances faded away, they threw their support behind the underdog Foxes to win it all. When defending champion Chelsea, coming off an extremely disappointing season, defeated second place Tottenham Hotspur to clinch the title for Leicester, it came after several of Chelsea's players admitted they wanted to defeat Tottenham in order to give the championship to Leicester. It's probably safe to say that there has never been a more popular team, either in England or anywhere else, to win a championship. Not only was it an impossible story on its own, it gave those fans hope that their own team might somehow rise from sporting poverty to greatness someday.

Leicester's own supporters, the ones who had stuck with them through thin and thin, were overcome with emotion, and it was common to see tears running down their cheeks as they watched their team raise the Premier League trophy at the final home match of the year, after having had Andrea Bocelli, no less, serenade them during a pre-game ceremony. No team in the Premier League had had such a rabid fan base during the season; in home games where Leicester scored, it wasn't uncommon for the stadium to shake from the commotion created by the cheering fans, so much so that it would register on the nearby university's Richter scale.

And so the impossible happened, and it's difficult to say whether or not anything like it will ever happen again - can ever happen again, for that matter. The story of Leicester City's Premier League win has passed into folklore, to be handed down from generation to generation. Songs will be sung about the heroic Foxes, ballads of Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez and Kasper Schmeichel and Shinji Okazaki and Wes Morgan and all the rest, and Claudio Raineri will never have to buy himself a drink again. Books will be written, movies will be made, and everyone will say that they remember when. Even if it were to happen again, if Aston Villa or Newcastle were to recover from relegation and take the crown in two or three years, or if someone else were to come along in a decade or two and duplicate the achievement, it would merely be just that, an imitation of the original, in the same way that an art student might sit in a museum and copy a Monet. By definition, the impossible can never happen more than once.

Watching the joyous celebrations carrying on long into the night, someone was moved to remark that it was a shame people don't show that kind of emotion for more important things, but I think that misses the point. Yes, in the long run the winning of a championship in sports is relatively unimportant, but it's precisely for that reason that people can afford to let themselves go. It's a cruel world out there, one that can dash the hopes and dreams of a person with a figurative snap of the fingers, and sometimes we just need a little something to give us a life, a jolt of morning caffeine or a rush of sugar in the afternoon. Sports, at its best, is like that, a treat that one allows oneself. Unrestrained, undiluted, unadulterated joy is a rare thing, something that almost never happens in "real" life, and something that one can rarely afford to hope for outside of the spiritual realm. It's risky to open oneself to that kind of passion, and perhaps only when we know the stakes are relatively low can we allow ourselves that kind of vulnerability.

Perhaps that's something we ought to remember more often, and learn from it, for if there was anything truly important about Leicester's victory, anything to change the course of a person's life, it was the demonstration that anything truly is possible,

Even the impossible.

Wish I'd written that...

Lionel] Messi is an alien that dedicates himself to playing with humans. The only hope is that this Saturday he will be from earth, like the rest of us.”

- Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon, on the eve of the UEFA Champions League final between Messi's Barcelona and Juventus on Saturday.  Buffon should not count on it.

The FIFA scandal: deja vu all over again

In considering the ongoing FIFA scandal, one can be forgiven for feeling they'd seen this all before, maybe on an episode of The Untouchables, where the incorruptible Eliot Ness helps bring down the mob, although Sepp Blatter makes for a most charmless Al Capone.  Or it could have been the evening news, with Blatter cast as an Eastern bloc strongman brought down by the people's revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall; you can almost see his statue being pulled off its pedestal, an outstretched arm breaking off and shattering as the statue comes crashing down.  Whatever the analogy, it all seems awfully familiar.  I mean, the level of corruption makes you think of a college sports scandal.

Which is why I have trouble believing FIFA will be able to stall the election of a new president until the end of the year; once the people have it in mind to revolt, liberalized policies are usually a case of too little, too late. As the tumult grows, with confirmations that Blatter is the focus of an FBI probe that includes charges of bribery in the awarding of World Cup tournaments dating back to 2010, the calls for reform can only grow louder.  If Blatter should be indicted this summer or early fall, with the United States demanding his extradition (and perhaps calling for him to be held without bond as a flight risk), it would make it very difficult for him to continue running his empire from the county jail.

It's certainly possible that FIFA is an organization that defies reform, where the corruption runs so deep a divining rod wouldn't be able to uncover it all.  If that's the case, the only possible solution would be to blow it up and start all over, to let the United Nations take care of selling the game to developing countries (put it under UNICEF; after all, soccer's good for kids, isn't it?), while a new organization could be formed to manage the basics of the game: the rules, the governance of international competitions, and most of all the administration of the World Cup and the granting of media and advertising contracts.*  It's true that this last point is what led to most of the bribery in the first place, but without the ability to dispense patronage to smaller countries under the guise of "growing the game," it would be that much harder for anyone to build up the likes of the power base Blatter had.

*There's also this option.

Whatever the case, it is true that sports hasn't seen anything like this since the heyday of boxing, when the International Boxing Club spread its octopus-like tentacles throughout the sport and the mob controlled everything and everyone.  Because make no mistake about it: FIFA is modern-day organized crime, a group of corrupt officials running the world's most popular sport as if they were cheap hoods in expensive double-breasted suits, smoking Cuban cigars while sitting around a table that looks suspiciously like a map of the world.

This has been an extraordinary couple of weeks for people who've followed the story.  With the sordid headlines dominating newspapers and cable news networks like the latest political scandal (at least nobody's thought to call it FIFA-gate.  Yet.), soccer hasn't gotten this kind of attention in the United States since the last World Cup.  In fact, I'm not sure it's ever had this kind of exposure.  And for every new story that breaks, every new charge that comes complete with the opening theme to The FBI accompanied by images of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. waiting to pounce on another crooked vice president in charge of graft, the remaining officials of soccer's governing bodies are left to hope in the truth of P.T. Barnum's old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

It wouldn't surprise me a bit. . .

An interesting move

Well, Comcast has done it again. Another major sports property is going to the Philadelphia-based cable company, as the Barclays Premier League has signed a deal to move all 380 games to Comcast properties in 2013-14 for three seasons. This will mean NBC, NBC Sports Network, and likely CNBC (since the business channel doesn't have anything on Saturday or Sunday mornings, so this gives them programming on weekends; in addition, another Comcast channel -- likely G4, E!, or one of their entertainment channels, could carry games on F1 weekends when NBCSN is committed to F1) will air the games with streaming of the other games.

It puts the question that has withered on the vine since we discussed it earlier. Which channel will News Corp sacrifice for the new Fox Sports One that has been discussed with the new baseball deal? Speculation on Daly Planet has been Speed, but with the loss of soccer rights (except for the Scottish league, UEFA, and all FIFA from 2015 until 2022), could one of the two Fox Soccer channels be dumped to create the new Fox Sports One, and the Plus become Fox Sports International with rugby (did you know that the six-tackle rule in Rugby League was borrowed from the gridiron code's four downs to make ten yards), Aussie Rules, and V8 Supercars (which has a May race at the Circuit of the Americas; during the 2011 season, Fox sent their top play-by-play man and analyst to the Australian touring car series' big races on Mount Panorama in Bathurst, New South Wales and the streets of Surfers Paradise, Queensland (which was a CART Champ Car event from 1991-2007, and an INDYCAR exhibition race in 2008; the 2011 V8 race was the first time in a long time US-based broadcasters were actually Down Under for Surfers and not holed in a studio Up North as was the case in the later years of CART/Champ Car and INDYCAR). ◙

Survival Sunday

I don't think I've seen anything like it on television, but Sunday is football's Survival Sunday, and seven of the ten games in the Premiership will air live on television Stateside, while three games are streamed online. All seven televised games have importance.

To think about it, imagine the NBA using a system where the top two teams in the East and West in the D-League advance to the NBA, and the bottom two teams in each conference are dumped to the D-League. In that case, it would be Charlotte and Washington (East) and New Orleans and Sacramento (West) to the D-League, while Austin and the D-Fenders (Los Angeles) (West) and Springfield, MA and Bismarck, ND (East) replace the two dumped teams in the NBA for next year.

Wolverhampton and Blackburn are dumped. 38 points are needed to avoid relegation.

It's Survival Sunday, seven games broadcast on Disney and News Corp channels combined make this bigger than Week 17 of the NFL, when only five games air on their final day of the season, and the Thursday night game is not available locally.

Classic Sports Thursday

Have you ever noticed how many times people use the phrase, “I could care less,” when what they really mean to say is, “I couldn’t care less”?

Think about it. If it is true that, as Rush Limbaugh often says, “words mean things,” then it’s only fair that we look at how these words are used. To say “I could care less” in essence means that there are indeed things that would be even less important to you than that in question. Now, if someone told me I’d just won a million dollars, I doubt that my first reaction would be to say “I could care less!” but it would be true – there would be many things that I suddenly cared much less about than having won one million dollars. My job, for instance.

So when I say that I could not have cared less about the election returns Tuesday night, I may be guilty of a slight hyperbole; no doubt the New Hampshire primary carries more interest to me than, say, the latest episode of “American Idol.” Nevertheless, the foregone result of Tuesday's vote was far from the most important thing in mind – not when one had the option of watching Thierry Henry’s return to Arsenal.

Henry is probably one of the greatest soccer players ever, and likely the greatest ever to play for Arsenal, so given the choice – well, there was no choice, really, between watching Fox News’ election returns and Fox Soccer’s replay of Monday’s FA Cup match between Arsenal and Leeds United at London’s Emirates Stadium. (Especially when I hadn't seen the live broadcast Monday.) It was a triumphant, and storybook, homecoming for Henry, who came on as a substitute for the last 25 minutes and ten minutes later scored the only goal in the Gunners’ 1-0 victory over Leeds, advancing them to the fourth round of the FA Cup.





It was also a rare opportunity to see an all-time great return to the scene of some of his greatest triumphs, even more rare if those previous moments occurred beyond your memory. Being a relative latecomer to the world’s most popular soccer league, England’s Premier League (sorry, MLS), I knew of Henry’s exploits in Arsenal only through highlights on retrospective shows: the three FA Cups, the two Premier League titles, the undefeated season in 2003-2004. No, the Henry I was familiar with was the one from Gillette commercials, from his time with Barcelona , from the disastrous French play at the 2010 World Cup, and his late-career move to the New York Red Bulls.

A very good, perhaps exceptionally good, player – but not the great Henry. The one voted greatest Arsenal player of all time. The one memorialized with a bronze statue outside the Emirates. The one who would sit in the stands during MLS’ off season, wearing his red-and-white striped Arsenal scarf.

The prospect of Henry’s return to Arsenal, even if for only a couple of months while on loan from New York (whose season doesn’t start until March), was something akin to what the younger generation must have felt when Schumacher came out of retirement to race again in F1. But with that anticipation also came concern: would Henry wind up the same way as Schumacher, not even very good (relatively speaking) but only good enough to not embarrass himself, which would in itself be embarrassing? Would the crowd's roar as Henry prepared to enter the match be the highlight of the evening?

Well, as it turns out, it was more than a night for nostalgia. As Steve Rushin pointed out in this terrific article, Henry's match-winning goal, coming as it did, was a reminder of why we watch sports on TV. Because for just a moment it was as if time had stood still, and for someone who had never appreciated the Arsenal years, that was time enough. ◙

Classic Sports Thursday

In honour of the English FA Cup soccer final on Saturday between Manchester City and Stoke City, here are highlights from one of the greatest FA Cup finals ever: the epic 1970 final replay between Chelsea and Leeds, won in extra time by Chelsea 2-1.

The FA Cup, sponsored by the Football Association, the governing body for the sport in England, is the major soccer tournament in Europe, and the premier event in English football, with over 700 teams from all levels taking part. Although it's been somewhat eclipsed in recent years by the growth of the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League, it remains dear to the hearts of football fans everywhere.

Back in the day we're dealing with today, if an FA Cup match, including the final, ended in a tie, 30 minutes of extra time followed. It wasn't sudden death, so whoever scored ththe most goals in extra time won. If the game was still tied, it would be replayed in its entirety about 10 days later. This rule has since been done away with in the case of the FA Cup final; if Saturday's game is still tied after extra time, it will be decided by a noxious penalty kick shootout.  (Drawn matches in earlier rounds of the tournament are still replayed, with shootouts if the replay also ends in a tie.)

The 1970 FA Cup final was the first time in the history of the competition (which began in 1872) tha the final match had to be replayed, the first contest having ended in a 2-2 draw. Late in extra time of the replay, Chelsea scores, winning the Cup and preventing a second replay. ◙