Portsmouth have had a torrid season but can still thwart Chelsea by pulling off the biggest FA Cup final shock for over 20 years
When Tottenham Hotspur reported for training in the summer of 1960 their captain, Danny Blanchflower, informed the Spurs chairman, Fred Bearman, that: “We’ll win the Double for you this season, the league and the Cup.” Bearman believed him. However, had John Terry put a similar prediction to Roman Abramovich 10 months ago Chelsea’s Russian owner might have thought the captain was setting his sights a little low. These days the Champions League is the grail, the old Double is a couple of domestic baubles to keep the trophy cabinet respectable.
True, adding the FA Cup to the Premier League would, for Chelsea, be a unique achievement. As Didier Drogba has pointed out, it would be better than anything the team won in a single season under José Mourinho, although they collected six trophies during his three years at Stamford Bridge. Yet the Double does not command the awed admiration that it once did and had ceased to do so even before Manchester United pulled off the treble with their stoppage-time triumph in the Champions League final at the Camp Nou in 1999.
Rarities become commonplace with repetition. If Chelsea beat Portsmouth at Wembley today it will be the 11th time the league and FA Cup Double has been completed and the fifth in 16 seasons. Compare this to the gap that lay between Aston Villa doing the Double in 1897 and Tottenham’s hallelujahs in 1961. When Blanchflower matter-of-factly told Bearman that Spurs were about to make 20th-century history he did so in the knowledge that a whole host of potential Double winners had been frustrated by injuries, loss of form and plain bad luck.
For a long time it was assumed that if any club were going to pull off the feat in the modern game it would be Arsenal, the most successful team of the 1930s and still a power in the immediate postwar period. But it did not happen for them until 1971. In the mid-50s the most likely Double winners were the West Bromwich Albion team of Ronnie Allen and Johnny Nicholls, but they came no nearer than winning the Cup in 1954 after finishing runners-up to Wolves in the league.
Vic Buckingham, then the Albion manager, was confident the Double would be done but that it would take a great team to do so, “for apart from the nine months’ tangle of seething-hot competition in the league there is the deadly wait between the semi-finals and final and the league programme to complete. Physical and moral strength, premeditated method in play and that veneer of ruthlessness will achieve it.”
No doubt Carlo Ancelotti would agree. Under his guidance this season Chelsea have shown all of those characteristics listed by Buckingham more than half a century ago, even if the extramural activities of certain players may have challenged the bit about moral strength. Certainly Wigan will bear witness to the new ruthlessness in Chelsea’s football after last Sunday’s 8-0 mauling that ensured the arrival of the league title at Stamford Bridge for a fourth time.
It is a peculiarity of Double seasons that the feat has almost invariably been achieved in an atmosphere of anticlimax, usually because as spectacles the relevant FA Cup finals have been less interesting than the results. Liverpool’s 3-1 victory over Everton to complete the Double under Kenny Dalglish in 1986 remains the best footballing occasion of the bunch, followed by Arsenal beating Chelsea 2-0 in Cardiff in 2002. The 4-0 defeat of Chelsea in 1994 that gave Manchester United their first Double is the most one-sided encounter so far, although that may be eclipsed when Chelsea play Portsmouth this afternoon.
To Pompey falls the task of thwarting a Double by pulling off the biggest shock in an FA Cup final since Wimbledon upset considerable odds by beating Liverpool, who had just regained the league title in some style, at Wembley in 1988. But the Dons had previously held their opponents to a 1-1 draw at home that season, whereas Chelsea won 5-0 at Fratton Park in March.
If the Double deed is to be done again at least let it be done on a decent playing surface. “No complaint could be lodged on the state of the turf,” reported a scribe who covered Preston’s Double-winning final against Wolves at the Kennington Oval in 1889. The present Wembley pitch, which has now been laid more times than Lady Chatterley, is as much on trial today as the teams.
FA CupPremier LeagueChelseaPortsmouthDavid Laceyguardian.co.uk
