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

• Chelsea can become seventh side to win domestic double
• Lampard says team cannot afford to be complacent

Frank Lampard says Chelsea are intent on ruining relegated Portsmouth’s hopes of a fairytale end to their dismal season. Victory over Avram Grant’s Pompey side in the FA Cup final at Wembley tomorrow would see Chelsea become only the seventh English side ever to achieve the coveted domestic double, and Lampard is adamant they will not be complacent after winning the Premier League title last Sunday.

“We don’t want it to be a fairytale that goes all the way for Portsmouth, we have to be ruthless how we approach the game,” said Lampard. “To win the league was a huge thing for us last week. We got that job done but we knew the season wasn’t over.

“We saw Portsmouth against Tottenham in the semi-final and we’ve seen them have a very spirited end to the season, even with the difficult circumstances.”

Lampard went on to suggest that a Chelsea defeat would also be bad news for England, with several Chelsea players set to play significant roles for the national side at this summer’s World Cup in South Africa.

“What better way to go to the World Cup than having done the double,” said Lampard. “But I would hate to go there having missed out on the double. Mentally if I went away and we’d lost that would be the freshest thing in the mind and it would be horrible.

“We are determined to finish the job and it won’t be as easy as some people have made out. I also have a lot of sympathy with Portsmouth. I think they’ve handled themselves very well, particularly Avram Grant, who we know really well and have a lot of respect for.

“He’s handled himself brilliantly and everyone has seen that. It’s not been easy circumstances and everyone has taken to them a bit this year – in very adverse circumstances they have held their heads high and managed to get to Wembley.

“But the double is huge and has never been done in our history. We really want to do it. I grew up always knowing the big teams that had done the double in the 70s and 80s, so if we do it, it will go down as the best year in the club’s history.”

Lampard’s Chelsea and England team-mate Ashley Cole is bidding to become the first player to win the trophy six times. Cole’s first FA Cup final victory came with Arsenal against Chelsea in 2002 before retaining the trophy against Southampton the following year and then scoring in the 2005 penalty shootout win over Manchester United.

He then moved to Chelsea and was part of the team who defeated Manchester United in the first final at the new Wembley. Last season he won his fifth final and moved into the record books as Chelsea defeated Everton 2-1.

“It is an amazing achievement and to win it that many times would set him out as the most successful FA Cup player ever and he deserves that,” added Lampard.

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