F.A Cup Memories

Playing Arsenal today in the F.A Cup Third Round inevitably takes me back to a sunny spring day long, long ago, when West Ham were in the Second Division and Arsenal were on a quest to complete a treble of League, Cup and Cup Winners Cup.

I had a ticket for the 1980 FA Cup Final courtesy of a Sunday league teammate who also happened to be a professional footballer - I don't think you'd be allowed to play Saturday's and Sunday's these days. Anyway the pre-match build-up centered around the comments of one Brian Clough who had stated that Trevor Brooking 'floated like a butterfly and stung like one.' This was Clough talking bollocks as he often did and was really down to the fact that he had tried twice to sign Brooking to be part of his European Cup dream and West Ham had turned Notts.Forest down.

I was standing behind the goal at the end Trev 'scored with his head' as the goal became known in our house and when the ball hit the back of the net after 13 minutes I went mad, only to soon realise that my ticket was in the Arsenal end. Mind you, there were several hundred other Hammers fans in the Arsenal end as well and despite having some run-ins with the Gooners in the past there wasn't any trouble. I don't remember much more about the match, this wasn't due to any excessive alcohol intake but down to the fact that for the first time in my life I had flu, proper flu.

After the match we took the tube back to Harrow and decided to stop off in an Irish pub. Back then the rougher Irish pubs weren't the dream of some advertising executive in Soho, they were proper sawdust on the floor jobs. The four of us sat and watched a fight take place which featured one of the more surreal moments in my life. The two guys fighting were both clearly worse for wear and weren''t doing each other any real harm when one of the them challenged the other to a cock fight and promptly unzipped his jeans and took out his old man. I can't tell you what happened next as we decided to leave and continue our journey around the North Circular and then home.

One of the more anorakish features of that day was the live coverage on BBC and ITV, I only knew this after the event because I owned several West Ham videos, ITV gave the goal to Stuart Pearson on their live transmission whereas John Motson on the BBC called it correctly - for some things you just had to trust the good old beeb back then.

These days of course things are different. Arsenal have replaced their Irish quota with a French one, West Ham have replaced their home grown players with, well home grown players, and the relatively expensive English signings (Parkes, Pearson and Cross) have been replaced by cheap foreign signings (Ilunga, Behrami and Franco). The managers that day were the quintessentially British pair of John Lyall and Terry Neil, today they will be a Frenchman and an Italian. The thirty years that have passed since that day in May 1980 have seen changes in the domestic game we wouldn't have dreamed of back then when the F.A Cup was the second most important competition in England. Billy Bonds even appealed to the FA to have a booking quashed so he could play in the final, which he did, these days you can't help thinking a lot of foreign born players would be grateful of the day off.

Anyway, enough of the memories, good luck this afternoon - to the team in claret and blue of course.