Like Selhurst Park, Football Daily’s local boozer is a fairly ramshackle, rough-and-ready establishment located in a small corner of south-west London that is an excellent place to go when the football’s on. During the FA Cup final, it was full of football fans whose allegiances lie with a wide variety of different teams across various divisions, none of whom happened to be Crystal Palace or Manchester City. You wouldn’t have thought it at the final whistle, mind, when for the first time in living memory this particular pub’s entire clientele was completely united in its celebration of the outcome of a football match shown live on the pub TV screens. With irritation or indifference conspicuous by its absence, each and every person present was genuinely thrilledthat Palace had wonand deniedPep Guardiola’s state-owned sidethe opportunity to salvage something from the wreckage of their season.
While “this means more” might be a twee marketing slogan dreamt up by some wonk in the Liverpool marketing department, it was abundantly clear that winning Saturday’s cup final meant far, far more to the tens of thousands of weeping fans who had won the march on Wembley, won the tifos, won the hearts of neutrals and eventually won the match courtesy of Eberechi Eze’s strike at the end of that signature Palace move in which the ball is wellied through the centre from deep, held up, played out right and then quickly back inside. When it comes to tactical analysis, Football Daily is the simplest of simple folk but even we could see that one coming. Pep couldn’t, despite getting paid the big bucks, a state of affairs that might explain why he was as gracious in defeat as we’ve come to expect.
While Saturday’s final was not without its controversy andCrystal Palacewere undeniably lucky that an inexplicable VAR recommendation helped them to keep Dean Henderson on the pitch, you would need a swinging brick in place of a heart to begrudge them their success on a weekend in which various fond farewells and emotional wins helped maintain the charade that for most observers, this season’s top flight has been anything other than a massively underwhelming non-event. “To do something like that is pretty incredible,” said Joel Ward, who has played just 12 minutes of football this season, didn’t get summoned from the bench during the final but was handed the responsibility of accepting the club’s first major pot. “I don’t think there are real words for what it means, but to create history for this club, this set of players will go down in the history books for lifetimes.”
With football increasingly not as good as it used to be back in the Daily’s … er, day, it should go without saying that this seismic, life-changing Cup win doesn’t mark the end of Palace’s season and the club’s players and fans may or may not choose to sober up in time for what promises to be an even more raucous Selhurst Park evening than usual when they host Wolves tomorrow. After that, Oliver Glasner’s side will end their season at Anfield, in what could become the first recorded Premier League fixture in which both sets of players eschew the option of doing anything so vulgar as trying to win and decide instead to spend the entire 90 minutes giving each other those congratulatory guards of honour the British media are so obsessed with.
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