Brian Viner: Saints must win to stop final sliding into the murk

The inescapable conclusion is the Cup can be bought, which it could not in 1973

First, an apology and a resolution. Both concern a question I posed a couple of weeks ago about the FA Cup final, sent in by a reader. The answer, Gordon Smith, formerly of Brighton and Hove Albion, was right, but the question was wrong. I asked: which player appeared in two FA Cup finals in the same year? It should have been: who played, for one club north of the border and another south, in two domestic cup finals in the same year? However, it occurs to me that perhaps Smith is not the only answer to that question. Doubtless you'll let me know.

Whatever, the resolution is to check my teasers more thoroughly in future, because Independent readers spot sloppy research like Paul Scholes spots Ruud van Nistelrooy on a diagonal run.

My thanks to several of you for pointing out the error, especially Andy Tye, who has just watched his beloved Seagulls go screeching into the Second Division, and so is understandably hot on the details of happier days. Marginally happier, anyway, as I think I'm right in saying that 1983, the year in which Smith played in the FA Cup final for Brighton, was another which ended in relegation.

Anyway, Andy e-mailed me to point out that Rangers did not loan Smith to Brighton, as I asserted; Brighton loaned Smith to Rangers. He signed for Brighton in June 1980 and joined Rangers on loan in December 1982. He then played in the 1983 Scottish League Cup final (a 2-1 defeat by Celtic) before returning to Brighton to play against Manchester United at Wembley. And is rather unfortunate, Andy adds, to be remembered for his late miss in that 2-2 draw rather than a fine goal.

On the subject of FA Cup finals gone by, I have observed before that it is the matches played during one's formative years that loom largest in the memory. I can recall with absolute clarity every final played between 1970, when I was eight, and 1985, when I graduated from university.

Indeed, these memories extend beyond the matches themselves to the entire television package; I believe I'm right in saying that although Saturday's finalists, Southampton, won the Cup in 1976, their representatives had earlier suffered ignominious defeat in FA Cup Final It's A Knock-Out, being less adept than the team from Manchester at dodging giant sponges while walking the plank dressed as enormous ladybirds.

Those were the days. And my memory stays almost as keen for the remaining finals of the 1980s, yet it begins to get decidedly blurred around 1990. Not everything is a blur. I have delightfully vivid memories of Everton lifting the Cup in 1995, for example.

But who contested the Cup final 10 years ago? Without consulting myRothmans Football Yearbook, I couldn't have told you that Arsenal beat Sheffield Wednesday 2-1 in a replay, and I have only the fuzziest recollections of the match itself and none at all of the goals. Yet there is 20-20 vision in my mind's eye of the final of 30 years ago, between Sunderland and Leeds, of Jim Montgomery's heroics, and Ian Porterfield's goal, and Bob Stokoe's hat.

I wonder, actually, how much this has to do with formative years, and how much with the thoroughly depressing statistic that of all the finals since 1990, only one, the 1991 match between Tottenham and Nottingham Forest, has not featured Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool or Chelsea? Between them, those four clubs have lifted the FA Cup 11 times since 1990, on four occasions contesting it among themselves.

And which four clubs in that time have shelled out the most money on transfer fees, paid the highest wages, imported the most expensive foreign talent? The inescapable conclusion is that the FA Cup can be bought, which it could not be in 1973, 1976, 1978, 1987 or 1988, when Wimbledon beat Liverpool. That is the last year in which the underdog prevailed, if you can call a rottweiler an underdog.

So it is no wonder that the post-1990 finals are, for me and I'm sure for many others, a blur. That is why, along with most neutrals, I will be rooting for Southampton on Saturday. A win for Gordon Strachan's team would make the occasion memorable; otherwise it will just enter the mental murk.

Yet I feel more ambivalent about it than I thought I would, for no team, not even Manchester United in their considerable spring pomp, have played more thrillingly than Arsenal have at times this season. In a way it will be a shame if some truly gasp-inducing football does not, in the end, yield any silverware. But only a shame; not, as their manager, Arsène Wenger, would doubtless have it, a travesty.

After all, unpredictability made the FA Cup great. Predictability is killing it.

b.viner@independent.co.uk