The FA Cup

Taxi for Mr Mancini.

 

City were ****ing awful.

 

The last three winning managers of the FA Cup have all been called Roberto. Roberto Mancini, Roberto Di Matteo and Roberto Martinez.

 

Wigan athletic have now officially won the same amount of major hounours as is lol. So ****ing happy for em. They really do deserve the success.

 

Pantilimon must be annoyed. Scharner won't be throwing away his medal for this one.

 

Better have a Mauricio next season then.

 

If Wigan stay up, I'm curious whether this will make a difference in terms of their fanbase...if they still struggle to draw after this, it'll never be a football town, unfortunately.

 

Nice name-check for Saints. ESPN commentator mentioned not seeing scenes and upsets like this since Southampton in 1976.

 

Pellegrini?

Edit: oops, he's a Manuel. Was thinking of the former Valencia defender Pellegrino!

 

This is a perfect example of why I dislike a juggernaut like the Premier League. It is geared so that the biggest richest teams come out on top. It wasn't always like that when it was part of the Football League, and smaller clubs still had a chance of winning it. The old FA Cup competition gives us a lingering taste of what football was like before the PL started to erode all that traditional fans held dear. Mind you, football fans did it to themselves, and with every SKY subscription, and the like, the PL becomes further entrenched.

Yes, this is what the FA Cup is all about. It used to be what First Division football was all about. Competition..!

 

I guess this is why Cortese believes anything is possible. Amen to that, Tom.

 

I have to say I don't have the same dislike a lot of people have for Dave Whelan, but boy I am tired of hearing about him today.

 

Any idea how his career ended, or how he ended up at where he is today? Seems to be a serious dearth of information about it...

 

Tbf, that trend was guaranteed to continue today.

 

Then again, English football was some way behind football on the continent, in terms of quality, before the PL and Sky came along. It's a mixed blessing.

 

Wigan were outstanding there, City let the occasion and the pressure get to them. Unfortunately this means we will have to put up with Dave Whelan's broken leg story for another month or so.

 

I can't decide if my favourite FA Cup Final is this one or the Liverpool-West Ham final of 2006.

 

Really..? His relevant history is all over BBC Sport, and I suspect that if you typed Dave Whelan into a search engine, you'd probably find a Wikipedia page at the very least.

 

That one was a cracker. This is certainly the best final since then at least. We've had some truly abysmal finals in recent years so we were due a cracker.

 

And why was that..? It shouldn't need SKY or the PL to remedy that.