Category: FA Cup

There was a sense of disbelief at Wembley as the team I support ended a wait of almost 120 years to win a major trophy

When Marc Guéhi and Joel Ward went up to collect the FA Cup, we were there. Although it still seems like a dream. The sense of disbelief Crystal Palace supporters felt when the full-time whistle at Wembley ended their wait to win a major trophy will probably take a few more days to fade away given it’s taken almost 120 years to become a reality. But with most of the 30,000 wearing red and blue having travelled from south London in hope rather than expectation, finally, it was our moment.

After an agonising 10 minutes of stoppage time that seemed to take an eternity, the emotions of defeat in Palace’s two previous FA Cup finals came pouring out. Everywhere you looked there were grown men – including me and the former Guardian stalwart Dominic Fifield – moved to tears. The comedian Mark Steel just kept shaking his head, unable to comprehend what had just transpired. It even spread to the royal box, where the chair, Steve Parish, who had been pictured with his head in his hands moments earlier, was greeted with a bear hug from Palace’s largest shareholder, John Textor.

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Eberechi Eze scored a fine winner and Dean Henderson – who might have been sent off earlier – saved a penalty on a famous day for Palace

Oliver Glasner’s pre-match thoughts

It’s a special moment for all of us and we’re really looking forward to the game.

We expect City to have more of the ball, as they do against most teams, especially as they have picked a very attacking line-up. It’s a little bit similar to how Villa played, with lots of attacking players, but that gives you space for transitions. That’s what we need to wait for. We have to be very efficient when we get chances.

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• All the buildup to the FA Cup final, 4.30pm kick-off
• Share your thoughts with matchday live or post BTL

Chat over. Will Hughes strolls across the car park to get some photographs taken. As it happens, the man emerging from the gym at that very moment is the Crystal Palace midfield partner whose praises Hughes has just been lavishly exalting.

“Just added about £20m to your fee in that interview,” Hughes shouts at Adam Wharton as they pass. “You can have half,” Wharton retorts. All delivered with a knowing smile, for this is the Palace of Oliver Glasner, where – as Hughes puts it – “there’s egos, but good egos”. No arrogance, none of the blame culture he sees elsewhere. “You watch other teams and hands are in the air, there’s moaning,” he says. “But I honestly don’t see any of that here.”

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Crystal Palace midfielder on the hype in his early career, ‘shit’ VAR and embarrassment of the 2019 FA Cup final

Chat over. Will Hughes strolls across the car park to get some photographs taken. As it happens, the man emerging from the gym at that very moment is the Crystal Palace midfield-partner whose praises Hughes has just been lavishly exalting.

“Just added about £20m to your fee in that interview,” Hughes shouts at Adam Wharton as they pass. “You can have half,” Wharton retorts. All delivered with a knowing smile, for this is the Palace of Oliver Glasner, where – as Hughes puts it – “there’s egos, but good egos”. No arrogance, none of the blame culture he sees elsewhere. “You watch other teams and hands are in the air, there’s moaning,” he says. “But I honestly don’t see any of that here.”
It’s the week of the FA Cup final and there’s a frisson in the air. But Hughes is happy to talk about anything and everything: the good, the bad, the ridiculous. What the first trophy of his career would mean. How a wispy teenage No 10 turned into one of the Premier League’s toughest, most reliable midfielders. Why VAR is “shit”. Whether he was ever as good as everyone said he was. Why he doesn’t really watch football.

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The Crystal Palace manager cut his teeth in the Austrian and German Bundesligas, while a health scare helped form his approach to life

Siegmund Gruber didn’t take long to decide Oliver Glasner was his man. “We were convinced from the moment we met him,” says the chief executive of the Austrian club Lask. “Oliver started his presentation and it was like that scene in Jerry Maguire: ‘You had me at hello.’”

It was the summer of 2015 and the future Crystal Palace manager had been persuaded to leave SV Ried, where he had made more than 500 appearances and been named player of the century before taking over as manager the previous year, for their main rivals. What made things worse was that Lask, after going bankrupt under the previous owners and losing their stadium, had just been promoted from the third division, while Ried had finished mid-table in the Austrian Bundesliga.

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Collapse of their league title defence and an early European exit mean Manchester City’s season rests on beating Palace

The measure of Manchester City’s class is that they have a chance of claiming the FA Cup in Saturday’s Wembley showpiece despite a troubled campaign featuring serial injury, an insipid title defence, Champions League playoff stage elimination by Real Madrid and the mid-season departure of the captain, Kyle Walker, on loan.

Oliver Glasner’s in-form Crystal Palace, who have lost two of their past 14 games, are in their way but Pep Guardiola’s garlanded team are favourites, the wounded deposed champions intent on not ending empty-handed for the first time since the Catalan’s opening 2016-17 term.

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• Striker puts focus on FA Cup final against Crystal Palace
• ‘We need to finish well and get a trophy,’ he says

Erling Haaland has described Manchester City’s season as “horrific” and “boring” owing to the champions losing so many games, and said that makes winning Saturday’s FA Cup final against Crystal Palace even more vital.

City, the Premier League title winners in the past four seasons, are fourth, 18 points behind the champions, Liverpool, having lost nine times. They were eliminated by Real Madrid in the Champions League playoff stage and by Tottenham in the last 16 of the Carabao Cup.

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Manager elated at semi-final win against Aston Villa but keen to ensure players keep their eye on league form

Oliver Glasner is not the kind of manager who makes bold predictions, although it seems to be a different story behind the scenes. A few hours after Crystal Palace’s epic 3-0 victory over Aston Villa in the FA Cup semi-finals, a video of the Austrian’s post-match team talk was released on social media, where he had outlined his expectations of his players during a training camp in Marbella in March.

“I told you guys, this is because I know you guys and I know your talent, especially I know your character, that we can achieve outstanding things this year,” Glasner said. “I felt it, guys, that we are able to achieve, to write history for Crystal Palace. We fully deserve a place in the final, but it’s not the final.”

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Gazza painted his artistry all over the 1991 FA Cup and his stupendous free-kick influenced the game for years

Football is an unstoppable continuum, a whirling dervish of love and hate, life and death, frequent tedium and the greatest excitement known to humanity. Because we care so much for it it feels like it cares for us back, but the painful truth is this is our imagination and self-respect saving us from acknowledging that actually, football was there before us, it’ll be there after us, and while we’re there it exists as though we don’t.

Occasionally, though, we have bestowed upon us an event that grabs us by the lapels and shrieks indelibly into our souls, the entirety of the cosmos consumed by the wonder of the game. “It tells us something we’ll always remember,” wrote director-screenwriter Randall Wallace when considering what makes something epic. “It makes us walk out of a theatre and whisper into our own hearts, ‘I’m changed.’”

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Goalkeeper struggled at Newcastle but heroics in Nottingham has set up a chase for Europe on two fronts

Matz Sels might have thought his FA Cup story had ended with a humiliating defeat at League One Oxford United, in what turned out to be his final game of a forgettable spell at Newcastle. The Belgian, 33, was bought to be the club’s No 1 in 2016 but managed only 14 appearances in a turbulent period at St James’ Park before departing for the serenity of Strasbourg two years later.

In five and a half seasons in France, Sels rebuilt his career. He won the Coupe de la Ligue in 2019 and was named Ligue 1’s best goalkeeper of the 2021-22 season. His consistency alerted teams to him but he was a long way down Nottingham Forest’s shortlist when they were looking for a goalkeeper in January 2024. The £5m punt they took on him has paid off spectacularly though and Sels has an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester City to look forward to on Sunday. His saves in three shootouts have helped Forest to get there.

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