Arsenal title lifts the Gunners, Saints turn to sinners and football keeps on delivering
No matter your age, the life of a fan is never, ever boring
Remember the children. Remember your childhood. Remember that special feeling when football offered you the realisation of all your sporting dreams. Remember the kids with Arsenal and Southampton shirts in their locker when you take these words on board.
Some of them are smiling today as they celebrate a first Arsenal Premier League title in 22 years. Some of them are asking why they won’t be going to Wembley on Saturday now that the adults in charge of Southampton FC have paid the price for cheating.
All of them are experiencing the emotional roller coaster of emotions that football will subject them to for the rest of their lives, Gunners or Saints, League or Cup. The highs will be high and the lows will be low.
One of the great disappointments last weekend was the utter and complete devaluation of the FA Cup final. It was almost forgotten about as Manchester City defeated Chelsea 1-0 at the new Wembley, a week before Southampton were due to play Hull City on the same hallowed turf.
If the stories are correct, then in years to come the 2026 edition of what was once the most famous game of any year in English football will be remembered as Pep’s last stand, as the final occasion on which Guardiola lifted a trophy for Manchester City.
Yet there was little or no razzamatazz about the Blues achievement. And that hurts. In my day - and I go all the way back to the 1971 FA Cup final - this was the day of all days..
Granted we didn’t have Sky Sports or Premier or TNT or Amazon Prime or Netflix in those days. Many of us didn’t even have BBC or UTV available on a daily basis.
So live football in our living rooms was about as common as a dry day in Ireland. That’s why the FA Cup final was special. It was wall to wall coverage - breakfast from the team hotel, interviews with the players and the managers, footage as the bus made its way towards the Twin Towers, cameras inside the dressing room, live coverage as the men in suits led their teams out.
It was rare and it was magical. Charlie George diving on the Wembley grass that 1971 Saturday has stayed with me forever. It prompted a lifelong love affair with the Gunners, a lifelong fascination for all things football and for the Arsenal.
That’s why the public disregard for the Cup final on Saturday was disappointing. That’s why Arsenal’s title win in absentia on Tuesday night, their first in 22 years and the first for the great Mikel Arteta, was so special.
That’s why I feel for the Southampton fans today, young and old, and for their Irish players Finn Azaz and Ryan Manning. They weren’t the ones who authorised a young staff member to hide behind a tree and record phone camera footage of a Middlesbrough training session.
They weren’t the ones recording Oxford United and Ipswich training sessions earlier this season. Yet they are the ones who are really going to feel the pain this Saturday - pending appeal - when the play-off final goes ahead without them, the richest game in club football as they like to call it.
Football, as Mikel Arteta will tell you today, will lift you up like little else in life.
Football, as Southampton fans and players alike will tell you, will let you down like nothing else in life.
That’s the beauty of the game. And it’s why, 55 years after a Saturday devoted to an FA Cup final, it still woos me every day of every week. And we wouldn’t swap it for the world!