Wembley Revisited
Revisiting my long journey to the 1990 FA Cup Final with Crystal Palace. Bonus guest: George Best.
Today is FA Cup Final day. I am in London, I have my ticket for Wembley, and I will once more be hoping, wishing, praying and cheering for my team, Crystal Palace, to win themselves a major trophy - for the first time in their 164-year existence and at the third time of asking in this particular tournament, which was once the biggest occasion in the global football calendar.
The last time Palace got to the FA Cup Final was 2016; I was in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and could not attend. The FIRST time we got there was in 1990 and wild horses couldn’t keep me away1. At the end of that year, the New York Press – the spunky freebie upstart challenger to the Village Voice – asked its writers to pen something for ‘The Year In Review’ edition and I happily ran off 3500 words on the subject of my trip back to London for the occasion. Unfortunately, we were not paid by the word at the NY Press, but it was great fun working for and with the editor-publisher Russ Smith, who had a similarly libertarian attitude towards content as he did towards the free market and politics and entertained most of my madcap ideas. He also decided to apply some Winston Churchill to his choice of title.
Much has changed since 1990. On a personal level for sure - I was punished for having a stupid haircut back then by losing my hair entirely - but professionally as well. I’d like to believe I’m a better writer than I was in 1990, but for all that a 35-year-old article makes me wince here and there, it has trademark energy and certainly evokes nostalgia (for me, at least). Of course, when it comes to football, that too has changed since 1990, both on the field in terms of tactics, rules and physicality, and off the field, especially the sums of money involved. Many of you will recognize these changes as you read.
Specifically, you’ll be able to tell that I wrote this article partly for American readers who would have had little more than a passing interest in the game. Back in 1990, coverage of the sport was still minimal in the States: English matches were not shown on terrestrial TV at the time, not even the FA Cup Final, and even the live matches from the forthcoming summer’s World Cup would be interspersed with commercial breaks mid-half. All that would change when the World Cup came to the USA in 1994, every match sold out in advance, and a new American league, the MLS, was established in the tournament’s wake as a condition of hosting.2
While the quality of football in the MLS may still lack somewhat, enthusiasm does not; home crowds are respectable and some games attract Premier League style sell-outs. Football - proper football, soccer if you want to give it its original name – is typically the most played younger child sport in the States (especially with girls, something the US was way ahead of Europe in leading), and coverage is everywhere. NBC deserves special kudos for its phenomenal marketing of the English Premier League, which includes the ability to watch every single match live for a paltry few bucks a month. I typically watch more Palace games live, in the moment, than all but the most devoted of home-and-away season ticket holders in the UK.3 And of course Ted Lasso hardly harmed, especially for Palace, given that the show’s fictional AFC Richmond plays at the real Selhurst Park and therefore sports Palace red-and-blue. Some of my American-born friends know more about the state of today’s game than I do, and hey, some of them are even Crystal Palace fans.
There is still only one George Best, however.
Join the loyal supporters club by taking out a “season ticket” to Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith for just $6/circa £6 a month, or $60/circa £60 a year. You will get home features every weekend to read at leisure, and away features during midweek that are usually shorter and snappier, though sometimes they too go to extra time. Your season ticket will also get you bonus posts, access to all the archives, and the Crossed Channels podcast. No more queuing at the turnstiles: book your regular seat today!
THERE ARE SOME EVENTS IN LIFE which you think about, talk about, dream about and, in those blissful moments when you close your eyes and let your mind wander, can almost grasp with your bare hands.
Such a vision became a reality for me this year at around 9:15am EST on Sunday, April 8, when the last of a series of nerve-racking phone calls from across the Atlantic brought news that Crystal Palace, the soccer team I've supported since the age of seven, had beaten Liverpool in overtime to reach the final of the FA Cup.
The oldest and most famous annual soccer tournament in the world, the FA Cup began in 1872 as an all-comers Challenge Cup at a time that the sport was just becoming organized. These days, some 480 clubs,4 including almost every semi-professional team in England and Wales, enter, village teams with names like Princes End United getting the action going in September, the lower league professional teams joining in in November, and the giants of the first and second divisions adding their weight in January. As an unseeded competition, the magic of the FA cup is that with a lucky draw, smaller, non-league clubs get the chance of playing against the most famous names in the sport, to live out a day of local glory and perhaps even a remarkable "giant-killing" result-part of the thrill of the tournament being just how often the underdogs spur themselves on to beat the better team. The ultimate goal is to appear in the final at Wembley the Saturday after the regular league ends, in front of a capacity crowd and the eager eyes of 600 million sports fans worldwide.
The dream that every child entertains of taking part in the Final does not disappear with adolescence or adulthood, it merely metamorphoses from wearing the team's colors on the pitch to wearing them in the stand. Crystal Palace's journey to the final this past May would have been great enough purely as an enormous emotional achievement by a club who had never won a major trophy in their 85-year existence. For that, those years of my adolescence spent in the rain on the terraces of Selhurst Park in south London, or following the club to the far-flung, collapsing corners of the once-industrial north on away trips, watching as our team languished in the third division, were rewarded instantaneously.
That the club had started the 1980s freshly promoted to the first division with a talented youthful side unfortunately dubbed "the team of the 80s" by some smart media hack, only to collapse amidst boardroom wrangles that reached a nadir with six managers in two seasons, relegation to the second division and a disastrous decline in attendance for what had once been one of the best-supported clubs in the land, made this start to the new decade all the sweeter.
But the greatest part about reaching Wembley came in beating Liverpool, whose domination of British football is quite unlike that in the history of the game.
The Merseyside club won the Football League again in 1990, proving by far the best team in the land over the course of 38 games. On the way, they handed Crystal Palace their worst-ever defeat, a humiliating 9-0 slaughter on Palace's first season back in the first division. It was widely assumed that they would mete out similar punishment to Palace in the Semi-Final, the first ever to be shown live on British television. A nation that sat down for a unique doubleheader of football (the other Semi-FinaI following immediately afterward) were rewarded with one of the most exciting televised games in the sport's history, three goals in the last 10 minutes swinging the result back and forth before Palace clinched it in overtime.
The prize for beating the best team in the land was to play the most famous and best-supported: Manchester United, the Red Devils, whose trophies-chest was so used to displaying the FA cup (winning it six times out of 10 appearances), that we figured it wouldn't miss a 12-month loan to the bare cupboards of south London. The FA Cup however, is not a trophy people volunteer to give away.
It was a foregone conclusion that I would be at Wembley on Saturday, May 12. Explaining the loyalty one feels to a football club is another essay in itself; suffice to say that in this often painful world, we all need heroes, to believe that if we as individual humans are not good enough to reach the very top, that we will follow others in the hope that they will do it for us.
But in the enormous community that is world soccer-and may the American general public one day get to experience this-the players reciprocate that trust, as eager to win trophies for the fans on the terraces as to line their pockets. The number of millionaire British footballers can be counted on one hand, yet as this year's World Cup proved, they still play some of the best football on show. There being something a lot deeper here than money and success, there could be no doubt that whatever the result of the Final, it would be ours-the fans'-the day to cherish forevermore.
Getting a ticket for the Final was another matter. Wembley's new all-seated arrangement had brought the capacity from 100,000 down to 80,000,5 and although half the Cup Final tickets are split between the two competing clubs, in the light of the unforgettable disaster at the FA Cup Semi-Final the previous year, when almost 100 Liverpool fans died in a crush, the organizers decided to give Manchester United two-thirds of the supply. While true that the northern team's support has always been greater than Palace's, the allocation failed to take into account that when a forlorn and forgotten club reaches the pinnacle of the sport, everyone who has ever given time to them wants to be a part of the big day. Palace fans cropped up from everywhere, and while some might call that "fair weather" supporting, the opposite was true: Manchester United fans I knew in New York were prepared to watch it on (satellite) tv, knowing there would be another opportunity in the future, just as there had been in the past; the only other true Palace fan I knew here was as keen to make it home as I.
I practiced Zen methods of positive thinking over the coming weeks. I had no chance of getting a ticket off the club, who were besieged with applications and were exercising their usual concern for the following year first. Instead I worked through my phone book: I called on favors from pop stars, media contacts, season ticket holders at other clubs and God, who had probably been wondering where I'd got to ever since I discovered that kicking a ball around was a far better use of a Sunday morning than going to church. genuinely believed that my perseverance would be rewarded, but in the end I asked my mother to buy one from a scalper through ads in the paper.
The going price had reached £150, and I had already broken my code of personal ethics by writing a glowing biography of a band I hated for a record company to pay for it when, three days before the game and the night before my flight, a friend called with the news: as a member of an amateur team which received two tickets from the FA, he had snapped them up and saved one for me. I got it for face value (£15); my mother, now caught up in Cup Final fever, ended up spending £1006 she didn't have to spare and decided to join in the festivities.
My first tears were shed on arriving back in the Crystal Palace neighborhood the evening before the game. Red and blue bunting was everywhere-hanging from pubs, from shops, from rooftops-in a vibrant burst of local pride. A florist had made a four-foot tall Eagle (the Palace symbol) out of red-and-blue roses, little children had used red and blue crayons and stuck messages in their parents' front windows. The streamers, rosettes and pennants hanging around my own family's front door were the final straw, and I wept with pure joy on arriving home to be part of such a great occasion.
Like superstitious young children whose state I had reverted to, I slept in my newly-purchased Palace team shirt that night, and like a little kid on Christmas day, was up at 7:30 in the morning, the kick-off still almost eight hours away. We gathered at a friend's house within the hour, along with other people who I had stood on the terraces with as long as 10 years ago. Someone had brought the body paints ready and was busy applying red and blue stripes on our faces-a tribal gesture befitting for our brave warriors.
As we took to the street on our walk to the station, singing and chanting and drunk on nothing but optimism and pure happiness, almost every passing car tooted its support. By the time we reached the main south London terminal of Victoria at 9 a.m., the whole station was already a sea of red and blue, the air filled with choruses of "Glad All Over" and "Eagles."
The pubs weren't open yet, the game was five hours off, the venue still another 15 miles across London but at this gateway to south London the streets were soon jammed solid. It was as though we had already won the Final, with thousands of fans, all in the team colors, celebrating and dancing in the streets, pick-up trucks packed with supporters arriving over the bridge with flags flying, the overall impression being like the joyous atmosphere we'd seen in Tiananmen Square when optimism still reigned. Our own group chose a small pub when the doors opened at 11 a.m., but we still made it sound like an army of occupation-a good-natured one at that, the long-suffering bar staff remarking upon our behavior as a graphic de signer friend applied a beautiful red and blue eagle to my cheek. Those of us with longer memories began resurrecting old terrace songs that had long passed into history, and by the time we began the underground train journey to northwest London our day was almost already complete.
Somewhere on the other side of London, my girlfriend was arriving by plane for a week in my home city; bewildered if not surprised, she would have to fend her way through a subway system packed with perhaps 50,000 football fans converging on one train line to Wembley. The image of the English football hooligan is asstrong at home as it is in America, and the mostly young, masculine, working class crowd taking over the subway must have been akin to a real life visit from Freddy Krueger for the majority of shoppers riding through central London. But part of the joy of the Cup Final is the sense of community it brings with it, in which bygones become bygones and opposing fans share the occasion with equal enthusiasm.
As dictated by the ticket allocation, and by the sheer propensity of Man Utd fans in Britain, Palace supporters were severely outnumbered at the newly all seated Wembley. My own ticket was in a mostly Man Utd section of the ground (there being no such thing as a neutral fan at a Cup Final), but nothing was going to shut me up on this particular day. Noisy though they were, and determined to wrest some glory from a rather miserable season, there was something rather tired about the United support, as if they'd seen it all before-which of course, they had.
When the two teams took to the pitch, the incredible sea of red and blue balloons that suddenly appeared from the Palace end (a trait almost unique to our club) almost obliterated that half of the pitch. Again, the tears welled up, but they were blocked by the noise from my vocal chords. From there on in, regardless of the result or the disproportion of supporters, there was no doubt about which club the day belonged to.
The best team didn't win. Neither side came home that Saturday with the most famous football trophy this side of the World Cup. After an enthralling 90 minutes and a further half hour of extra time, the score was settled at 3-3, the two teams destined to come back five days later and repeat the routine.
The media didn't deign to call the game a classic, but they couldn't argue about the sheer excitement of the highest scoring cup final in almost 40 years. Palace even had a true fairytale hero in Ian Wright, a young goal scorer who had been plucked from the obscurity of Sunday league football by an eagle-eyed Palace scout at the already senior age of 21. His loyalty to the club had already seen off big-money bids from more wealthy clubs, and even the fact that he had broken his leg twice that season failed to deter him from shining at Wembley.7 Held back as a substitute in deference to his injury, he was brought on with 20 minutes left and Palace 2-1 down.
Within three minutes he had equalized; within two minutes of extra time he had scored a magnificent goal that looked like bringing the cup home to south London. United pulled one back before the game was out, but even so, as the players ran a perfunctory lap of honor, I put my hands through the iron bars at the front of the seats, patted him on the shoulder and proclaimed him my hero. And I meant it.
A post-match party had been arranged by my hosts in central London which, as far as parties go, was a roaring success, but for the Palace supporters seemed ill-timed. Many were, like myself, a bundle of uncontrollable nerves, physically exhausted from the sheer energy expended in a day at Wembley, but still wired at the prospect of the replay. I finally collapsed a full 24 hours after getting up, still wearing my now sweat-stained Palace shirt, still with the eagle painted on my red and blue face; I cuddled up to my girlfriend on the living room floor knowing that regardless of the eventual outcome, one of my life's ambitions had been achieved. The day belonged to me as much as it did to Ian Wright, and no one who knows the FA Cup would ever disagree.
It was meant to be something of a holiday back home, but everything took a back seat to football. The Palace club answering machine announced that tickets would go on sale only to season ticket holders on Sunday, with limits on purchase, but confronted by an army who came straight back from Wembley and began camping outside, they merely opened up the box office and sold all of their initial 20,000 application on a virtual first-come-first-served. As I joined a number of bitter supporters that Sunday night at the ground, some simply laid down there and then to be first in line when a further supply was to turn up the next morning.
Rather than join them, Monday found me queueing outside Wembley's box office, where the remainder were going on sale at 9 a.m. I was there by 7, physically weak but emotionally strong and relieved to see only a small line ahead of me. A 16- year-old Palace fan stood behind me, missing a major end-of-school exam and having spent his entire savings on Palace's run; I was pleased to see he had his priorities right. The box office was sold out within an hour of opening, but by then I had four seats for the replay in my hand. The scalpers who immediately began selling freshly-purchased seats at vastly-inflated prices to working class Mancunians who were being forced to make the 400 mile round trip three times in five days, were simply pushed to the ground and removed of their wares. The police didn't intervene.
The replay was bound to be an anticlimax. The Saturday was British football's gala day with the world tuned in; the following Thursday the glamour disappeared along with the good will. There was no early rise and a meet in the pubs when they opened; it was a case of rushing out of work and a quick pint before the journey through rush hour amidst frustrated commuters. In the long cavernous tunnel leading from the Wembley subway stop to the ground, rival fans no longer shook hands; they shook fists as scuffles broke out. At the ground, the royal box was all but deserted (an insult to the loyalty of the travelling fans of both sides) and Palace, attempting to milk impressionable young fans for every penny of merchandising they could, took to the field in a bizarre yellow and black kit that made a mockery of the red and blue regalia. My mother, having had such a wonderful day on the Saturday, chose not to accept my offer of a free ticket, and my girlfriend, somewhat embarrassingly in the light of ticketless fans, now has to admit that her first football game was a Cup Final.
It was, in every respect, a return to the typically gritty English night game and, for Palace's still vociferous army, a disastrous return to the form we'd known and suffered. Our faithful boys, who had put four goals past the best side in the country in the semi-final and three past Scotland's national goalkeeper in the final to become the nation's favorite underdogs, never looked like scoring. The adrenaline that had brought them this far gradually slipped away, and although it was not deliberate, their aggressive defensive style came across as unpleasantly violent.
Manchester United scored halfway through the second half at which point their fans, till then disarmingly quiet, sensed victory and begun a chorus of singing that took them to the final whistle and a joint record seventh FA Cup Final victory. As the final whistle blew, I waited for the tears to come, but they didn't. Defiantly, I joined Palace fans in chanting ''We're proud of you'' and nodded silently when a lovely old lady from Manchester leant over from behind and told me, ''I know it's tough, but someone has to lose, dear.''
My best friend told my girlfriend to keep a suicide watch on me as he made his way back to south London. We voyaged back to the center of town on a slow-moving train where tension hung heavily in the air and even the Manchester United fans, frustrated at the expense of the constant travelling south when so much football is won by the north, couldn't raise a significant chant.
Walking from the station to the pub, I attempted to inject some happy memories into a morbid atmosphere. I told my girlfriend how I too had once been a Man Utd fan, and how in fact my first ever League match was when they came to Crystal Palace when I was seven. I would soon switch my allegiance to the home club, but on that occasion, I was propped up on a crash barrier among United 'fans, watching some of the greatest players in the world give Palace a sound thrashing. Although two members of England's World Cup-winning squad were playing, the star of the show was George Best. By his own admission a “'skinny streak of piss," he had left Belfast for Manchester in the mid-60s and stunned the world as a 17-year-old when he helped United win the European Cup at Wembley in one of the game's greatest showcases.
Nicknamed ''the fifth Beatie,'' George Best was the first and greatest player of a short-lived generation of flashiness and style. Off the pitch he enjoyed a playboy lifestyle that would eventually bring him down. On the field, he was the equivalent of Muhammad Ali, visibly taunting the opposition, capable of rounding every player on the pitch, of scoring from every conceivable angle, and always with such flair that he was every schoolboy's hero . Unfortunately, his extra-curricular activities won out; he missed too many games wrapped up in bed with Miss World and too many training sessions with a hangover. He fell from grace and despite a stint in the short-lived North American Soccer League, ended his playing career an embarrassment. A retrospective tv show once asked him if he hadn't succumbed to temptations, whether he would have been the greatest player in the world, and he calmly replied ''I believe I always was.''
As I related all of this to my girlfriend, I cheered up. Entering the pub and seeing some United fans in their colors didn't even matter as they bought me a drink and admitted that the Saturday had belonged to the underdogs, Palace. We had been in the pub not a minute, however, when all eyes switched our way; behind us, as if on cue, in walked George Best. Noticing my red-and-blue striped face (it would be impossible not to), he offered immediate consolation - “You were unlucky tonight, lad'' he said as if I had actually been playing. So acrimonious was his parting from Manchester United that I wondered whether he hadn't wished for a Palace victory.
Such is George Best's influence on my generation that New Order named a song after him,8 and The Wedding Present their first album likewise. And I, who had been waiting to break down and collapse ever since the final whistle, raised a smile and asked him to autograph my ticket. As he obliged, I reminded him of that day back at Selhurst Park almost 18 years ago, how magnificent he had been. Did he remember it? No, he replied, there were too many memories. His face momentarily became sad and I left him alone. .
In September, George Best. published his autobiography and was invited on Britain's leading chat show. Whether he fell or was pushed, he went on air completely drunk and had to be forcibly removed.9 Perhaps the memory of being a wasted legend was too much for him to take sober. The memories for me are fonder, of years of ups and downs rewarded by taking part in our club's greatest ever day. As Liverpool's most celebrated, now-deceased manager Bill Shankly (who, incidentally, had a Smiths song named after him) replied with shock when asked if football was really a matter of life and death, ''No, not at all. It's much more than that.”10
Both previous matches were against Manchester United. Today it is Manchester City. Much as I love the city of Manchester, that love will not be evident today in my loyalties.
I attended every round of the 1994 World Cup. How I got my ticket for the Final is probably worth of a post in itself.
NBC made a championship worthy move when they hired Rebecca Lowe to anchor the EPL coverage. She just happens to be a Palace fan. I gather she is in London this weekend having her own priorities in place.
According to the Guardian this past week in 2025 it is closer to 750 clubs.
There were lots of first and lasts about this FA Cup Final. The Semi-Finals were the first to be televised live in the UK; the Final was the first all-seated at Wembley; it was also the last to go to replay.
If so, that was an enormous outlay. My ticket for the Final in 2025 is less expensive.
The second time he broke his leg was just six weeks before the FA Cup Final. By rights, he should not have been fit enough that quickly even to have made the bench.
A slight exaggeration: they composed the theme song for the TV show “Best and Marsh,” which starred George Best and another of the “flash” players of the 1970s, Rodney Marsh.
The Internet allows for fact-checking in a way it did not in 1990. A short clip on YouTube, as relived by the host Terry Wogan, certainly confirms the drunkenness, but not his being forcibly removed.
Fortunately, I got this quote near enough right. https://www.friendsofliverpool.com/2023/10/bill-shanklys-most-famous-football-quotes
Sorry, are you referring to George Best, the Fulham legend?
What a result for your Boys in the FA Cup. Enjoy the victory laps. Well earned!!!