I met up with EddieC and we wasted an entire afternoon watching the dullest match in the history of fooball, ever!
Hardly a cracker like Liverpool v The Hammers eh?
Mark Lawrensons comment of £800 million and they can't grow grass is reflected in this piece by Richard Williams from The Gaurdian.
£800m spent and the pitch still plays like a sponge
Wembley's poor playing surface ruined the game on the new stadium's historic day.
Forget the vaulting arch, quite possibly visible from the moon. Forget the retractable roof and the extra nine centimetres of room in every padded seat. Forget the refurbished Tube stations, the 688 catering outlets, the 2,618 lavatories for the fans and the individual hairdryers for the players. All that really matters about a football stadium is the pitch, and in that respect the new Wembley, on its great day, was a disaster.
"A good-looking pitch that's strong-wearing and fast to recover," the head groundsman promised. He said nothing about preparing a surface on which the two best teams in England could produce the kind of football to justify the build-up to a historic day. What he produced was, in the worst sense, a classic Wembley pitch: the grass had been given a No3 cut where a No1 was required, and was left dry in the hours before the kick-off, which meant that a ball played along the ground would hold up rather than run.
So when Manchester United kicked off the 2007 FA Cup final on Saturday, they spent the first minute warily passing the ball around inside their own half, simply trying to get the measure of the spongy, pace-destroying, strength-sapping surface on which they were expected to deliver their very best football. And then, when they surrendered possession, Chelsea spent the next minute doing exactly the same. It was a scenario that has been played out in Wembley finals - the traditional cagey opening - since time immemorial, but on this occasion it lasted for 45 minutes so featureless as to make the recent cricket World Cup feel like your favourite band's greatest-hits anthology.
As much as anything that might have appeared on Sir Alex Ferguson's blackboard in midweek, that explained why Paul Scholes spent most of the match in a withdrawn position, aiming long diagonal balls over the head of Chelsea's right-back. It looked good, because Scholes hits an exquisite long pass, but it achieved little and it was certainly no substitute for the kind of high-speed one-touch interplay that distinguished Ferguson's latest title-winners for much of the season.
Faced with such a fundamental barrier to their natural game, United failed to adjust. Poor Wayne Rooney, lacking the kind of support he received earlier in the season from Louis Saha, or much in the way of inspiration from Cristiano Ronaldo, ran himself into the accursed turf, to no avail.
Chelsea, whose natural game is more robust and less susceptible to fine tuning, deserved their win simply because, in the dying minutes of extra-time, they produced the game's one moment of genuine collective artistry and accuracy, a carefully constructed move involving Salomon Kalou, Mikel John Obi, Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard, culminating in Drogba's darting run, superb adjustment and beautifully delicate scoring touch. But it was as much out of context as a diamond on a dunghill.
Was there another factor responsible for destroying the spectacle? Earlier this month Eric Cantona told a French journalist that Ferguson's last pre-match instruction to his team was always the same: "And now enjoy the game. Have fun." Here, by contrast, are the words with which Jose Mourinho prepared Chelsea for Saturday's challenge: "I asked the players, 'Do you want to enjoy the game, or do you want to enjoy after the game?' They said, 'After the game.'"
So he prepared them to neutralise United's quick counter-attacks by getting men behind the ball whenever they lost possession. Pragmatic, tactically astute, carried out to the last detail, this was a performance of which the 2004 Porto side would have been proud. Hardly a surprise, then, that - in Mourinho's own words - "it was not a very enjoyable game", although United's failure to break down the opposition's system meant that they had to share the blame for the poverty of the entertainment.
As for the prefatory spectacle on this unique afternoon, there was an undeniable majesty in the sight and sound of 90,000 people gathered for a great occasion. But the architecture of the £800m stadium - located half a mile from England's biggest branch of IKEA - looks a bit flat-pack, with little apart from the arch and the sheer scale to differentiate it from other new grounds, reawakening the regret that Lord Foster was unable to find a way to integrate the old twin towers into his plan as anything other than rubble for the foundations.
The parade of heroes from the past half-century of Cup finals was a fine idea, but it needed to be executed with greater conviction and panache. From Peter McParland, Roy Hartle and Bill Slater through Denis Law, Ian St John and Peter Lorimer to Ricardo Villa, Mark Hughes and Marcel Desailly, each of the great men walked alone down one already crowded touchline before disappearing, while the crowd's generally muted reaction to anyone without a connection to Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge conveyed a general ignorance of the game's history. Similarly, Prince William's short speech was drowned by yobbish chanting from the red-shirted end, while the mass indifference that greeted the singing of Abide With Me by Lesley Garrett and Sarah Brightman proved that this is one tradition which deserves to be consigned to the past.
Along, of course, with the notion that a Wembley pitch should present a technical test not faced by England's top teams on any other day in the season. Even the players of Brazil, who arrive to face England in the new stadium's first international match on June 1, would have had trouble demonstrating their skills on Saturday's surface, a handsome-looking thing but surely the most frustrating to play on since the competitors in the Horse of the Year Show ploughed up the old stadium's turf a few days before the 1970 final. You could only imagine Arsène Wenger looking on in gratitude that his short-passing team had not been required to perform on such a stage.
Perhaps by the time Chelsea and Manchester United reconvene for the Community Shield the groundsman will have learnt his lesson. But the nature of Saturday's match, and its outcome in particular, will only have deepened and intensified this modern arch-rivalry. Come August, don't bet on either side being told to go out and have fun.
At least someone scored and put us out of our misery, I contemplated taking up knitting 15mins into this game!
