Frank Keating

Football’s coming home

By way of domestic overture, Chelsea play Manchester United this Saturday in the FA Cup final, and it would be fitting if a compelling show marked the return of the ancient fixture to its traditional home.

With no international competition this summer, football’s curtain comes down with a clamorous abruptness in Athens on Wednesday, when Liverpool meet AC Milan in the final of the European Cup. By way of domestic overture, Chelsea play Manchester United this Saturday in the FA Cup final, and it would be fitting if a compelling show marked the return of the ancient fixture to its traditional home. Certainly each team has it in them to produce a memorable Wembley premiere.

The vicissitudes of Wembley’s construction and appalling overspend have provided a sorry saga; today’s relief at business resumed merges with a keen curiosity about the aura and ambience of English football’s reclaimed amphitheatre. The new Wembley was ‘more Canary Wharf than cathedral’, pronounced Tom Dart in the Times the other day, adding nicely that the unveiled building plays so dull, safe and solid that ‘it could have been designed by the architects firm McClaren & Eriksson Associates’. Will the players today colourfully perk up that assessment? Meanwhile, as the actual builders, Multiplex, recount costs and lick wounds, the catering bods obviously have no worries about bottom-line profits; for the feeding of the multitude it’s rip-off Britain as usual — £4.50 for a single hot dog, I’m told, and £7.50 for a slice of fish and a scoop of (what used to be called ‘four-penn’orth’) of chips. Still, the new Wembley does, apparently, have 2,618 working toilets, which I reckon is about 2,600 more than its crumbling old forerunner could boast.

In football terms, Wembley kicks off with a keen little local grudge match. The Olympic stadium in Athens on Wednesday night is the stage for a far more tumultuous opera. Liverpool must look to their most imperturbably red-blooded resolve against the same AC Milan they so humiliatingly sandbagged in the final of 2005 in Istanbul, when they ravishingly reversed a 3-0 half-time deficit.

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