Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
CARABAO CUP FINAL LIGHT YEARS & BILLIONS OF POUNDS AGO..
..Actually it was 1986 when Chelsea and City last faced off at Wembley (just 24 HOURS after playing league games) and EVERYTHING has changed since then
DRAW the curtain, nurse, and fetch the smelling salts – the patients are feeling faint.
On Pep Guardiola and Maurizio Sarri’s notes at the bottom of the bed, it says the last time Chelsea and Manchester City met in a Wembley final they had both played top-flight games 24 hours earlier.
City had just recovered from 2-0 down at Old Trafford to earn a point in the Manchester derby, and their team bus was pelted with pies as they set off for the Twin Towers straight afterwards, while Chelsea had chiselled out a 1-0 win at Southampton.
And each manager made only ONE change to his starting lineup at Wembley the next day.
Fetch matron, nurse – the patients are delirious. They don’t believe it.
For big-budget managers who use rest and rotation as lame-duck excuses, or pampered millionaire stars who struggle to play twice a week – let alone two games in a weekend – the 1986 Full Members Cup final was pure heresy.
The Full what? The competition was invented to fill the gap left by English clubs’ ban from Europe.
It was royally shunned by fans until 67,236 turned up to see Chelsea edge home 5-4, with the goals shared between hat-trick hero David Speedie and two-goal Colin Lee (both left).
If there are another nine goals tomorrow, pessimists among the contingent from SW6 fear most of them will be at one end.
But for John Hollins, the Chelsea manager at the showpiece 33 years ago, that weekend confirmed his longheld suspicion that rotation was for tumble-dryers or rotisserie chickens.
“Yes, we played a competitive game on the Saturday, and there might have been a few stiff legs, but it never crossed my mind to make unforced changes,” he said.
“It wasn’t the Mickey Mouse Cup, as some people were inclined to call it, and it wasn’t a day out at Disneyland. It was a proper game of football and we got to lift a cup.
“I might have let the boys have one beer if they wished the night before, but I remember telling them, ‘We’re going to Wembley, I want to win and so do you – because some of us might not get another chance’.
“Speedie (above) was a real handful, always nibbling at centre-backs, and if they annoyed him it was like poking a wasps’ nest. He could swarm all over them.”
For City keeper Eric Nixon, the double-header was “surreal”. Before the year was out, he would create history by playing on loan at clubs in all four divisions of the Football League in the same season – Wolves, Bradford City, Southampton and Carlisle.
But Nixon recalls: “As a Manchester lad, it was my dream to play for City in the derby against United and in a Wembley final – you just don’t expect to do both in the same weekend.
“We must have been tired after the game at Old Trafford, because the lads had run their socks off to come back from 2-0 down.
“But we gave ourselves a mountain to climb when we found ourselves 5-1 down at Wembley the next day.
“Three goals in the last five minutes after Paul Simpson came off the bench made it interesting, but the game finished too early for us.
“For a lad who had stopped off on the way home from his day job of cleaning and polishing cars, and walked in through the front door at Maine Road to ask Manchester City for a trial three years earlier, I was living the dream.”
Hollins, now 72, made a record 714 appearances in the top flight for Chelsea, QPR and Arsenal.
“When I watch football now, I don’t see many happy people,” he lamented.
“They look miserable, which begs the question: If all that money doesn’t make you happy, what are you playing the game for?”