THE DAY WE GOT OUR GAME BACK

Tielemans’ stunning strike created another piece of glory for Leicester, but it was worth so much more in front of noise and passion of fans

SOME FA Cup finals occupy an enduring place in English culture. The White Horse Final of 1923, the Matthews Final in 1953, Sunderland’s victory over Leeds United in 1973 with Jim Montgomery’s famous double save. They all symbolise things we love about English football: popular fervour, individual brilliance, the joy of a giant-killing.

Those finals still move us now, and in years to come they will be joined in football folklore by this FA Cup final between Chelsea and Leicester City. If we are to give it a name, we could do worse than the Fans’ Final because this was the moment when, after all the pain and disruption of Covid-19, football started to feel like football again.

After all the ghost games, after all those disembodied matches we have watched in echoing, empty stadiums, when all that is to be heard are the shouts and cries of the players and the exhortations of the substitutes and staff in the stands, we got our game back. Leicester City won this match and that was a magnificent, moving story on its own, but there were 21,000 winners inside Wembley and millions more watching on television.

This was a game that had everything but it was worth so much more because it was full of the noise and the passion and the joy and the despair that fans bring to our national sport. Football without fans is not nothing but it is only a miserable fraction of the sport we love.

What a story this was for Leicester City, who have never won football’s most famous competition before, have lost four times in the final and had not appeared in it since 1969, when they lost to Manchester City and a solitary goal by Neil Young. After their fairy-tale Premier League title win in 2016, this was another moment to treasure.

High in the Wembley stands on the top tier, a giant flag had been draped over the seats with a photo of Leicester’s late owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who died in a helicopter crash in 2018. ‘Our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them,’ the words next to his image said and how Leicester battled to bear them out. After the game, his son danced on the pitch with the Leicester players, tears in his eyes.

Leicester won this match — against a Chelsea side who will play in the Champions League final in a fortnight and were strong favourites — with a brilliant strike from man of the match Youri Tielemans. They also needed one of the greatest Cup final saves, from Kasper Schmeichel, to keep out a shot from Mason Mount and the intervention of VAR to save them from a scrambled Chelsea equaliser.

What a wonderful, moving evening. Never had Abide With Me been sung with such feeling. Never had sitting in match traffic on the North Circular Road felt so reassuring. Never had seeing Leicester’s players throwing themselves to the turf in unrestrained joy at the final whistle felt so stirring. Never had the despair of the Chelsea players and supporters felt so visceral. Never had the rescue of English football from the prospect of a European Super League, which hates the success of clubs like Leicester, seemed so uplifting.

When that final whistle went, Leicester fulfilled a lifelong dream of Gary Lineker, who said before the game that he had been fantasising all his broadcasting life of being able to say on air that his boyhood team had won the FA Cup. He had measured out his life in occasions like this, too. His trip to see the 1969 final was the first time he had been to London. Now there was another occasion that will live with him and everyone who was here for ever. Maybe we had started to take the FA Cup for granted in the time before Covid but tradition seems even more precious now. And so the biggest crowd anywhere in Britain since March 2020 became the latest landmark in the country’s attempt to emerge from the darkness of the coronavirus crisis.

The match had not started well. It took 15 minutes for either side to fashion even a half-chance and it was Leicester who created it. Timothy Castagne ran on to a ball that caught out Marcos Alonso and crossed first time for Jamie Vardy, who had peeled away from his marker 10 yards out. Vardy hit it first time but Reece James produced a fine block to thwart the danger. Midway through the half, Mount, who has been one of the revelations of this season, span away from Caglar Soyuncu and ran away from Wilfred Ndidi before pulling his shot from the edge of the area just wide. Mount created a threat again five minutes later when he raced on to a pass to cross from the goal-line. The ball flew across the area and when it was turned back in by Thiago Silva, Timo Werner flicked it on and Cesar Azpilicueta came within a hair’s breadth of applying the finishing touch.

Three minutes before the break, Leicester went close again when Luke Thomas, who had been outstanding on the left with his energy and pace and a steady supply of curling passes into the inside-left channel, whipped a free-kick into the box. Soyuncu stole in front of his marker and tried to glance it past Kepa Arrizabalaga but his contact was too heavy and the ball flew wide. On the stroke of the