FA Cup would be small consolation for Manchester United, Chelsea
Manchester United play Chelsea in the FA Cup final on Saturday, but both clubs have had, in their own ways, disappointing seasons.
It has been a long time since an FA Cup final felt as (what’s even the right word here?) inconsequential, disappointing, mildly embarrassing as the one between Manchester United and Chelsea on Saturday. It’s not that the Cup final isn’t, even now, a day, a prize worth savoring. It’s that this particular final has been stripped, by the various disappointments that preceded it, of the pageantry that usually allows us to pretend, for a day at least, this trophy is more than what it has, sadly, become: an afterthought.
Perhaps that’s harsh. Though if it is, it’s far harsher on United, who put together a good, possibly even a very good, Premier League campaign that has been made to look ordinary next City’s record-breaking one. Jose Mourinho’s side finished on 81 points, more than the second-place team in 12 of the 23 seasons since the league switched to 20 teams, and good enough to win the title in six of those. They may well have done even better if they still had something to play for in the final months of the season. An 80-plus point league campaign and an FA Cup would hardly be a disaster.
Still, not all is well at Old Trafford, as most obviously seen in the manner of their exit from the Champions League, in which they lost in the round of 16 to a Sevilla side that are likely to finish seventh in La Liga. The score ended 2-1 on aggregate, thanks largely to the brilliance of David de Gea, but United were comprehensively outplayed. It would be foolish to judge a team based on two games alone, but it must be said the games were an excellent distillation of what’s wrong with Mourinho’s side — they lack ambition in attack, they lack quality in defense (outside of de Gea) and they are, at their worst, terrible to watch.
In the aftermath of the defeat, Mourinho launched into a wild, 12-minute tirade, outlining the many reasons for his team’s failure, from underperforming players to a lack of spending in the transfer market. Broadly, he was right — City were in a much stronger position than United when he took over — but the speech would have been a lot more convincing had United lost to, say, Bayern Munich, or even if they had lost to Sevilla in any way that wasn’t the way they actually did: uninspired, slow, entirely devoid of attacking ambition.
And so the FA Cup, which would be Mourinho’s third trophy in two seasons at Old Trafford, certainly matters, and would mark a positive end to a season, despite its problems, that was an improvement on the last (and it’s hard to ask more from a manager than for improvement every year). But it will do little to gloss over the deeper issues, or to ease the tension between Mourinho’s methods and the identity of the club he’s trying to make his own. If it would be foolish to judge United on those two matches against Sevilla, it would be even worse to judge them on this one against Chelsea.
The Blues, for their part, are in even worse shape, having missed out on next season’s Champions League. They head into the summer with questions surrounding several key players, chief among them Eden Hazard, and their manager, Antonio Conte, who has spent much of the year launching thinly veiled (and occasionally explicit) barbs at the lack of support his club have given him in the transfer market. With Thomas Tuchel off to PSG and Roberto Mancini in charge of Italy, however, Conte may hope to stick around a while longer.
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This sort of drama has been a feature at Chelsea since Roman Abramovich bought the club in the early 2000s. The difference now, of course, is that they can no longer sleepwalk into the top four. The Manchester clubs are richer (or at least more willing to spend), and Liverpool and Tottenham appear, increasingly, much smarter. Even if Arsenal don’t get their act together under a new manager, the Blues may have to get used to an on-again off-again relationship with the Champions League.
This, then, is the context in which Chelsea and United meet in the FA Cup final. It’s a trophy, a trophy both managers will be desperate to win. But as they meet at Wembley on Saturday — a weekend after Manchester City became the first side ever to reach 100 Premier League points and the weekend before Liverpool meet Real Madrid in the Champions League final — it will be hard to avoid the sense they are competing for a consolation prize, and harder still to say whether it might actually console them.