The wind came scudding in from Wembley Way and the sky was 50 shades of grey.
But Bob Stokoe’s smile was wide enough to illuminate the old stadium - long before anyone had the idea of sticking floodlights in there.
While many of you have never have heard of Stokoe no Sunderland fan will ever forget him.
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That gap-toothed image of their former mentor, his hands raised to the air, trilby hat balancing delicately on his head, is ensconced in football history.
It’s also carved into stone, a statue of their 1973 FA Cup winning manager proudly placed outside the Stadium of Light.
Every new generation of fans gets to see it, to stop and stare and ask a parent why it is there.
You can be sure as hell that no mum or dad will answer by saying, ‘because this was the man, our kid, who guided us to sixth in the old Second Division in 1973’.
Some of us are old fashioned enough to care about things like this, old fashioned enough to believe the game should still be about glory rather than accountancy.
We look at the draw for the fifth round of the FA Cup and note the absence of 11 Premier League teams from it and wonder why they even bother entering.
You look at the selection policies of managers and it makes you weep. Arsenal made eight changes for last Friday’s Cup game at Manchester City and lost; Fulham made seven changes to their side for their game with Sunderland and were held to a draw at home; West Brom made five changes for their trip to Bristol and promptly got thumped.
Prior to then ‘top man’ Frank Lampard rotated his squad for Everton’s third round Cup tie at Old Trafford, making four changes to his starting XI. They lost 3-1 that night. He lost his job within a fortnight.
That attitude brought to mind Alan Pardew’s take on the FA Cup when he was at Newcastle United. In four campaigns as boss on Tyneside, Pardew never took The Magpies further than the fourth round, making it clear the league was Mike Ashley’s priority.
But what is Pardew’s Tyneside legacy now? Put it this way, there aren’t any supporter groups setting up GoFundMe pages to gather the money required to erect a statue of him outside St James’ Park.
At least Pardew was up front about what he did and why he did it.
Contrast this with Jesse Marsch, the Leeds United manager, who told reporters that he always took ‘the FA Cup seriously because he has always known it was an opportunity for glory.’
Then he named his Cup team to play Accrington Stanley with eight changes to it; the words on the team sheet telling us a lot more than the ones that came out of Marsch’s mouth.
They just don’t get it, these managers.
They make statements like the one Mick McCarthy delivered prior to Blackpool’s defeat last weekend. “The reality is that I have been brought in to help keep the club in the League.”
Well, there’s another reality. A manager can worry about two things, his payslip or his legacy.
He can work to keep a team in the league, can sweat over finishing ninth rather than tenth in the Premier League, knowing there may be a bonus on the back of the higher-placing.
But beyond his bank manager, who cares?
They won’t name a stand after him like Ipswich Town did when Bobby Robson passed away in 2009. They didn’t happen on the back of Robson’s Ipswich finishing 18th in 1978 rather because this was the year they won their one and only FA Cup.
Leeds, too, have won the Cup just once and to mark the fortieth anniversary of their solitary triumph, they unveiled a statue to Don Revie, the mastermind of that 1972 win. “It’s a great honour and tribute to my father and that wonderful team,” said Revie’s son, Duncan.
Isn’t that worth more than an end-of-season bonus?
These people, these managers, these money-obsessed owners, need to realise what men like Revie, Stokoe and Robson achieved and that it can’t just be measured in trophies or ticks in a win/loss column.
Those Leeds, Sunderland and Ipswich sides represented their city, their town, their community, carrying their hopes, shouldering their dreams.
You can’t dismiss that with a stroke of a pen when you write out a starting XI.
You can’t bow to a chairman’s pressure.
You have to stand up for everything that is great about sport, everything that made you fall in love with football in the first place.
You look at the travelling support Reading brought to Old Trafford last weekend, the speed with which Leeds sold out their ticket allocation for their tie at Accrington, the passionate reaction to Newcastle’s EFL semi-final cup win, and you rediscover what you already knew about Cup culture.
The game is about fans and community, not managerial bonuses for finishing seventh.
That extra £2 million in prize money won’t lift the spirits of a town. YouTube videos of the 2022/23 season accounts won’t get millions of views decades from now.
But a Cup final winning goal might. An open top bus ride might. There’ll always be space for statues of Cup winning heroes outside stadiums but there’ll never be one built for an accountant.
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