My earliest memory of the FA Cup is from the 1980 final when West Ham played Arsenal. The excitement of the day was largely because it was a rare live game on TV. Today we have ubiquitous live games beamed from every corner of the globe, so few things mark my age more starkly to my kids than the idea that one game a year was live on TV, apart perhaps from the concept of writing actual letters, which makes me sound like a character from a Brontë novel.
Those technicoloured Saturdays are so vividly remembered because the normal TV schedule was replaced by a full-day football extravaganza, roving reporters outside team hotels, a celebrity edition of a Question of Sport, the growled rendition of each team’s FA Cup song, all before the whistle to start the game had been blown.
