We’re Up For the Cup – If For Nothing Else

SO it’s all about the FA Cup. Reds-Chavski. Good against evil – the final frontier. This is where it really matters. The lads will rise to the occasion. They always do.

We’re a Cup team. Premiership Schmemiership. OK, we haven’t done too well recently (well, relegation position on 2012 form, if you’re going to be pedantic). West Brom hadn’t won at Anfield since 1967. Fulham had never won there at all. Now they both have.

But Saturday will be different. Not being cynical here – it will. We beat the Chavs where it counts, don’t we? OK – there was the odd glitch, like when the then-unsettled Stevie G equalised for them with an own goal (which got the scum chanting “You’ve scored your first goal for Chelsea”) and we went on to lose 3-1. And that Champions League (ah! the nostalgia!) semi-final, when I stayed up till 4 a.m. in a bar in Thailand to watch the heroic own-goal by John Arne Riise which put the rentboys through, and put my son in a catatonic trance for literally minutes…

But we usually have the beating of them. (And yes, Luis Garcia’s goal was over the line.) We took them at Stamford Bridge in November, didn’t we? When Glen Johnson in the 87th minute decided it was boring being Glen Johnson and he’d rather try being Luis Suárez instead?

And I suppose it’s hardly unnatural that we should be resting key players for Premiership games in the run-up to the final (after all, we don’t want any silly buggers getting sent off, do we?) So we send on reserve players against Fulham, like, er, Andy Carroll, and he completely dominates in the box, as usual, but couldn’t find the goal with a bleeding sat-nav, again as usual. And it’s always useful to have yet another shot at working out exactly what Jordan Henderson is for.

Meanwhile, the odd real first-teamer, like Martin Skrtel, gets a go, and we’ll just have to hope his unerring eye for goal is pointed in the right direction on Saturday.
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But anyway, it doesn’t matter, as we’ll have Luis Suárez. Of course now he’ll be able to repeat his spectacular performance at Carrow Road every week (What do you say to a guy who can’t hit a barn door one week and slots an inch-perfect lob from 50 yards the next?) Of course we couldn’t risk him against Fulham, as he might have said something to Hangeland or Riise which sounded dodgy in Norwegian. And I’m sure the dressing room will have made it absolutely clear to Luis that if Torres scores more goals than he does he’ll be strung up under the Shankly Gates.

But actually it’s going to come down to the same man it always comes down to when push comes to shove. Stand up Steven Gerrard. You’ve never failed to do it yet. Just after the 2006 Cup Final I’d arranged to have a West Ham-supporting mate to stay. I let him know that he was in for a fair amount of derision. When he turned up he simply said “The better team was beaten by the better player”. And I couldn’t argue. Let’s hope, even if the Chavs do put in a good performance on Saturday, that there’ll be someone saying that on Sunday. I wouldn’t bet against it.

And let’s hope that next season, whoever the manager is, he’ll be able to get a bit more out of some rather good players, on a weekly basis rather than just in the Cup limelight. And good luck to England under their not-quite-good-enough-for-Liverpool manager.

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