Some FA Cup Finals are remembered (all the ones in the 70s, 80s and 90s and before that too) and some are forgotten (every one since 2007) but one of the most famous and over-played of them all, a game you've seen even if you haven't seen it, is the 1988 FA Cup Final.
Aldo missed a penalty and future Sligo Rovers manager, Lawrie Sanchez scored the winner but ye know all that.
What ye mightn't know is how Wimbledon prepared for said final. The night before the final they stayed in 5-star hotel called Cannizaro House. So far, so un-Wimbledon.
However, manager Bobby Gould was seized by the justifiable fear that his feral gang of pranksters and messers would be somehow ejected from such a plush place. And so, in a nod to the prevailing scientific wisdom at the time, he told them to 'clear off down the pub'.
As Sanchez and co relate in the Telegraph, veteran Alan Cork (who a few years later would grow the biggest beard ever seen at Wembley for Sheffield United's cup run) wrestled some money off 'the gaffer' for the first round. The pub itself, according to the landlord, marked the spot where the first Wimbledon team who played on the common (it's worth recalling that Wimbledon had only been in the Football League since 1977) used to get changed.
Can you feel the FA Cup romance?
