The People of VICE Share Their FA Cup Final Memories

Let's get this one out in the open right away: this year's FA Cup Final is not especially exciting for anyone who doesn't support Arsenal or Chelsea. It's obvious enough and now we've said it.

What's with the pessimism? See, wereas in recent years we've had the intrigue of a smaller Premier League side making it to the big game, this season it's a pair of bona fide titans with almost no neutral kudos. It's sort of magic, in the way that a bad children's magician with a hangover and some questionable stains on his shirt is magic. That is: it claims to be magic and has literature supporting this, but even a fairly bright nine-year-old can see that it's not. It's just Chelsea vs. Arsenal. It's probably going to routine 2-0 win for Antonio Conte's boys.

And so we turned to the place where all the best things are found – the past – and asked a few VICE staff to recall their most memorable FA Cup Final moments. This is what we got.

I was too young to remember, let alone attend, our first FA Cup Final of my lifetime in 1990. That didn't stop me from growing up knowing all about it, though. Our manager heading into the final in 2016, Alan Pardew, had scored in the semis to beat Liverpool 4-3 before we went on to lose against United at Wembley. 'It's like history's repeating itself,' I heard one chap say in a pub near Covent Garden before the game.

Sadly, he was right.

Some of my best memories of that day are actually in the build up to the game. We got to Covent Garden and it was absolutely flooded with Palace fans, balloons everywhere, red and blue smoke filling the air with young and old standing side by side drinking cans of indistinguishable beer. There was a guy running around in a red and blue shirt that I hadn't seen before – he was in full Dominos uniform and was crowd surfing, being covered in beer while the masses chanted: "You're getting sacked in the morning." 'This is what the FA Cup is all about,' I thought to myself.

I'd never been as excited for a game and, equally, never so nervous. I was optimistic and so were my mates. Okay, Pardew's recent record in the league had been appalling, but we were still backing him and were confident that on the biggest stage, our passion and noise would drag them over the line.

We were walking around the ground beforehand talking about good omens when suddenly I realised I was queuing next to Neil Shipperley, a Palace legend who scored in the 2004 play-off final against West Ham to take us up under Iain Dowie. "Alright Neil?" I said, as if he'd recognise me. "What do you reckon the score will be, mate?"

Neil replied with a grin on his face: "Well, it's got to be 1-0 to Palace again, doesn't it?" That was good enough for me – if Neil Shipperley thought we'd re-enact 2004 and win 1-0, then we were definitely going to do it. I grabbed a beer and we took our seats in the upper stand at Wembley.

The game started off cagily until Connor Wickham scored a perfectly legitimate goal – or so we thought. Mark Clattenburg – who has since admitted he made the wrong decision and run away to Saudi Arabia – pulled Chris Smalling back for a foul when he should have played advantage and let us score. The game continued as a stalemate until the 78th minute when Jason Puncheon, who had been inexplicably left on the bench for most of the match, scored to send our end into raptures. Neil Shipperley was right – Palace were going to be crowned FA Cup winners, our first piece of major silverware EVER.

We'd barely had time to celebrate our goal when United went up the other end and scored through Juan Mata. From then on the game felt lost, even when United went down to 10 men in extra time after Smalling was deservedly sent off for a second yellow. They still looked more confident and physically up to the task – scoring and then conceding so quickly can knock your confidence, and we were a team lacking confidence at that time. As my Newcastle-supporting friend described it, we'd been "Pardewed".

Looking back, it was still an amazing day and I would do it all again. I just hope that next time we get to an FA Cup Final, we don't play Man United.

Obviously my life is studded with once-yearly FA Cup Final memories: watching Chelsea beat those cheating scum Middlesbrough 2–0 in 1997, knowing deep down that in a true and honourable world they would be tonking Chesterfield with a first-minute Di Matteo goal instead; Arsenal–Liverpool 2001, when even my football agnostic dad was yelling about how good Michael Owen was that day; that back-and-forth Liverpool–West Ham final in 2006, Paul Konchesky fucking up a cross so badly he scored, Steven Gerrard absolutely Steven Gerrarding it at the death, an actually entertaining penalty shootout, the best FA Cup final for neutrals of my lifetime; but personally my best FA Cup final memories are from 2014, when Arsenal ended a nine-year silverware duck by beating Hull 3–2.

There is something double-memorable about games where you come back to win. Something about climbing up out of a trough of depair into high euphoria that makes the emotions and memories burn brighter, stick longer. Arsenal, in the opening eight minutes, conspired to absolutely Arsenal it up: some of the worst zonal defending you've ever seen allowed James Chester to fluke a Tom Huddlestone shot past Fabianski; four minutes later, the entire Hull defence amassed around Curtis Davies to bundle in a second. Two down in eight minutes to a Steve Bruce-managed side playing 3–5–2: can you imagine that feeling? Can you imagine ever being in such a dark place in your entire life?

But then Santi Carzola (Santi, I love you and I have to let you know) belted in a freekick, and then the rest of the squad perked up a bit, turning the screw for an hour until Koscielny pirouetted the ball in from close range, after which the game cruised into 30 minutes of extra time (by this point I have to admit I was stunningly pissed). And then, deep into ET, Aaron Ramsey capped his one good season by scoring an intricately-worked peach: Arsenal, patient, picked their way through the by now 15-man Hull defence, Giroud flicked a backheel back towards the #16, and with a delicate step he pelted it past McGregor. I was in a pub in Stoke Newington, deep Arsenal territory, which promptly erupted: beer arcing through the air, lads in mid-nineties replica kits doing a sort of forward-facing poznan, more beers, more beers. I ended up briefly going missing for an hour after telling my mates I had to go home and feed the cat, and instead going to Tesco and eating two (two.) Meal Deals and then falling asleep for a bit in front of a police station, before going back in to the pub and drinking more than I can remember and not getting home until 2am. There have been other victories since – Aston Villa, a year later, was a routine win remarkable for Jack Wilshere's bucket hat piss-up the next day – but that one was the sweetest.

I've watched untold FA Cup matches involving Southampton, but our truest moment of glory came before I was born - 1976's victory, Bobby Stokes' offside goal, all of that malarky. Been playing catch-up in my own lifetime - and no, winning the Johnstone's Paint Trophy doesn't quite cut it.

In 2003, though - before shit got really dark for a while down on the south coast - we had a chance for that same silverware. Different opponents in Arsenal and a different ground, with Wembley still being redeveloped.

And, from what I recall, we put in a very respectable shift in Cardiff - against a team that the very next year would become the legendary Invincibles. We lost 1-0 - I remember it being a scrappy goal by Robert Pirès, but on watching it back it was a solid slug of a shot into the corner, no messing about.

I wasn't there - my now-wife was living in Bournemouth, and we were out for the afternoon with her parents, my in-laws today. My wife and her mum went shopping for whatever they wanted; my father-in-law and I, meanwhile, retreated to a pub to watch the kicking. And it's here that I experienced my first - and to date only - moment of pure mortification in front of him.

It's to be expected. There's a beer in your hand. Your team's on the TV. There's a trophy at stake (we qualified for Europe even in defeat, mind, because of Arsenal's second-placed league finish). The blood's running a little hot. Pirès rifled it in. I burst. In front of the politest, quietest, calmest man I think I've ever met: just a raging torrent of obscenities. All over in a flash, relatively speaking, but all the same, I can still picture myself right there, rooted to the spot in the wake of having someone's opinion of me go crashing to the floor.

At least, that's how it was for a few seconds more - ultimately, he laughed, we laughed, and we lost (good on you, Ashley, for sticking to the post). But yeah, losing your head in front of your girlfriend's dad, who I don't think I've heard utter a single curse, ever, in over 20 years of knowing him. Not cool at all. In some way, I think I'm still apologising for it.

As a Stupid American, I have never understood the FA Cup. I know what it is and how it works, of course, but I don't understand its importance other than "it's old." As the first soccer fan in my family, I had no adult figure to explain to me at a young age why I should revere the tournament and hold it only a notch below the league title in prestige. I was pretty much left to my own to figure out why announcers were cawing on about the "magic of the Cup" for what looked to me like months of comically uneven match-ups that, once every hundred games or so, yields an upset; not so much magical as statistically sound. Why is this so important, I wondered. Why do people love this tournament so much even though the round-by-round draw is the single biggest determinant of who advances, not actual on-field performance? Why is this tournament so beloved when, by the semi-finals, it is often four teams from the top flight anyways?

Nevertheless, I watch the FA Cup for the same reason I occasionally watch Major League Soccer: because it is soccer and I enjoy soccer in all its forms. My only real FA Cup Final memory is from the 2014 game between Arsenal and Hull. I lived in Washington, D.C. at the time and went to my usual soccer bar to watch the game. Knowing it would be packed, I arrived a half an hour early, but that wasn't early enough. The bar was already full and turning people away. So about 50 of us wandered D.C. looking for a bar open at noon on a Saturday with a television willing to turn on the game. We swarmed a nearby hotel bar and disrupted many important-looking people's brunches. I remember being happy when Aaron Ramsey scored the winner but feeling consistently guilty the entire game for the obnoxious behavior of the other Arsenal fans, singing and chanting while saner people tried in vain to enjoy their cobb salads. Soccer fans are the worst. Americans are the worst.

For the 2015 FA Cup Final, not being inclined to fork out out several days' wages for the dubious privilege of spending time at Wembley Stadium, my matchday outing instead took place at the Emirates and cost me the grand total a fiver. Though it has been cancelled this year in light of the Manchester bombing and Britain's heightened security threat, Arsenal have in recent times been known to screen big events live at the ground. Watching a game televised in real time and beamed from one stadium to another is a strange experience, a highly self-referential activity which will no doubt be the subject of countless theses from the social scientists and anthropologists of the future. In a packed stadium with a pitch occupied only by enormous, looming monitors, tens of thousands of fans had gathered to watch a game happening a couple of miles away, cheering, chanting and exhorting the players in sync with their Wembley counterparts, but in front of an otherwise empty expanse of turf.

If there was some metaphorical poignancy to this, some whiff of the ultimate pointlessness of fandom, football, life and existence in general, there was also something quite sad about looking around at the faces in the crowd. Generally excited young fans who were, from one North Londoner to another, unmistakably from the wider local area, these seemed to be people who would not only have found Wembley to be unfamiliar, but maybe even the Emirates itself. When tickets to a football ground go cheap, the average age of those in attendance drops visibly, because the majority of kids from Islington, Highbury, Camden, Barnet – or anywhere in London for that matter – do not have a clip of £20 notes to throw at the football each weekend, and certainly cannot afford to go to the FA Cup final. It's not like their commitment is lacking, considering that the Emirates can draw a crowd of thousands to watch a rubbish final against Aston Villa on what is essentially a glorified widescreen TV.

Though it would probably take a nuclear apocalypse for tickets to be reduced to a fiver at the Emirates, there was still something about the event which was suggestive of how many people are habitually excluded from football. Thankfully, before the realities of the modern game became too much of a burden on my soul, Arsenal stuck four past Villa and there was an impromptu pitch invasion, replete with at least one red smoke bomb and people climbing up onto the screens, causing the tannoy man to lose his shite. While it was technically against the rules, according to squares and losers anyway, the Emirates could probably do with a bit more anarchic fan culture. In fact, it could well have been the best atmosphere of the season, and not a single footballer was there to see or hear.