432 days later: Watching Leicester City win the FA Cup

I wake up.

I look at my hands. I don’t remember rubbing them against a cheese grater.

I try to speak. I sound like Sean Dyche crossed with Darth Vader.

I close my eyes. Playing on repeat on the inside of my eyelids, a ball is rocketing through the air.

For the first time in 432 days, I have all the symptoms of having been to a football match.

There is no test for this affliction.

On Saturday, Leicester City won the FA Cup for the first time in the club’s history. That would have been enough, but the circumstances — the fourteen long months without the roar accompanying players onto the pitch, derisory howls at wayward opposition shots, songs for our star man, for victory, for Vichai — managed to turn FA Cup final day into even more of an event.

And it should have felt utterly surreal climbing the steps from the concourse at Wembley and taking in the sight of a football stadium again. For many, it might have done.

For me, it felt completely natural — a continuation of where we’d been when football was halted and a gift from our players and staff for the time spent apart.

After all, our previous travels in the cup in January 2020 had taken us to a semi-final second leg at Villa Park. We were so close to Wembley that night. We were desperate for the winning goal that would take us back to the place we made a second home in the 1990s.

There’s a sweeping bend on the M1 between Elstree and Edgware that curves round the Broadfields Estate and offers a panoramic view of north west London. This was my first glimpse of the Wembley arch, five miles to the south, for well over a year.

I can’t remember a train journey into Euston over the past thirty years that didn’t include a glance over to the famous stadium, wondering when I’d see my team play there again.

As diverting as they were, games at the national stadium against Manchester United in the Community Shield and Tottenham in the Premier League didn’t feel like proper Wembley. It’s not proper Wembley unless you have the chance to win something life-affirming.

And this was the next step up, for those of us born way beyond the last time Leicester made it to the FA Cup final in 1969. The play-off finals were glorious, the League Cup victories great, but Saturday… Saturday was a whole other level. The missing piece of the jigsaw, and the opportunity of a lifetime.

The build-up to the game had been tense for most Leicester fans, in particular for anyone with a realistic chance of securing a ticket. The coronavirus situation meant arrangements around tests, tickets and travel that brought an extra layer of complexity.

We were ticking things off just to be there, never mind worrying about what would happen on the pitch. Test done, ticket printed and travel complete, we stood on Wembley Way and heard songs from the dim and distant past of early 2020 echoing around. There were knowing nods of reunion to old faces. The Leicester were there.

I spent an hour or so in the company of my mate Joe, who I once spent four hours with in a hatchback on the way to a game 200 miles away in which Leicester had no shots on target. And four hours on the way back.

It seems ludicrous now, but that was our reality and we made the best of it. In those years, played out unfathomably far from the elite, the match was often a minor part of the day. We reminisced and pondered the sheer impossibility of imagining then that we’d be at an FA Cup final 14 years later.

There’s no hiding the feeling that creeps up on you as kick-off approaches at an FA Cup final. That will stay with me forever, cultivated by the excitement of Cup final day as a child — not just Abide With Me but three hours of build-up on one of the four TV channels: The Road to Wembley, players in suits, the opposing managers leading out two neat lines of excited and anxious faces, ribbons on the trophy, Abide With Me.

My cousin had warned me that the first strains of Abide With Me might send me over the edge. He was right. I tumbled through the opening verse until I came to rest an emotional wreck. I looked around and could see many feeling the same way.

That was what calmed me, what I’d been missing for so many months — the empathy you get from being in a crowd and realising there are thousands of other people who couldn’t help what they were going through either.

I’m completely aware how stupid it is that I get so nervous and obsessive about the fortunes of Leicester City Football Club. Not all fans get nervous and I envy those that don’t. There’s really little to recommend it. My shoulders tense up hours before games, sometimes days if it’s particularly important. I shiver and shake.

But for some reason, for me, being in the ground helps. Being able to see danger unfold brings what is admittedly an absolutely false element of control. Whatever gets you through.

I didn’t think we’d win. I barely ever do. But I have a feeling that being a pessimist makes the best moments even better. It also brings you into that curious headspace in which you don’t rate your team’s chances but you become furious should anyone else dare write them off.

The first half had been typical cup final fare. The nerves were on the pitch too, it seemed. There were signs of tiredness. I thought we played poorly, carrying little threat going forward and allowing Chelsea to get comfortable. Perhaps that was the plan. In the second half, we grew into the game and for the first time, I started to believe we had a chance of winning.

So. Just over an hour gone in the game. No goals. There I was, standing on the back row of the lower tier behind the goal Leicester were attacking and waiting for the moment that decided the match.

At that point, it could have arrived in half an hour’s time with a late winner, or half an hour beyond that with a goal at the end of extra-time, or even, God forbid, with a missed penalty even further into the future. But it didn’t. It arrived right then.

I’ll be forever thankful I didn’t clock the way Ayoze Perez blocked Reece James’s pass forward. If I had, my memories of what happened in the next few moments would probably have been ruined by the mind-altering mess that is VAR.

Instead, I saw Luke Thomas look up and spot Youri Tielemans in space in the centre. I saw Tielemans collect the pass from Thomas and begin that familiar drive towards the edge of the opposition penalty area.

I can’t remember if I urged Tielemans to shoot. I probably didn’t. Watching it back now, you can hear thousands of others did. What I do remember is thinking as soon as the ball left his foot that… it had a chance. Pessimists rarely get carried away.

The human brain is amazing. The number of emotions you can feel in the space of a few milliseconds. As the ball passed Thiago Silva, I switched from “this has got a chance” to “this might actually be going in” to “this is a goal” to “okay, you’ve got literally no more time to react to what’s about to happen here” to “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARHGHHJGGHGJDHFJDFHDJFHDJFHDA!!!!!”

I’m sorry. That’s all I’ve got to explain that particular split second in time. Leapt around, ran up and down the row, howled like an animal.

As the celebrations eventually died down, I remembered I was wearing a mask and it felt like I was hyperventilating. That memory will forever place the moment in my little personal history.

There followed a tiny feeling of regret that others weren’t there with me because of the away ticket priority point system — my Dad, who only has 203 priority points despite introducing me to this incredible football club, my wife, who has zero points despite living the hell of those final ten minutes on Saturday at home like a lifelong fan, and my mate Alex who drove that hatchback to Plymouth, who chose to have a child rather than continue driving up and down the country watching football — and so also has zero.

I’m sure many in the Leicester end thought of others who they’d wished could have been there, but that goal must have been amazing to watch from anywhere on the planet. The beer gardens of Leicestershire, in the shadow of the Empire State Building with the New York Foxes, in the players’ hometowns across the globe — the Turkish city of Izmir, the Nigerian city of Owerri, the Midlands metropolis of Tamworth.

That goal will live long in the memory of neutrals, never mind anyone who leapt into the air when the ball hit the net. Say what you like about Belgium but when the pressure’s on and Leicester City need a life-affirming goal, that lot step up.

I thought the Chilwell header was in.

I thought the Mount shot was in.

Those efforts just became the latest to prompt me to say out loud, to nobody at all, “Kasper”.

And so we faced the final curtain, but we were only ever going to do it the Leicester City way, which is to put thousands of fans through the wringer again one last time.

The day after the game, I loved reading the recollections of other supporters about the equaliser that never was. The array of reactions summed up the way supporting a football club throws all sorts of people together under one banner.

Some were never worried — they thought it looked offside straight away and trusted in the VAR system to rule it out. At the other end of the spectrum, we return to me — the opposite end of Wembley Stadium, devastated that glory has slipped away at the last.

Not for one second did it occur to me that as Ben Chilwell rode in from stage left, he might have been offside. It just wasn’t there. From my perspective, there was a ball over the top, then somehow it was in the net and all I had left was Chilwell knee-sliding into the corner and our boys slumped on the Wembley pitch. There was nothing else.

Even when the VAR check was displayed around the stadium, I didn’t really react. It would just be another layer of disappointment when the goal was given. Then suddenly there was a flash of activity.

The referee moved. The crowd reacted.

But what will stay with me, what I noticed first of all in that chaotic moment, was Wilfred Ndidi doing some kind of pirouette kick in the middle of the pitch. That was what caused me to lose all structure in my lower half and sink to my knees, clutching the seat.

“You alright, mate?” said the guy next to me, laughing, when I’d got back to my feet.

“This club will be the death of me.”

Captain Morgan’s last ever headed clearance, Jamie Vardy and James Maddison firing up the crowd as we played out the closing minutes, our newest hero Wesley Fofana falling to the ground as the final whistle went: it was all perfect.

I stayed in the stadium and watched everything after that. I drank it in.

The trophy lifted by two men who had spent a decade turning Leicester City into such a wonderful club to support.

The affection from the stands for an owner and a manager who had begun and maintained the momentum.

The glorious sight of fans who have travelled up and down the country for years getting to be there for one of the greatest days of all.

Leicester City have won the FA Cup.