Narrative overload: FA Cup final is a domestic finale ripe with storylines

Manchester United were the original domestic powerhouse but Manchester City’s modern brand threatens to eclipse them

Now for the big series-ender. You have to hand it to the FA Cup. Football’s grand old patrician knockout pot may have grown a little mildewed and liver-spotted with age. But, like some geriatric sovereign stepping out from the shadows and striding the shopfloors one last time, it still knows how to twitch the threads. Saturday’s final at Wembley already looks like that rarest of things, a genuine multilayered epic.

At the end of a season that seems to have been going on for at least three years, when so many storylines have faded in and out, fractured by the outage at its centre, here is an end note to the domestic calendar that comes prepacked with fat, wet, impossibly ripe storylines. Power, succession, legacy. A heritage-gold 3pm kick-off. Frankly the Cup hasn’t looked so vital or hip in years.

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