One way or another, this was always going to end up being a Pep day. At the final whistle Pep Guardiola didn’t punch the air or really celebrate at all. Instead he walked quite slowly over to the scorer of the only goal, Antoine Semenyo, and vigorously triple-patted his buttocks, then meandered around the edges of the bobbing huddles on the Wembley pitch.
There will be a temptation to look for clues here. Nobody really knows if Guardiola is leaving Manchester City at the end of the season. Contract extension brinkmanship is nothing new, although not with quite so much whispered chat about assistants on the move and leaked replacement plans.
But the pensive walk was normal practice. It is one of Guardiola’s many quirks that even in victory he tends to look a little disappointed that the game, this glorious living torture, is now over. Do the thing you love and you’ll never work a day of your life. Do something that grips you with skull-clawing, trouser-ripping energy, and you’ll never quite lose that life-giving buzz, right down to the end of your 591st game, 416th win, and 15th major trophy.
Guardiola was the familiar frenzied spectacle throughout this FA Cup final. Dressed for the day in a vanilla-hued yak fur roll neck and country gent slacks, the look of a minor royal cousin on a school visit, he was out in his technical area from the start, arms whirring in those furiously stylised patterns, like a man trying to break the world record for constructing an invisible flatpack wardrobe.
If this really is his final big touchline moment, it would be fitting that it should come at Wembley, with a third FA Cup, eighth domestic knockout trophy and 12th medal won on this ground if you chuck in the Community Shield and Barcelona lifting the Champions League.
It is often said that Guardiola has been commendably and respectfully obsessed with domestic cups in England. Is it respect? Or just the blanket obsession with winning? You suspect he might be equally respectful of a game of Connect 4 with his niece on Boxing Day, or trying not to step on the cracks on the pavement on his way home.
But this was a good Pep day in many ways. City started the game without any real midfield craft, but shifted at half-time, bringing on Rayan Cherki. The decisive second-half goal came from a player signed in January for just this kind of moment. It was made by Erling Haaland, who took the ball deep, spun in behind for a return pass from Bernardo Silva. Semenyo steered Haaland’s right-footed cross into the corner off the inside of his heel, the finish that doesn’t really have a name, the Sharpe-flick, the Kanu-twirl.
Semenyo was a fitting Cup final match-winner, a player who has taken his own one-man pyramid ride to get to this point, from Bristol to Bath to Newport to Sunderland. The goal here will rubber-stamp the success of his move, which is still a slightly odd one in the wider context. Semenyo is a decisive player. But he isn’t elite in the classic Pep way. He’s not hyper technical. His touch can be clunky. He doesn’t seem pathologically obsessed with holding the ball. Pep isn’t signing this guy 10 years ago.
But then, we have all come a long way in this relationship. Even the agent of change is changed by the act of changing. A decade ago it would have seemed an unexpected outcome that the great moderniser, the duke of the elite Iberian style, should become so deeply entwined with the FA Cup.
By now that annual Wembley date feels like the perfect embodiment of Guardiola status as both an outsider, the systems brain who doesn’t coach tackles, and also the biggest structural influence on how the game is played now in England; navigator of the City pirate ship, 115 charges, suing the league into the ground, but also deeply plugged into English football’s traditions, a one-man guardian of the domestic cups.
There is always a slight sense of tenderness on these occasions now. Here it comes, the dear old Cup, still running through its moth-eaten routines. Still the marching band? Still the tinfoil trophies, the bed sheet banners? Still Ronnie Radford?
The band were shinily buckled. The soldiers and sailors furled their tarpaulins dutifully. Abide With Me was sung by a Bradford City choir, one of the great English football moments, a reminder of sport as collectivism, connection, geographical ties, relief from industrial life.
It is just a lovely hymn, in part because it’s not about victory or triumphalism. It’s about death and consolation, and glory of the more everlasting kind, about the ultimate worthlessness of these material things.
Talking of which, here come Manchester City and Chelsea, twin expressions of two distinct forms of sporting excess. On the one hand the nation state propaganda project. On the other hedge-fund ball, a gamble on a global leisure product. And in the middle waste, excess, the glossing of a hardline regime, the legacy of a Kremlin-connected oligarch.
And yet, there is of course still glory here, even in a game like this one, which kicked off with 45 minutes of non-football. For long periods Chelsea basically did nothing. Understandably so. Right now this feels like a club where everyone always wants to leave all the time, like some terrible rooftop drinks party where people are constantly checking their phones, muttering about the exits, waiting for their car to come.
It was still a good day for Calum McFarlane, who came here in tracksuit trousers, hoodie and big white trainers, like a man roped in on his way to buy a Snickers from the Tesco garage. To his credit Chelsea began to stir after half-time, with Cole Palmer a more urgent figure on the right.
But it always felt like City would have enough. Their subs were too strong, their manager too good at doing this. From here City can still end up with a domestic treble, despite never at any stage really looking like a team marching on towards one of the greatest English seasons.
As ever, their resurgence in the latter part of the season has been powered by the willingness to spend money. It has been the central tension in Guardiola’s own career, the urge for some to see only the advantages, the money spent, the elite players, to ignore the reality that this is simply where the world’s greatest coach gets to work.
At the end here Guardiola was still very much his old self. He said the FA Cup was “cool”. He moaned, with a genuine passion, about the state of the trains in the north of England. He promised nobody would be celebrating just yet. City may not have the league in their own hands. But you wouldn’t rule out another victory walk a week from now.