Not wishing to denigrate Chelsea's achievement of the league and cup double, and at the risk of sounding an old fuddy-duddy, but FA Cup finals just aren't what they used to be. Are they?

Sure the Blues' 1-0 win on Saturday had its moments. Carlo Ancelotti's side peppering the woodwork in the first half, and an historic two missed penalties and Didier Drogba's match-winning free kick in the second. A bit of argy-bargy here and there and Germany's World Cup captain limping off, and out of the World Cup finals as it transpired, after having a lump kicked out of his ankle. A reasonable afternoon's entertainment.

But as a spectacle? The showpiece of English football? I'm not so sure.

The day just doesn't seem to have the special appeal it had in the days before the Premier and Champions Leagues.

It didn't help that the pitch, despite being relaid after Portsmouth's semi-final win over Spurs, was once again a cow paddock. The suits at the FA could have transferred the final to Moorabbin and turned the sprinklers on all Friday night, and the players would still have had a surer footing than they did at the weekend.

"The pitch ruined the final. It's probably the worst pitch we've played on all year. The FA have to decide if this is a football pitch or events stadium," Chelsea skipper John Terry bellowed. And he should know a thing or two about cutting someone else's grass.

But it wasn't just the hankering for the sun-bathed bowling green Wembley pitches of old, immaculately rolled into criss-cross patterns of greenkeeping perfection for athletes and aesthetes alike.

There was a time when the final was the most eagerly awaited match of the season, in all parts of the world that followed English football.

It was an occasion of great tradition and ceremony, of time-honoured rituals and familiar refrains about the "great romance of the cup", of "plucky underdogs" who had got to the now vanished Twin Towers on the back of "giantkilling runs".

In the midnight hour Down Under, you might gather with friends to lap up all the pre-match piffle and other-worldliness of this special piece of English spring pageantry. Suited players filing off buses, and later, inspecting the pitch, relaxed and joking, hands in pockets as they toepoked the pristine turf. The terraces, awash with banners and scarves, the songs and chants echoing around the famous stadium.

Back then it was an occasion for fans to celebrate being fans and having, for many, a once-in-a- lifetime day out at Wembley.

That's not to say the fans on Saturday didn't have a great day out. But if you're a Chelsea supporter, there's the knowledge, that may inspire a certain complacency, that there will always be another big final or title-wining match around the corner. Even the poor Pompey fans were making a second trek in three years to north-west London.

Now the Cup final is one of the hundreds of matches fans can watch live on the telly each season. Thousands potentially if you're sad enough to have the most extensive satellite package and want to spend weekend afternoons and evenings watching NAC Breda at Hereenveen and the like.

I have a mate in London, who I shall call "Bill Edgar", who has confessed to having watched for several years upwards of 10 live matches on the tube each week, though perhaps sensitive to accusations of neglecting his responsibilities as a husband and father of two tackers, he claims to tape several and watch them on fast forward, stopping only for the goals.

And therein lies the cup's fall from greatness.

We've been spoiled. There was a time when the cup final was one of the only live games you could watch on TV. Now, we get them all. Sadly, the FA Cup final is just another match.

It's not just that the finals are often duds, or good but no great, like Saturday's. Much like AFL grand finals, you might get two great ones each decade and blowouts in between.

But it was always so. The ratio of good and bad FA cup finals has not changed much over the years. Why, even some of the 'great' ones weren't that great.

People forget the dramatic climax to the 1979 final, when Manchester United pulled two back right at the end before Alan Sunderland's perm at the far post won it for Arsenal, came at the end of a dull 85 minutes after Liam Brady had orchestrated a 2-0 lead for the Gooners by the break. Second division Southhampton upset United three years earlier with one of the ugliest goals in final history, Bobby Stokes trickling the winner past a mortified Alex Stepney.

The FA Cup will still occupy a special place on the English sporting calendar - the Poms aren't in the habit of dispensing with the old ways in any great hurry - and will provide the odd belter. But there will be lots of other belters to watch, interspersed with a lot of dross, too, and the end result is that those once-cherished FA Cup finals get buried in the memory under an avalanche of live football.

* It seems I did Bill a disfavour. He proudly tells me now watches 12-15 full games and 6-8 extended highlights (50 minutes) each week - purely for research purposes, of course, for his national newspaper statistical analysis column.