Leicester City's Foxes win the FA Cup for the first time in their history

 Leicester City's Foxes win the FA Cup for the first time in their history.

So it wasn't for the want of trying. This was a victory for perseverance, a case if you don't succeed at first try and try again because you never know and besides capitulation and surrender to defeat were never advisable. You had to keep going on to the end of road because the law of averages insists that one day it'll all come right and besides you can't keep losing. 

Yesterday Leicester City won the FA Cup for the first time in what is proving to be an illustrious history. Five years ago Claudio Ranieri brought home the unlikeliest Premier League title for a Leicester City side who could hardly believe what was happening to them. They did so with the kind of derring-do, adventurous football that swept aside disbelieving Premier League contenders and ensured that fairy tales do indeed come true even when you thought they were just wishful thinking. Leicester did indeed kiss the frog and then discovered Cinderella's carriage had just turned up at the right moment and time. 

After losing four FA Cup Finals from yesteryear even the most deluded fantasists must have thought that Leicester were just wasting their time. How many times can you keep visiting Wembley on FA Cup Final day only to find that the woes of defeat would just dissolve in tears and sadness? Admittedly Bill Nicholson's emerging Spurs team beat Matt Gillies Leicester underdogs with something to spare and were never likely to challenge Spurs overall dominance 60 years ago. 

Then 52 years ago Joe Mercer's Manchester City scored the only goal of the game when Neil Young and City won their first FA Cup for seemingly ages, Leicester slinking away into the undergrowth never troubling the Wembley authorities again until yesterday. And so it was that the cynical among us didn't know whether to laugh or cry at Leicester's modern exploits and whole hearted exertions. Some of us were privately hoping for a change in their fortunes since the sight of Chelsea trying to make amends for last year's FA Cup Final defeat against Arsenal was more than enough and hadn't we tired of the same old teams gracing the Wembley arches?

But Leicester yesterday were prepared for the big occasion and this time fully equipped to make a mockery of the odds. This is not to suggest that Leicester should have ever assumed the mantle of quiet, restrained underdogs who would simply roll over and have their tummies tickled. In 1973 Bob Stokoe's brave and valiant Sunderland, then in the old Second Division, were just expected to lose quite humiliatingly to Don Revie's celebrated Leeds United, a team who polarised opinion throughout the country with their sumptuous attacking football. But then they were condemned as villains of the piece when Billy Bremner glared and snarled at Sunderland with what looked to be malicious intent. At heart though Leeds were softies and wouldn't have harmed anybody. 

Then in 1988 Bobby Gould's Wimbledon rough and tough scufflers won the FA Cup, beating the much more aristocratic Liverpool who had won innumerable old First Division championships with their eyes closed. And yet driven forward by the tigerish Dennis Wise and the ferociously unapologetic Vinny Jones, the team from South London scored from a glancing header by Lawrie Sanchez. A year before, Coventry City, who had once been pioneers of match day entertainment under Jimmy Hill, had now narrowly if gleefully beaten David Pleat's much more fancied and experienced Tottenham in one of the more eye catching Cup Finals.

And yet Leicester have finally done it their way and how triumphantly was this FA Cup victory so emotionally marked. Three years ago the father of Leicester's owners died in the most horrific helicopter crash and the whole club were plunged into a desperate state of mourning. The memory of Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha is still engraved indelibly in the hearts of all Leicester City fans and yesterday the cunning Foxes of Leicester hunted down their London prey and got their just desserts. 

For those of us though who have been longing for the day when football fans would be warmly welcomed back into football stadiums, our patience was suitably rewarded. 21,000 fans cranked up the volume on the dial and suddenly Wembley had come back to life. The life support machine had started flickering back to life, oxygen masks fittingly administered and the patient was breathing again. For just a year now football had been receiving mouth to mouth resuscitation without any hope of any kind of recovery. 

It was both distressing and disconcerting beyond belief but finally the wait was over. Small knots of Chelsea and Leicester City fans could be heard chanting, cheering, groaning and moaning, cheering and biting its collective fingernails. It was rather like listening to a harmonious orchestra that may have been extremely rusty and out of practice for months and months on end. Eventually somebody had discovered that the percussion and woodwind section was in the rudest health after all. The fans were back and not before time. 

Leicester City, in their strange looking brown shirts, were patient, methodical, tactically and technically skilful, endearingly spirited, nimble on their feet, well organised and ultimately the better side. For a while the brown shirts of Leicester were reminiscent of a newly born foal struggling painstakingly to its feet, nervous and almost terrified of its shadow.Then the doting parents lifted their child to its feet and Leicester grew steadily in confidence. 

In truth this was not the FA Cup Final we might have been expecting. Invariably we witness a game where both teams indulge in low body sparring, a contest of few jabs and very little of any significance to remember it by. The opening 45 minutes of this match became reduced to whispered mutterings, few if any goal chances and only the occasional flashes of the spectacular. The game seemed to get stuck in its own rut, both teams keeping each other at arms length and cautiously testing the game's temperature when the mood took it. 

By the game's hour some of us were beginning to wonder at the futility of the whole exercise. What on earth were the FA thinking when they decided to lure its devoted football supporters back into the ground? But it was good to see them back en masse again. Watching Chelsea and Leicester though, was rather like watching paint dry, two evenly contested Premier League sides who had so obviously cancelled each other out. The football was pleasant and flowing, ebbing and flowing, seesawing intriguingly from one end to the other. The goals were not forthcoming and a sigh of impatience could be heard back at Wembley Park tube station. 

Of course both Luke Thomas and and the evergreen Jonny Evans had provided Leicester with the most solid of defensive platforms, chain locking Leicester's back line with that unmistakable reliability. Then Evans limped off with an injury and Leicester began to wobble and sway disturbingly at the back. Now the roving, roaming Wesley Fofana began to find easily available spaces opening up, while the youthful James Maddison continued to look like one of Gareth Southgate's easiest of choices for June's Euros. Maddison was comfortable and dependable on the ball, always seeing the bigger picture and puncturing Chelsea's wilting defence with clever use of the ball and the most economical of touches.

When Wilfred N'Didi began to explore and collect the ball in dangerous areas of the pitch, Leicester broke free of the web Chelsea had woven and Ndidi was here, there and everywhere. He charged forward with all the zest of a man who just couldn't wait for the final whistle to blow, protecting his team with an almost paternal air of authority and then carrying the ball carefully into the Chelsea half weighing up the options in front of him and then delivering custom made passes that loosened the Chelsea defence with penetrative purpose. 

Leicester were beginning to grow into the game as the minutes ticked away and all of Chelsea's earlier trickery, imaginative promptings, finery and intricacy seemed to be opening up Chelsea with the surgeon's scalpel, all wily know how and guile. For a while Chelsea's football seemed somehow fated to send Leicester into a stupefied trance. Their short, sharp and neat, quick passing triangles were almost totally hypnotic, Leicester's players being dragged helplessly out of place.

Another England certainty for the upcoming Euros was Mason Mount, possibly one of the most promising young Chelsea players since Ray Wilkins. Mount is an artist, illustrator, carver and sculptor, a lovely looking touch player with impeccable control, visionary awareness and inventive inklings, a player of  daring and impulse, simplicity and grace for good measure. 

Alongside Mount Chelsea presented us with Thiago Silva, all vision, wit and sensitivity. With Reece James threatening damage and havoc whenever he thought the mood was right, Ben Chilwell, bounding and galloping along the touchlines like a full back who just wanted to be an out and out winger, Antonio Rudiger blending class and composure in bundles, Christian Pulisic working the Leicester defence to the limit and Timo Werner busting a gut to make his presence felt, a goal for Chelsea looked to be only a matter of time. 

But then Leicester clawed their way back into the game in a kind of nostalgic throwback to the way it might have been if things had gone right for them in their last four FA Cup Finals. There was Timothy Castagne who ventured forward with an enchanting sense of adventure, Caglar Soyuncu, a rare if talented find from Turkey, Maddison, Ndidi and the unmistakable Jamie Yard who were now firing on all cylinders. 

Then half way through the second half  Leicester, sensing perhaps that Chelsea had other things on their mind, surrounded  Chelsea with another educated attacking movement. It had the stamp of their progressive manager Brendan Rogers. Picking up the ball in the middle of the pitch after Chelsea thought they'd cleared the ball sufficiently, Youri Tielemans, one of an increasingly influential band of Belgians in the Premier League, watched the ball all the way before lifting his foot, addressing it like a golfer at St Andrews, and then following through with a memorable 25 yard thunderbolt that flew past Chelsea keeper Kepa Arrizabalanga high into the net. It was a goal Wembley will never forget. 

Chelsea were now struggling to find anything resembling cohesion or incisiveness. Their attacks looked blunted and misshapen, the body language that of defeated men who didn't quite know what to do on the day. They have now a Champions League Final against Manchester City to look forward to and another Premier League ding dong encounter against Leicester in their penultimate game of the season. But the moment had certainly gone as soon as they realised that Leicester goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel had been watching videos of Jim Montgomery's acrobatic double saves that kept out Billy Bremner, Mick Jones, and Peter Lorimer in the FA Cup Final 48 years ago. 

And then it all came to pass that the fans who thought they had forgotten about their place in the general scheme of things had now come to revel in yet another thrilling spectacle that most of the more pragmatic Leicester supporters had thought was completely beyond them. Up in the TV gantry former  Leicester favourite son Gary Lineker was flinging his arms up into the air as if a childhood dream had finally come to fruition. Brendan Rodgers had cleaned up his seventh domestic trophy, the Leicester family owner hugged Rogers meaningfully and a sentimental lump in the throat convinced us that perhaps justice had been done. Leicester are FA Cup winners of 2021. It sounds impressive because it is.