TERRACE TALK: Reaction from the weekend’s FA Cup action

It was an arduous task escaping the carnival atmosphere around Highbury, on my way to Wembley on Saturday. Opting for the next best thing, the many thousands who’d missed out on the gold dust of a match ticket were bursting out onto the streets, having gravitated to London N5, to savour the occasion at the live screening at our gaff, or to watch the game in one of the many gaily bedecked Gooner boozers.

This impromptu street party extended way past Finsbury Park and on up Stroud Green Road, nearly all the way to Hornsey. Much to my relief, having eventually picked a route through this positively overwhelming red and white mass of humanity, the pessimistic thought crossed my mind that if the worst came to the worst, this Gooner hootenanny would rapidly degenerate into one almighty wake!

And it really couldn’t have got much worse in the opening 10 minutes at that other Home of Football. We were all left so shell-shocked, with the stunned silence at our end of Wembley only broken by the sound of 25,000 jaws hitting the deck, as our dreams of the end of our trophy drought unravelled before our eyes, quite so rapidly that I couldn’t really evaluate exactly what had transpired, until I returned home and watched the highlights, late on Saturday night.