Today’s the day. The Beeb started broadcasting at noon even though the kick-off is at 3PM. Basically they’ve cleaned the whole afternoon’s programming to make room for football and football accessories. During this time we, the viewers, were treated to live aerial coverage of, err, the teams arriving to the stadium on their buses (think OJ Simpson’s escape attempt), a parody of 24 where the FA Cup was stolen, footballing poetry and such.

Sonja’s note: think if Yle did all this with ice hockey SM-liiga finals.

Our original plan was to go into a pub to watch the game. We would’ve had to leave at noon as every pub all around the UK is packed (quite understandably), but somehow the plan changed and we stayed home.

I brought my state-of-the-art hifi-system to the living room and plugged it into the telly. Makes those thumps sound more satisfactory. About halfway through the match our telly started acting up, loud bangs of static noise made it quite hard to concentrate on the programme.

The first and last 30 seconds were the most interesting with Thierry Henry’s near miss and Southampthon’s desperate last-minute corners. Close but no cookie.