Arsenal 1-2

Telegraph:

Arsenal 2 Chelsea 1: Aaron Ramsey seals Arsene Wenger's record seventh FA Cup win in magnificent final


Sam Wallace, chief football writer


The long league campaigns, the Champions League’s dreaded barrier of the round of 16 – these are the challenges that Arsène Wenger has found ever harder to negotiate over the years but there is only one king of the FA Cup, the 67-year-old Frenchman who has now won it a record seven times.

Below him the Victorian Scotsman George Ramsay on six victories, and then others such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Bill Nicholson and Herbert Chapman, but no-one in the 146-year history of the oldest cup competition in the world has more than Wenger’s seven.

It might take another century to surpass his achievements or he might just remain there forever, a giant figure in English football’s greatest heritage piece, a man who simply had a knack for winning the FA Cup.


He ascended the steps at Wembley jacketless, the look of the wise old prelate in white shirt sleeves, once more looking the shrewd repository of all football’s best secrets. He had picked the right team, set the right tempo and his side had defeated the runaway champions of the Premier League by virtue of Aaron Ramsey’s winner and a certainty that had eluded them for so much of the season.

It comes at this great juncture in Wenger’s career, another dramatic development in the debate over his suitability, a manager who even at the final whistle went to take the acclaim of his own divided support with a certain reserve. Whether he has done enough to have his reign at Arsenal extended beyond 20 years seems academic now, more important is that he has created more favourable conditions for Stan Kroenke, the club’s majority shareholder, to award him the contract.

Afterwards, Wenger claimed he was at the mercy of the Arsenal board when they meet on Tuesday as to whether there would be a new deal, and what conditions will come attached. He is playing a much stronger hand now and his criticism of the sections of the support for the ‘hostile’ treatment of his team during the season suggested a manager emboldened by his club’s record 13th FA Cup to get some things off his chest.


An FA Cup winner three times in the last four years, his fluctuating fortunes defy definition, a manager whose Arsenal teams have an array of personalities, jaded and rudderless or as inspired and confident as they were at Wembley. This was a magnificently open final, albeit featuring a Chelsea team who conceded Alexis Sánchez’s goal in the fifth minute before they had barely done a single thing in the game.

It had been defeat to Arsenal in the league in September that had prompted Antonio Conte to change to the title-winning 3-4-3 system and it took eight months for Wenger to be convinced it was also the right system for him. In time for Wembley, a manager who has often looked behind his younger coaching peers finessed Conte’s innovation with a version of his own.

They did all the things a great Cup-winning team must do, making the running early on and scoring through Sánchez within the first five minutes and then, when they thought they had won the game, doing it all over again after Diego Costa’s equaliser. Before Ramsey scored the winner, Chelsea had lost Victor Moses to a second yellow card for a dive that no-one in a Chelsea short protested in any earnest.

Conte later complained about a handball by Sánchez in the creation of his goal although he was wise enough not to labour the point to make it look like the result should have been any different. For the first time this season he suggested the champions had been the victims of some bad refereeing decisions although he also conceded that his players had taken around 20 minutes to get into the game.


As for Arsenal, this was as Wenger would have them every week if possible, a liberated Mesut Özil, feeding into the ruthless running of Sánchez. Danny Welbeck let loose, fit and strong to run the legs off an opposition defence. Even David Ospina, selected ahead of Petr Cech in goal, threw himself in front of a Costa shot in the 86th minute that would have taken the game to extra-time.

Just minutes of the game had elapsed when a long Arsenal passing sequence yielded a corner that Thibaut Courtois took cleanly before throwing the ball out. From there Chelsea’s lack of composure was telling. They lost possession through N’Golo Kanté who had a poor game by his standards and they missed chances to get the ball back.


The goal was a complicated affair during which referee Anthony Taylor first blew as if to disallow but instead gave himself time to speak to his assistant Gary Beswick. He decided Sánchez had not handled when he won the ball on the edge of the area and pushed it through the Chelsea defence to run onto and score with a left foot shot past Courtois. Neither, the referee ruled, had Ramsey, in an offside position, interfered with play.

When Özil slid into a tackle against the escaping Eden Hazard towards the end of the first half this looked like an Arsenal team that had been transformed by the occasion.


With Welbeck having one of his best games in an Arsenal shirt and stretching Chelsea with his running, the English striker drew the foul from Moses that led to the Chelsea winger’s first yellow card. There was no argument about that one just as there was very little about the second awarded by referee Taylor who, as he had done for the Sánchez goal, blew his whistle, took a moment to think and then made the correct decision under heavy pressure.

Moses had come in down the right channel, taken the ball on his left to go past Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and went down as he passed the Arsenal man. Before then Conte had changed his team, bringing on Cesc Fabregas for Nemanja Matic, and later Willian replaced Pedro. It was the Brazilian who crossed for Costa’s equaliser, a fine clipped finish past Ospina with the help of a deflection.

Arsenal’s response came almost immediately with Welbeck’s replacement Olivier Giroud yielding immediate dividends. It was Giroud’s intelligent run into the left channel, and a fine cross pulled back from the byline that Ramsey headed in from close range

Ospina was required to make that one more save from Costa but this was Arsenal’s day.