MY MATE’S son, Joe, aged 10, was asked who he wanted to win the Champions League final last week. He looked sort of incredulous that anyone would need to ask. “I want the game to be a goalless draw,” he said, “and then I would like extra time to be goalless, followed by a penalty shootout in which no goals are scored, until all the players cease to exist.”

That was my hope, too, although Joe expressed it rather better than I would have. Usually, one would support the foreign opposition to any of England’s Big Four, but Barcelona gave me a problem. Women go on about how lovely Barcelona is, which unaccountably annoys me. I assume the cocaine in the water supply attracts them. Also, I don’t like the silky mewing tone adopted by football experts whenever they mention bloody “Barça”. On the subject of Barcelona, I’m with General Franco. “Cease to exist” was my favoured outcome, too.

When I was Joe’s age, though, it was all very different. The appearance of an English club — full of British players — in a major European final was a rare and compelling event and would rouse in me an unpleasant jingoistic fervour and vitriol, even if it were Leeds United; that one wouldn’t watch the game and do so in that shivering, nervy state that implies extreme commitment was inconceivable. Times and attitudes have changed, though, and it is not only the old European Cup that has lost its lustre for fans of clubs beyond the Big Four. I asked Joe who he wanted to win the FA Cup, and he didn’t care about that, either. Somehow the world’s most historic tournament has lost its ability to enthrall even football-obsessed kids, and not simply because the Big Four treat it as a poor third, or even fourth (after one or other world club championship), in the hierarchy of desirable achievements, and use it as an opportunity to give the likes of Wes Brown a run-out.

For the first 11 years that I watched the FA Cup final, 11 different teams won the trophy, beginning and ending with those likeable, stalwart also-rans, West Bromwich Albion and Ipswich Town. In the past 14 years a grand total of five different clubs have won the tournament; the interlopers being Portsmouth. As a kid, even for a fervent Millwall fan, the Cup final was the big event of the year and after the semi-finals we would choose our favourites and, for three weeks, support them with great passion. In 1971 I was so fervently behind Liverpool that I even wrote to Steve Heighway to wish him luck (and he replied, bless the man, with a lovely note that I still have to this day).

Over the course of those years I was also variously a fan of Chelsea, Leicester City, Fulham, Newcastle United and so on. The whole business was taken extraordinarily seriously by pretty much every boy in the school — I once got a very good kicking in the toilets for affixing my loyalties, in 1973, to Sunderland (in a school where usual loyalties divided between Middlesbrough and Leeds, so mine was a particularly dumb choice).

Cup final day was spent, from 10 o’clock in the morning until the end of the game, immobilised in front of the television. Everything over those seven hours would be lapped up — from the witless drivel of It’s a Cup Final Knockout! to that strange tug of emotion occasioned by Abide With Me.

Forgive the nostalgia. But that the FA Cup would not be on terrestrial television was inconceivable then — indeed on both terrestrial stations simultaneously; thus the final had a compulsory feel to it, of the nation sharing a great event, whether it wished to or not.

Setanta is to be applauded for attempting to disinter that old fervour by scheduling virtually an entire day of Cup final programming; perhaps the channel — which does football very well, with a bit of intelligence — is run by middle-aged men like me who hanker after their childhoods.

Either way, my guess is it will not work. The Cup final has had much of the life squeezed out of it by a paradox; on the one hand, a surfeit of choice for the individual, a barrage of corporate entertainment beamed into every home with a dish on the roof. And on the other hand, a narrowing of choice: the Cup final will almost always have one of those four teams in it, and usually two of them. Incredibly, I had to check the paper to remind myself of Everton’s opponents yesterday. I knew it was one of them, but I couldn’t quite remember which. Ah, Chelsea — that was it.