Nice stadium, anyway. I suppose we’d better talk about the football as well, though, and that is a pretty tough job. It was a game that dragged and sagged over two hours. Still, at least we had a nice finish, and at last a goal, when Didier finished of a sweet move for Chelsea.

It wasn’t much, but what do you expect for £800 million quid these days? But that’s the thing about football. It is simply not a tame game. And it is that quality of wildness, that quality of perfect untameability, that is the best of football.

You can get together the best players in the country for the FA Cup Final - and a match between Chelsea and Manchester United has some of the greatest players in the world - and produce a stinker. Well, this match wasn’t quite that: it was rescued from stinkerdom by Drogba when the ghastliness of penalties was almost upon us. But it wasn’t great. And yet you can bring together players of far lesser renown, far lesser skills, and produce a match of such compelling beauty and drama that you will never forget it.

That is what will almost certainly happen when we come to the play-off finals from the lower divisions: that is the beauty of football. But it is a beauty that we pay for in the hard currency of boredom. The FA Cup Final was rather less than the new stadium deserved: and it is, indeed, a dramatic structure, somehow maintaining human proportions despite its megalomaniac dimensions.

It deserved a classic: every one was half-expecting a classic and yet these two rivals cancelled each other out until the final minutes. That is so often the way when a showpiece game is used to open a great stadium or a great competition. Football will always give you beauty and drama but it will never tell you when.

Still, this is but the opening page of a new volume of history and it is certain that in well, less than a century, I guarantee it, there will be tales, legends and myths to compare with anything the old stadium conjured up: the white horse (whose name, I can reveal, was Billy), Roy Dwight’s injury, Ricky Villa’s mazy dribble, Jim Montgomery’s save, the time when Smith must score, and of course, that occasion they thought it was all over; it was then. As I write these words, some people are on the pitch. They think it’s all started. It has now.

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