It seemed to me that the Tardis had dropped me on Olympic Way, and though it was obvious that the final of the Football Association Challenge Cup was about to be played, it was not at all clear which year we had landed in.

True, the great arch was there before me as I stepped out from Wembley Park Tube station, supporting the illusion that the occasion had something to do with the 21st century, but I still had this nagging feeling that this wasn’t the full story.

“What? What? What?” as the Doctor is prone to remark at moments of crisis. Time had twisted itself like a pretzel: this was a Fifties Cup Final played out with 21st-century props. Half my senses insisted that this was a thoroughly modern occasion, but the other half was looking out for such anomalies as woollen scarves, cloth caps, wooden rattles, sober people.

It was the teams contesting the final that did it, of course. Portsmouth and Cardiff City, if you please. We have grown used to the notion that in football, no occasion can have any significance without at least one, or better two, of the “big four” clubs. It must also have a starting lineup of 22 players who everybody has actually heard of and a dozen or more whose style, appearance, strengths, weaknesses and wage packet are as familiar as our faces in the mirror.

But I ran my eye down the team-sheet and found myself in the same state of glorious ignorance as I was when watching the Cup Final in black and white at my parents’ place in Streatham. Admittedly, the players I didn’t know were called things like Mendes and Muntari rather than Perkins and Scuttlebottom, but there was still the same dim air of discovery.

How could it be otherwise when there was only one televised match a year? I remember staring at the spare, distinguished figure of Danny Blanch-flower and thinking: “Oh, he doesn’t look anything like that on the cigarette card.” That languid sense of certainty, the nonchalance with which he took the penalty: all these things were revelations, not variations on a theme a thousand times witnessed.

As I took my seat in the press box, it was as if the ethernet cable did not exist; a Bakelite phone with a spinning silver dial would have been more appropriate. I almost expected the man in the white suit to lead the community singing and to conclude with a heartfelt rendition of Abide With Me.

Portsmouth had a manager, Harry Redknapp, who carries himself as a genuine throwback: professional character, bit of an accent, rough diamond, salt of the earth, heart of gold. What’s more, both teams genuinely suffered from Cup Final nerves. For them, playing an overhyped football match was a real novelty.

The “big four” play an overhyped match twice every week. The burden of trying to live up to unrealistic expectations is their lives’ staple. It is what they draw their humorously large salaries for. But here we had teams for whom Wembley really is the focus of dreams, for whom merely getting there is a considerable achievement.

We live in an age of star worship. Big Names, of clubs and of players, are all that matter. Nothing seems very real unless it is bathed in the light of stars. But on Saturday we had an occasion that basked in the glow of obscurity, losing the now traditional focus on famous individuals, becoming instead an occasion for corporate effort and all the one-for-all virtues that will be eluding us at the Champions League final on Wednesday, when it will all be Ronaldo v Lampard and Rooney v Drogba.

Instead we had a match of fraught and anxious striving, two sides giving their all in a match that was decided by one of the greatest and most ancient traditions that the Cup Final can offer: the Goalie’s Blunder. Peter Enckelman lunged forward to a horrid, dipping cross from John Utaka (and no, I couldn’t, from the top of my head, furnish you with a full cv of either).

It was not a standard, much practised situation and Enckelman failed to come to terms with it, electing to catch it low down and failing. Kanu (a lapsed or faded star, but only one of the third magnitude) adroitly lifted the ball into the net.

So I left, dodging past Billy the white horse, had a good fish supper and a cup of Bovril and still had enough money left to ride home in a Hansom cab.

Explore Football

• Premier League

• Football League

• Scotland

• European Football

• International Football

• TheGame

• Live Match Tracker

• The Fink Tank

• Fantasy Football