16 Conclusions from the FA Cup final: Semenyo, Alonso, Guardiola, Salah, Haaland fury | OneFootball

Pep Guardiola won his 20th trophy at Man City on the day Xabi Alonso agreed to try and fix a broken Chelsea culture Mo Salah summed up.

Antoine Semenyo scored the only goal of the FA Cup final as Manchester City completed a domestic double of sorts.

Calum McFarlane provided some evidence that his successor as Chelsea manager will have more than precisely nothing to work with.

1) For the second year in succession, a tense FA Cup final involving Manchester City was decided by a moment of individual quality from a player of scalable, game-breaking excellence, ready to be transferred from the Premier League’s lower reaches and mid table to an elite level.

Eberechi Eze got his career-defining move soon after humbling Pep Guardiola’s side at Wembley; he left to win trophies at Arsenal and, 12 months later, could be rewarded with the two biggest.

Antoine Semenyo similarly cited silverware as his main motivation for leaving Bournemouth behind in January, and within five months has kickstarted his personal collection with two medals, having scored in a semi-final and now a final.

The joke, of course, always has to be on Spurs; it is quite funny that they tried to sign both at the time but were pied off so thoroughly by players who knew they deserved stages of this calibre instead.

2) Semenyo has put in one of the most satisfying single-season career arcs in recent memory.

After signing a five-year contract at Bournemouth in the summer, he dismissed speculation and damned Ruben Amorim by saying “if you go somewhere, you want to feel wanted, and I didn’t feel that,” adding: “This is my safe place.”

That extension protected the Cherries, ensured fair recompense for their prize asset when the inevitable sale came, and gave Semenyo a stable platform to continue developing his talent until it could be contained no longer.

“We’ve got a good group here and we’re wanting to achieve top things this year,” he continued at the start of the season, perhaps not realising that he and Bournemouth would do so, but apart.

He remains the second-top scorer for his former side, who are still in contention to qualify for the Champions League heading into the final week of the season, with his own 20-goal campaign delivering the first two trophies of a career that started at the bottom with rejection and unsuccessful trials, and has taken in a sumptuous winning goal at Wembley.

3) Joao Pedro and Liam Delap both spoke of their own trinket-based motivations for moving to Stamford Bridge in the summer.

“I grew up watching the Premier League, and Chelsea were a club that won trophies. So, when you join Chelsea, you can only think one thing: to win trophies,” said Pedro, who scored twice in the Club World Cup semi-final and once more in the final to deliver on that prophecy within a fortnight.

At roughly the same time Mo Salah lamented the “crumbling” winning culture of Liverpool, and how they need to “go back to being the heavy metal attacking team that opponents fear and back to being a team that wins trophies,” Chelsea’s own identity crisis persisted.

Since their last win over Manchester City in the 2021 Champions League final, the Blues have lifted four trophies: a Super Cup (on penalties against Villarreal); a Conference League (as absurdly heavy pre-tournament favourites); and two Club World Cups.

This was their seventh consecutive domestic cup final defeat. Long gone are the days Guus Hiddink, Roberto Di Matteo and Rafael Benitez could inherit a shuddering, self-destructive mess mid-season and still end it with history-making honours.

4) This was a far better Chelsea performance than any they had put in recently – and than they had any right to put in really.

A managerless team almost 30 entire points behind their ostensible title challenger opponents – who had already won one trophy against a significantly better side than the Blues 55 days ago – was not expected to provide much in the way of resistance that Manchester City could not ultimately overcome comfortably.

But that relative absence of pressure, the grand occasion and the realisation that the only other thing Chelsea have to play for this season is qualification to a competition that would leave them financially screwed all combined to force a more than passable display in defeat.

Chelsea were sound defensively, competed healthily in midfield and summarily failed to create anything of note. For £6bn worth of ongoing BlueCo investment, that is obviously hilariously awful but not quite blue billion-pound bottlejobs territory, so that’s…progress?

5) Like a budget version of Manchester United celebrating their FA Cup final win by disseminating the news that Louis van Gaal was about to be replaced by Jose Mourinho, the leaks came from within the Chelsea camp soon after this loss: Xabi Alonso has decided to continue sacrificing his coaching career on chronically unmanageable clubs.

It is unknown how much of Calum McFarlane’s foundations Alonso plans to build on. The Chelsea interim’s recent switch to a back three could potentially be read as a sort of welcome gift, but beyond that he will have standing start at best with this deeply confused squad and flawed recruitment strategy.

6) The most interesting reveal was Alonso only being worth a four-year deal when Liam Rosenior was given terms for six years in January. That is exceptional work, even if it a sign that Chelsea are finally learning that contract length does not automatically equal success.

7) Alonso must build around Levi Colwill, whose injury has arguably been the biggest factor in Chelsea’s gradual collapse over the course of this season.

Those line-breaking passes are a thing of effortless, close to irreplicable beauty: one, when Erling Haaland was charging him down and robbed Colwill of the chance to take a touch, managed to perfectly split Semenyo and Omar Marmoush to send Enzo Fernandez on his way as Chelsea slowly played themselves into the game.

As this campaign has proven, had any other Chelsea player tried that the results would have been sub-optimal. Enzo Maresca had it right in August.

8) It was a game for centre-halves to thrive in, even if Wesley Fofana did prove that every rule has an exception.

Every rule also has someone like Abdukodir Khusanov around to test their limits of enforcement. In this, the fixture which marked his nightmare Welcome To The Premier League debut, a game which Gary Neville is contractually obliged to mention every time he commentates on Manchester City, those boundaries were explored thoroughly.

Khusanov does appear to have mastered the fine art of the unpunished last-man penalty-area shoulder barge which leaves public opinion divided equally as to whether it is a foul or not. One in each half on Pedro and then Jorrel Hato provided Chelsea with enough ammunition to pretend they were hard done by.

It is undeniably a fine line to tread constantly and at such a fast pace, but Khusanov’s physicality and transition into this team has been impressive. And fair play for actively mocking the If That Was Anywhere Else On The Pitch cries by committing a similar foul somewhere else on the pitch and getting booked for it.

9) By his side, Marc Guehi was a quieter but no less effective force of defiance. He was a neat bridge between the athleticism of defensive partner Khusanov and the intelligence of international team-mate Colwill.

One wonderful pass in the first half released Haaland for the Norwegian’s only shot, while Chelsea could not bypass the first player ever to be knocked out of the FA Cup but still win it in the same season – back to back no less.

10) But Fofana, who cost at least twice as much as any other centre-half on the pitch, let the side down.

It was far from a glaringly poor display from the Frenchman, but the winning goal and Manchester City’s best chance before it came from his mistakes.

For the first, his unforced miscontrol of a simple ball was recycled into a chance Semenyo ought to have converted with his head soon after the restart. Then Fofana failed to get tight enough to Haaland after Rayan Cherki’s pass was blocked, with the centre-forward’s hold-up play crucial in constructing the winner.

Chelsea’s need to source a better partner for Colwill is one of their more pressing summer tasks.

11) It was excellent from Haaland, who was the furthest Manchester City player forward when Cherki released the ball, and had five players ahead of or next to him by the time he shipped it off to Bernardo Silva.

The Norwegian then continued his underlapping run into the area, made a couple of Declan Rice-worthy scans and cut the ball back for Semenyo to flick dexterously into the net.

It was Haaland’s ninth assist of the season, putting him behind only Leandro Trossard, Florian Wirtz, Jarrod Bowen, Morgan Rogers, Declan Rice, Dominik Szoboszlai, Jeremy Doku, Rayan Cherki and Bruno Fernandes in all competitions of any Premier League player in 2025/26.

Not as much is said about the all-round play of the “League Two player” anymore.

12) He does, however, technically remain a big-game bottler after a tenth consecutive goalless final for Manchester City. Going by Haaland’s fury in the final seconds after Cherki failed to pass to him in a four-versus-three attack, it is a record he is painfully aware of.

13) Chelsea’s best opportunity came almost immediately after when a long throw found its way to Fernandez, who hooked it over under pressure in the six-yard box. They were otherwise incapable of constructing a moment between them, the sort that Haaland and Semenyo created out of nothing.

No player had more than a single shot. No player had more than one pass leading to a shot. Cole Palmer completed two of their three dribbles; Doku, for reference, managed eight by himself.

It was a fine team performance. There was a good structure and sense of unity. But they were a complete irrelevance in the final third, with Pedro given a preposterous workload in leading the line and running the channels.

He needs more support. Liam Delap and Alejandro Garnacho managed a combined three touches as substitutes. This is a stupid squad compiled by silly people. And the corner which was sent all the way back to Robert Sanchez to a smattering of first-half boos summed it all up.

14) Guardiola deserves more praise for his reinvention of Matheus Nunes as “one of the best right-backs in the world”.

“He surprised me a lot how tactically he’s so smart and intelligent,” Guardiola said recently of a player he had previously damned as “not clever enough”.

There was a slight foolishness about his timing of the run in the build-up to Haaland’s offside goal, but this added credence to the idea that Manchester City’s need for a right-back is no longer nearly as desperate as it looked in the summer.

Some of Nunes’ interventions were brilliant, including some underrated back-post defending. No player won more headers. And that recovery tackle on Pedro in the second half after losing that battle initially was crucial.

15) “The future is bright,” said Guardiola. “I know the guys, I know how they feel, the commitment for the club, very professional. I’m pretty sure we’ll be there in the next years.”

Whether that bright future involves Guardiola is still theoretically unknown. Some will construe the “we” as a tacit admission that he will be staying beyond the summer. His relatively muted celebrations were interpreted as both an indication he will leave and that he intends to honour the final year of his contract.

So much of the post-match reaction was dominated by whether Guardiola will be leading this next chapter in Manchester City’s evolution. It has been a laborious discourse for a few months and was inevitable whether or not he won his 20th trophy in ten years here.

In two separate interviews before the game Guardiola reiterated that his deal runs until 2027. Not sure why it’s been such a persistent point of speculation really.

16) “Yesterday was a nightmare. We spent six hours travelling down. The trains in this country are a problem,” is sensational late-era Guardiolaing, though. The man has a platform and he isn’t afraid to use it