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Sixty thousand local residents were invited to be the first spectators allowed into the new Wembley Stadium at the weekend. They watched a charity match, paid £4 (around six euros) for a hot dog and generally acted as guinea pigs for an initial check of access, safety and … toilet facilities. The stadium in North London cost around £800 million (an awful lot of euros) and with a capacity of 90,000 is the largest roof-covered all-seater stadium in the world. With an eye on being one of the teams to play in the very first FA Cup Final in the new version of Wembley, four sides battled out two replays on Monday … and the games finished as might have been expected.

Chelsea travelled across London to face an in-form Tottenham Hotspur, who hadn’t lost in eight games and who had two potentially match-winning players in great form: England’s Aaron Lennon and Bulgarian Dimitar Berbatov. But on the night they were overshadowed by two Blues players with a similar style: Shaun Wright Phillips and Andriy Shevchenko, suddenly finding himself, it seems, after a poor start and, let’s face it, a poor middle of the season. Both scored excellent second half goals to give Chelsea a semi-final place against Blackburn, a late penalty by Robbie Keane ultimately meaningless. Chelsea also keep on course for a possible four trophies, one already won (the League Cup).

It was a penalty that decided the other replay, Cristiano Ronaldo accused of diving in the area before getting up to crash the ball in from the spot, giving Manchester United the win over Middlesbrough at Old Trafford. United play Watford in the other semi-final. The Cup is a strange competition, and anything can happen, but favourites for the Final must be the two teams that are also at the top of the Premiership, the London team still six points behind their northern rivals after both had easy wins at the weekend.

The English League (that’s the three divisions below the Premiership, a separate entity) are currently  discussing the possibility of having penalties at the end of games that end in draws – taking a lead from American sports, where drawing is not allowed (for some reason). It isn’t something the football purist will welcome, but on the other hand … there were three 0-0 draws in the Premiership (Aston Villa v Liverpool, Reading v Portsmouth and Wigan v Fulham), by all accounts extremely tedious affairs. Maybe in these cases penalties would have been a good way of waking the fans up … to tell them it was time to go home (?)

Elsewhere, strange goals and non-goals were being scored. Tottenham’s second in their 3-1 win over Watford was a massive kick upfield by their goalkeeper Paul Robinson which sailed over the Watford ‘keeper Ben Foster and in. It was, in fact, Robinson’s second goal of his career; he’d got one for Leeds before moving to Spurs. West Ham moved off the bottom of the table by winning 2-1 at Blackburn after five straight defeats, but the winning goal simply wasn’t; substitute Bobby Zamora’s shot did not cross the line, and Carlos Tevez was offside anyway, but the referee, through his assistant, gave a goal. The International Football Association Board, meeting in Manchester recently, gave the green light for goal-line technology to solve problems like this, which serve only to distort the truth of the game.

Hibernian won the Scottish League Cup in front of 52,000 at Hampden Park, thrashing Kilmarnock 5-1, Benjelloun and Fletcher both getting two. In the Scottish Premier League, Celtic appear to be putting their feet up before the job is done: after losing to rivals Rangers last weekend, it was the turn of modest Falkirk to steal three points from them with a 1-0 win. Celtic are still 13 points ahead of Rangers at the top, but the march to the title has become a bit of a stagger.

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