What happened the last time Manchester United met Crystal Palace in the FA Cup Final

Here are some things we noticed while rewatching the first game.

Yet this team, frankly, weren’t very good. United’s league campaign had been insipid and miserable -- they finished 13th in 1989-90 having briefly flirted with the relegation zone -- and Fergie Out sentiment was rife in the stands and the media. United scored a mere 46 goals that season, three fewer than Louis van Gaal’s current collection of shot-shy curiosities. A team that couldn’t score, an irascible manager with obscure motives and an incoherent team, a cup run that sits at odds with much of the rest of the season and might be the only thing keeping the manager in his job ... perhaps there’s a lesson here for United’s board. After all, the official line from the club has always been that the 1990 cup win didn’t matter, that Ferguson had the backing of everybody on the board at all times, and nobody ever even considered replacing him. Perhaps what this suggests is that excellence can emerge from incoherence, and that there is virtue to patience, to sticking to the plan.

As Crystal Palace line up to meet Prince Philip, you don’t need to see Pardew’s face to know that it’s Pardew. The hair -- coiffed to within an inch of elegance, then coiffed well beyond -- tells you all you need to know. This, to give it its full name, was the Football Association Challenge Cup Final Tie, and Alan Pardew was ready.

The long pass to touch that goes straight out for a throw-in is, regrettably, in something of a decline. Teams seem to want to keep possession these days. All this continental football has gone right to people’s heads. Refresh yourself with a quick look at this beautiful thing. If Palace’s fullback had stood on his winger’s shoulders and then jumped, he’d still have been yards underneath it.

(No legally unsustainable implications about spot-fixing, please and thank you.)

Consider Ian Wright’s first goal. Then consider Ian Wright.

The goal is a quite marvellous thing. Wright, on his way back from injury, drops into the game like a piranha into a carp pond. With a shimmy of his hips he leaves a defender flat on his back and then slides the ball under the diminished Leighton. One of the great FA Cup final goals and, so says Wright, the finest moment of his life.

Now, Wright himself. He spent 15 years as a footballer; since then, he has spent 16 years an an ex-footballer, a hyperactive media presence, bouncing from punditry to talk shows, from travelogues to reality television, via radio studios and opinion columns and advertisements. Without getting into the details of whether any of that stuff’s been any good, Wright stands as a particularly vigorous example of what post-career exposure does to sportspeople. It’s not just that there are people who missed his career who will know him only as the shouty one that thinks Shaun Wright-Phillips might be worth a go. It’s that it’s difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to think about, and look back on, Ian Wright-then without incorporating, at some level, Ian Wright-now. And that makes Wright-then slightly less mysterious, slightly less sexy. Everything gets just a little diluted. After all, that goal took just a few seconds. They made two series of Friday Night’s All Wright.

As a globe-spanning broadcast, the FA Cup has always played host to a wide range of advertising. This year’s, for instance, we will mostly be encouraged to buy Emirates air tickets while drinking Budweiser, the international beer of last resort. But back in 1990, tucked away among the familiar names like Sharp and Carling, are companies that appear to have slipped from the collective consciousness. Facit, Tulip Computers, Royal Liver Assurance. Where are the brands of yesteryear? Will EE, one day, mean just as little?

Cognisant of the fact that this is the the Football Association Challenge Cup Final Tie, Palace’s manager Steve Coppell strolls out for the occasion in a light grey suit with gargantuan lapels; risque, perhaps, but just about acceptable. However -- unless we’ve completely lost track of who’s who -- at some point between the handshakes and kick off he slips out of his Sunday best and into something more comfortable. Trackies and a plastic coat, which he sets off with a tin of Lucozade.

The precise moment he changed wasn’t captured by the television cameras so we don’t know for sure, but we are absolutely assuming that Coppell, as he strolled over to the dugout, reached down to his ankles, yanked and pulled the whole grey suit off in one clean motion without even breaking stride.

Watching now, there is nothing so jarring about Old Football as the backpass. Not the short shorts, not the haircuts, not the moustaches. Not the state of the pitches, and not the bone-juddering tackles that evoke nothing more than a shrug from the referee. None of that can come close to the feeling of sheer wrongness that comes every time a defender slowly rolls the ball back to the keeper, who reaches down and picks the thing up and everybody just carries on as if this is normal behaviour.

Perhaps this is evidence of just how rarely the laws of football actually change. There’s a lot of fussing around the edges, of course, tweaks to the offside rule and clarifications about what is and isn’t a foul. But it’s quite rare that something fundamental is introduced or cut out of the game: This thing that you could do. You cannot do that any more. Maybe modern football really did begin in 1992.