Sea monster has made it hard to bank on Arsenal

The nostalgia quotient was quite a double in itself. The sight of John Toshack, George Graham, John Radford and the rest trundling around a sun-dappled Wembley invoked a special glow, because this was the first match I ever watched with real intensity.

Added to the warmth a middle-aged man must experience when reminded of the day his seven-year-old self fell in love with football, meanwhile, was a sense of poignancy at watching such a stoutly English occasion just as news was breaking of the melodramatics in the Arsenal boardroom.

To think of that endearingly-pompous club falling into the chubby clutches of that Uzbek sea monster (technically "oligarch") Alisher Usmanov . . . well, it was enough to force a chap to pep up the Lemsip with a shot of 12-year-old malt, just to counteract the shock.

It hasn't happened yet, of course, and perhaps it never will.

But the rancorous departure of Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith — a name that belongs more to the genteel Arsenal Stadium Mystery era, when we were all good friends and jolly good company, than to this increasingly vicious Battle for the Emirates — puts another 15 per cent of Arsenal shares into play.

Should Usmanov and David Dein snaffle them, their Red And White Holdings will have a large enough shareholding to trigger an automatic takover bid.

In which case, needless to say, there would be every chance of Arsenal becoming the last of the Big Four to become foreign owned.

Ructions of this kind are a novelty for Arsenal and if the surviving directors need guidance they are no better tutors than the visiting counterparts from Anfield. Liverpool may have enjoyed a little tranquillity of late but one suspects that's because embittered co-owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks have called a truce to facilitate the sale of the club both are thought to want.

The role reversal in the respective boardrooms is echoed on the pitch.

For once it is Arsenal whose League challenge has faded after a promising start and Liverpool who are serious title contenders. So quixotic is Arsene Wenger's side, that Arsenal might be fancied to win. Yet so durable have Liverpool become that it's hard to imagine them losing.

Taking the form line through Chelsea, whom both have beaten at Stamford Bridge by a single goal, the draw is clearly indicated but it must be said that Sunday's match lacks its usual anticipatory savour. Historically this may be the grandest of all English fixtures, and has lit up all three domestic competitions.

Among so many memorable meetings was the captivating 1987 League Cup Final, when for the first time Liverpool lost a game in which Ian Rush scored, not to mention the post-Hillsborough decider two years later when Michael Thomas won Arsenal the title with virtually the final kick of the season.

Now the fixture list barely feels English at all, what with Usmanov seemingly closer to equalizing the Big Four score by making it American Investors 2 Ex-Soviet Plutocrats 2, and with so few of Her Majesty's subjects scheduled to play on Sunday (God willing the Premier League follows the Football League's example and adopts a quota system but you have to doubt He will be).

So you'll excuse me if I return to ESPN and the 1971 FA Cup Final to wash away the distaste in a nostalgic bath of sideburns, Kenneth Wolstenholme's Empire tones, and the immortal vision of a North Bank boy splayed headlong on the Wembley turf after winning the Double for the stronghold of permanence and tradition we ritually knew back then as the Bank of England club.