Guardiola picked an odd-looking team and the striker personified a hungover performance from the champions

Before kick-off at a lovely soft sunlit Wembley Stadium, Manchester City’s fans turned their backs and engaged in a mass Cup final Poznan. At the final whistle there was a strange, optical echo of that moment. Here we had an anti-Poznan, the Poznan of departures, as the backs of the blue shirts were once again turned, this time heading towards the stairs and out along the gloomy grey Wembley concourses.

Fans never stick around at the end of a losing final. Many did so here just long enough to applaud the City players after what is still a champion season. And this always was a weird, through-the-looking-glass FA Cup final. It ended with the leaky-roof billion-dollar underdogs beating the remarkably efficient government outreach project, which is some way short of culture clubs and crazy gangs but we work with what we have.

The England manager has made big calls in omitting Jordan Henderson and Marcus Rashford from Euro 2024 … but the right ones

Farewell, then, and thanks for all the almost-but-not-quites. From a rational point of view there shouldn’t be much to say about Gareth Southgate’s decision not to include Marcus Rashford or Jordan Henderson in his plans for Euro 2024.

On the other hand, well, this is England, old bean. And being rational has never really had much to do with it. More than ever in the age of tribal celebrity and online Southgate-truthers, every call and every cut must be unpacked for its wider significance, even when this adds up to little more than rationalising two entirely sensible decisions.

This feels like an act of disruption from club’s US investors but there is logic to appointing a super-smart yet low-cost tyro

Welcome, then, to the dicing and slicing of Arne Slot. As ever with the appointment of a new manager at one of the Premier League’s heritage-level clubs, it is necessary to make a prediction; to judge before anything has actually happened whether this will prove to be a successful hire.

The real answer to which is, of course: nobody knows. Football is a field of endless variables. Even the most dominant manager has a diminishing range of influence. Every appointment is a gamble, every managerial hire a playing of the slots.

Ukrainian makes convincing case as greatest of all time after rocking the Gypsy King to unify the heavyweight division

In the final shake-up it was those 30 seconds at the end of the ninth round that determined Oleksandr Usyk would finish the night holding all four heavyweight belts, the first man to do so this century; and in the process complete an ascent to the most rarefied all-time champion air.

This was a wonderful heavyweight fight, 12 rounds of craft, heart and in Tyson Fury’s case, bloody-minded will to keep throwing punches from the edge of unconsciousness. If that half a minute was pivotal, a knockdown that ultimately shaped the judges’ cards, it also captured the wider patterns of a fight during which Usyk worked away at Fury like a man chopping down a tree with a forged steel hatchet.

No manager has combined heart and soul with details and hard maths like the German, no wonder he has run out of energy

“I am, how can I say it, running out of energy.” It is, in its own way, the saddest of managerial farewells. Not to mention the most decisive. This is Jürgen Klopp’s thing. He’s an energy source. He’s joules, watts, volts, catalytic reactions. His energy is his energy, both in the tactical pattern of his teams and as a sustained feat of personality.

Throughout the Klopp elegies of the past few weeks, the deep-dives and unpeelings, the endless daily Klopp-trap, it is striking how little that decision has been questioned. The idea of an energy-free-Klopp is just so final, like José Mourinho telling you he’s run out of toxic bile, or Pep Guardiola confessing that, actually, he’s starting to find detailed positional strategy a little samey and humdrum these days. Jürgen is tired. And when that happens, it really is time to go.

Unusual storylines are growing ever rarer due to the influence of the super-rich and nation states in our national game

Admit it, when Erik ten Hag walked out holding a microphone after Manchester United’s final home game on Wednesday night you also thought he was going to start saying things like “Your job now is to support the new manager”, before marching off to write books containing anecdotes about Richard Branson.

In the event the most notable part of Ten Hag’s speech was how convincing he is when he frowns into a mic and says things. Ten Hag could stab himself in the eye with a kebab skewer and stand there in the centre circle, kebab skewer pyoing-ing up and down, explaining why this is actually a really good thing and a sign of genuine progress and you’d think, yeah, kebab-skewer-eye-guy really is on to something. He just needs time. Maybe with patience and a proper process he can stab himself in the other eye too.