Which Cup Final Defeat

…has stung you the most?

Everyone will have a different reason for their choice.

There’s been finals we’ve dominated and lost, finals we’ve lost in the dying seconds in heartbreaking fashion.

So which one stands out for you?

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Champions League always.

So close yet so far. The seesaw of emotions. From going down to 10 men that made losing feel inevitable, to taking the lead and then daring to believe as we approached the final 15 minutes.

Still hurts today.

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2001 cup final I was absolutely shattered as we should have won that comfortably, but I can’t go past the 2006 CL.

Valencia CWC final 1980. Coming on top of losing the cup final on the Saturday.
All then games for nothing. Kempe’s missing his pen and giving the hope only to be let down by Brady and Rix.

CL final. Think I was 17/18 at the time. About 7 pints of Stella in by full time and blubbing.

Yea. Nothing comes remotely close.

Definitely the Champions League.

But to try and be a bit more original, for me the FA Cup Final we lost to Liverpool was horrible. As Aussie says, we should have won it comfortably and as an eleven year old I fully expected us to win. There was also a horrible sense of injustice given that fucking Bond villain looking cunt Henchoz handballed one on the goal line.

Michael Owen broke my heart that day.

Then it took over two hours to just get out of the multi story carpark in Cardiff my dad had parked in, and the traffic on the way home was horrible too. Plus there was an incident on the motorway which lives in the memory. I made eye contact woth some bloke when parallel to a minibus of gooners. Feeling awkward I smiled at the guy and gave him a thumbs up, as an awkward child I was not sure how to accurately convey the shared misery we were both feeling. He obviously mistook me for a Liverpool fan and shouted something from the window we couldn’t hear and gave me the finger. I retreated into my shell and looked like I was gonna cry, my dad totally lost the fucking plot and started driving recklessly too get back alongside them and screaming at this bloke for swearing at a kid and telling them to pull over so he could have words (I’m not sure it’s words he wanted to have…lol).

I’d never seen my dad behave in such a fashion and it just upset me even more than the bloke who swore at me, and then my dad felt awful about that too.

Bad, bad memories that day :joy:

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Champions League was the worst one because of the sheer effort my boyfriend and I went to try and scalp a ticket, oh and i was working a job I hated at the time and effectively binned it off to goto Paris so yeah that didn’t go down too well

The CL final is obviously the worse however despite not being a final I feel second place belongs to the quarter final exit to Chelsea in 04 dont think theres a final I’ve hurt as much as after that.

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2001 FA Cup was the first defeat that I properly rember and still hurts to this day. Made all the worse by the fact that Michael Owen my favourite non Arsenal for quite a long time (now I cant stand him :grin:). But nothing can really come close to 2006, it would’ve perhaps been the biggest achievement in clubs history and couldve set us one completely different trajectory

2006

/thread.

Yeah, a good one.

Obviously the CL final was our most bitter loss, at least for me… Completely devaststing.
But that exit against Chelsea is also very high up there.
Fucking I’ll probably remember Cole running with the ball and kicking it on the final whistle to the grave.

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Not a final but I was pretty devastated when Fabianski came running out his goal like a silly prick in the 2009 FA Cup semi final against Chelsea and costing us the match after we were winning 1-0

2004 2nd leg vs Chelsea probably stung me the most also, I legit thought we’d win the treble that season.

What I remember about that game is, I was at a pub with majority Chelsea fans and at the final whistle images of an Arsenal kid crying came on screen, they all burst out in laughter. Was infuriating.

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Ahh this explains a lot, the root cause of the Emperor Palpatine we see today.

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I was at that game. Misery compounded by the fact that Everton beat Man Yoo the next day and we would’ve trounced them in the final.

Anyway, to answer this shitty thread’s question (nothing personal @Mr_Nostalgia but it is a shitty thread), the 2006 CL final stings the most.

2nd- Zaragoza
3rd- Scouse bastards 2001

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Surprised no one mentioned the UEFA cup final.

Was just an adolescent wanting to get some respect for my club in Europe and losing that sucked. I also remember it wasn’t on television and had to follow it on radio, was particularly painful for that.

But yeah it’s obviously 2006 CL final by a long shot.

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Was that the Galatasaray one?

It was a funny game, that. I really wanted it to be a Leeds-Arsenal final. The build up to the UEFA Cup final had, unfortunately, been about the Leeds fans who were stabbed and killed. Furthermore, there was violence between fans before our game against Galatasaray, too.

It all kinda led to an anticlimax for me. The result was forgotten about come the European Championships that summer (it wasn’t like the Chelsea defeat in Baku which still reverberates now)

That really was a bad year for football violence, with big clashes at that summers euros as well.