Tom Lappin: Thirty years on and Willie Young's cynical foul still rankles with the Hammers

THE 17-year-old was clear with only the keeper to beat, two minutes remaining, and glory on the horizon. The lumbering ginger centre-half was never going to tackle him, so instead lunged out and hauled the teenager to the ground.

The sheer ugly injustice of that moment is still burned into West Ham memories, even though they won the 1980 FA Cup final with the famously rare Trevor Brooking header.

The forward, Paul Allen, the youngest player to appear in a Wembley Cup final at the time, was about to ensure his double-entry in the record books. The centre-half, Willie Young, typified the Arsenal of the time, a rough, pragmatic crew who barely tolerated the fripperies of Liam Brady. Posterity's sense of humour has decreed that a quick image search for the no-nonsense Scot reveals that the first picture available features on a web forum called Footballers Who Look Like Rough Lesbians (Volume 1).

Thirty years on, and the world has changed. Arsenal, a club that used to regard a couple of ruthless Scots as integral to any first-team line-up, now avoids them with the disdain of any French gourmet declining a helping of clootie dumpling. They pursue an aesthetic form of purist football to a fault. In the same scenario in 2010, Allen would either be allowed to score, or would be dispossessed by a fleet but diminutive midfielder who would then sell him a dummy before flicking a disguised 40-yard pass to launch a counter-attack. The lumpen proles of 1980 are now the English game's elegant aristocrats.

Thirty years on and some things stay the same. Back then West Ham were a motley crew of limping veterans and eager youngsters that had slipped into a lower division, but still occasionally found enough spirit and cohesion to produce a momentous result. These days West Ham have the limping veterans (Kieron Dyer, Guillermo Franco), the eager youngsters (Junior Stanislas, Jack Collison), look likely to slip into a lower division, and those occasions of spirit and cohesion are becoming rarer under the increasingly helpless Gianfranco Zola.

It would be typically perverse if they produced one tomorrow afternoon at Upton Park against New Arsenal. If FA Cup runs are usually coveted at West Ham, as some diversion from seasons characterised by mid-table placidity or relegation battles, this season the competition is a luxury that cannot be indulged. West Ham's immediate financial future is only marginally more secure than Portsmouth's, and January is shaping up as a month where Upton Park may be plastered with 'Everything must go' signs.

Around autumn, transfer speculation centred on West Ham's three England internationals, Robert Green, Matthew Upson and Carlton Cole. Those rumours have diminished a little, because of Green and Upson's erratic form, and Cole's injury. Fabio Capello, for one, should hope they stay at Upton Park, because history tells us that England win nothing without three West Ham players running the show (Cockneys still wonder what would have happened in 1982 if Ron Greenwood's England had featured Alvin Martin, Alan Devonshire and Brooking).

Instead all the latest attention has concentrated on Scott Parker, the one player presently keeping West Ham away from a permanent position at the bottom of the Premier League. Parker has done enough to attract the interest of some big clubs, and his departure looks inevitable unless West Ham's precarious finances can be alleviated by a white-knight investor.

West Ham's present holding company declined an offer from David Gold and David Sullivan to add the club to their empire built on soft porn and sex aids, which will at least spare us alarming speculation as to the nature of the club's next shirt-sponsorship logo. The offer was rejected despite Gold and Sullivan being endorsed by Harry Redknapp, surely the last person to associate his name with anybody who might be regarded as remotely dodgy.

London financiers Intermarket (three words which fail to be reassuring) were reportedly preparing a takeover bid. "We'll be making a bid on Monday," claimed Intermarket's joint founding director David Byrne in the Telegraph, although disappointingly he failed to follow that up with the refrain, Into the blue again, after the moneys gone. Once in a lifetime . . .

Without Byrne's investment, West Ham will be taking the road to nowhere (aka the Championship). Zola's appointment now looks like a classic case of throwing an idealist into a job that needs a pragmatist. West Ham's squad is awash with obvious talent that would flourish elsewhere. They are simply not suited to the point-scrapping war of attrition needed for Premier League survival over the next four months.

The FA Cup at least represents a little R'n'R before they head back to the misery of life in the league trenches. West Ham fans can be forgiven if they indulge in nostalgia for the halcyon days of 30 years ago, when they were the last team from outside the top division to lift the trophy, when the kid Allen (we'll gloss over his subsequent career at Tottenham) had only Pat Jennings and his unfeasibly large hands to beat, until the intervention of that galoot Young.

After retiring, Paul Allen worked for the PFA, and there is no evidence that he was anything but assiduous in sorting out the union affairs of big ginger centre-halves. Willie Young now runs kennels in Leicestershire, where his stare can still cow even the most feisty of Dobermans.

Sir Trevor Brooking will begin his third spell as caretaker manager of West Ham in April, and narrowly fail to save them from relegation.