If Manchester United go on and complete the treble on Wednesday night you can safely bet that when people reflect on the manner in which they achieved a piece of footballing history the fact that this FA cup final was such a poor contest will scarcely merit a mention.

Taken as part of their campaign to pull off a much greater achievement, it was a confident, energetic and professional performance and for that Alex Ferguson and his players deserve a great deal of credit. But I think everybody who was back at Anfield in 1977, when Liverpool came so close to completing this remarkable footballing achievement, must be lamenting the fact that it was a determined United side, rather than the rather mediocre Newcastle outfit we saw on Saturday, that blocked the way on their own day out at Wembley.

Of course we have to be fair about this. United had done the hard work in this competition in the earlier rounds. If you beat two of the best three teams in England along the way and take out Liverpool (who might have risen to the occasion better than Ruud Gullit's side did) for good measure then nobody can begrudge you a bit of a stroll in the final. That, however, doesn't take away from the fact that once again what is traditionally one of the most enjoyable days in British football produced a terribly disappointing game.

Only the most blinkered of Newcastle supporters can have been genuinely surprised by the result but a good many more will have been taken aback by the ease with which it was achieved.

Newcastle needed to step up a gear or two on their recent form if they were to mount a serious challenge to Ferguson's players, but instead what we got was confirmation of the players' limitations.

They actually started brightly enough. I thought that in the centre of midfield Dietmar Hamann and Gary Speed did well in the way that they disrupted the Premiership champions' passing and, briefly, the pair looked capable of winning enough possession to enable their side to make a game of it.

When Roy Keane was replaced by Teddy Sheringham, though, their game plan appeared to crumble. Ferguson had a few options when it came to replacing his injured captain but once again he made an inspired call. Sheringham won the match for United, and not just by scoring the opening goal.

The striker's game is well known but, amazingly, nobody in the Newcastle camp seeemed to know what to make of the way he was consistently dropping off players and coming deep to pick up the ball. It was astonishing that neither of the centre halves decided to take it upon themselves to start marking him, but when they didn't somebody from midfield should have been detailed to at least try to curb his movement.

His goal was an enormous blow to Gullit's men, who you always felt were going to have to score first if they were to have any chance at all. In the few minutes after Sheringham's strike, you could almost see the players asking themselves if they were capable of fighting their way back into the game. The answer, they seemed to sense, was no.

There were a couple of brave performances. I felt sorry, for instance, for Alan Shearer who was one of the few Newcastle players on the pitch with the game to trouble United, if only he had been allowed to. Throughout the first half he worked hard but at no point did he get the service that he deserved and the fact that Temuri Ketsbaia was his striking partner on the day hardly helped.

The Georgian is at his best when making runs from midfield rather than playing up front and his unpredictability (half the time he really doesn't look like even he knows what he is going to do next) did little to help Shearer. After Duncan Ferguson came on for Hamann at half-time things did improve slightly for Gullit's men in attack but, though they came close once or twice, they still created very few genuine chances while their need to get forward in search of an equaliser was leaving them more exposed at the back, even before Paul Scholes more or less wrapped it up by scoring the second goal.

The problems in defence can't have been a surprise to Gullit who has been concentrating his efforts on bringing in two centre halves and a right sided full-back in recent weeks but even he must have been disappointed with the way Laurent Charvet and Nikos Dabizas performed on Saturday.

The lack of width was a terrible problem, too, with nobody capable of getting in the sort of crosses that Shearer and Ferguson have shown themselves capable of thriving on in the past.

If the pair are to be asked to lead the attack next season then Gullit must know some of his summer spending will have to go on players who can play to their strengths.

Ferguson's concerns, on the other hand, will be more immediate though much less troubling. On Saturday his team, without Yorke, Denis Irwin, Nicky Butt or, for the best part of the game, Roy Keane, cruised to another win and they will now go to the Nou Camp feeling that they are capable of beating just about anybody.

With suspensions and injuries to consider the United boss has some tough choices to make between now and then, but quite a few players have staked strong claims for places in his last starting line-up of the season. As usual, though, they are the sort of hard decisions that every other manager in the English game would love to have tormenting them . . . though few could hope to so consistently play their hand so well. On Wednesday he and his players will face much sterner opposition than they did at Wembley, but the way things are going now it's hard to imagine anybody being too concerned about that.

In an interview with Emmet Malone.