The third round of the FA Cup should be the highlight of the calendar. It should. Not just because ‘it used to be special’ but because it’s brilliant. The moment when the restrictions of who play who are lifted. It essentially involves getting all the teams in the game and putting them in a bag, giving it a shake and then there’s a purely random game to play. Will it be Hull City vs Doncaster? Forest Green Rovers vs Newcastle? Manchester Utd vs Woodley Sports? Who knows!
That should be fun. That should be the best weekend of the year, the one where all the rules are thrown out the window. It should be like going to the train station and discovering that for one day only, all the trains go to weird and wonderful places or going to the supermarket and discovering a whole load of exotic products in place of the usual dreary essentials.
It’s a holiday from normality. That should be pounced upon by one and all. A technicolour day amongst all the grey days of menial drudgery. A day when the clocks melt and the league tables dissolve.
Instead we gripe and moan about fixture congestion and the impact on league form. We treat it like unimaginative middle managers concerned about the impact of a long weekend on productivity.
The FA Cup is viewed with a surly kind of acceptance by most teams now. It’s something they have to do. A kind of unpleasant obligation. It’s like visiting a cantankerous aging relative, you go, but with as little commitment as possible and once it’s over, you leave as quickly as possible.
This year, the excuse of many managers appears to be
‘Ah, the first team players are injured and sick anyway, it’s not the cup per se, it just so happens that we’re having to put out the youth team to cope with fixture congestion’
We know that’s not true. We know what they really should be saying is:
‘Why would I put my assets out in this game, to get kicked and tripped, when even if we win it, there’s little or no benefit to the club, when, even if we get to the final at Wembley, we’ll get litle or no cash out of it.’
The sad truth (and it is a sad truth,) is that the top clubs are never going to care about the cup whilst football is the way it is. It doesn’t net them significant prize money and it doesn’t lead to qualifying for the champions league, which in turn leads to significant money.
Whilst this might lead to the next tier of teams taking the cup seriously, these teams are far too busy trying to protect their Premier League status or getting the highest finish they can (they earn more from finishing a few places higher in the league than they do for winning the cup.)
If we move down to the next league, then the prospect of getting into the Premier League is a far bigger pay day for the teams in the middle or above of the Championship. The Championship play off final has replaced the FA Cup as the most keenly awaited one of game of the year and it’s telling how every season it is greeted by a fanfare of hot air about being the most financially lucrative game of football in the world.
This is also sad. Two sides who weren’t good enough to win their league, which isn’t even the top flight, playing in a one off game is more important than the actual FA Cup final, a competition in which all the teams in the country compete with the beauty of randomness meaning in theory, the top flight League leaders can end up playing an 11th tier bottom of the league side.
What you are left with is now league 1 and 2 sides and the odd non-league side, who appreciate the pay day (which is often less than it could be, given the apathy of many higher tier supporters to the cup.) If these sides win their tie against a famous name, it often is somewhat tainted by the fact they were playing against a second or even third string side.
What is even more tragic is, aside from the odd blip when Roberto Martinez total footballed his Wigan side to relegation and the FA Cup in the same year, or Portsmouth snared the cup, shortly before financially imploding, the winners of the cup have become less varied. Even though the leading teams treat at least the first 3 games of the cup with a sullen attitude akin to a schoolkid being chided to focus in a home economics lesson, giving grudging attention to something they really don’t want to do or see the point in, they still go on and win it most years.
That’s the real misery. The cup, the one in which Wimbledon outmuscled Liverpool, the one in which Keith Houchen’s diving header took Coventry to their greatest ever moment, the one in which Stanley Matthew’s wing play set up Stanley Mortenson for a hat trick in one of the most famous games of football in history is a faded photocopy of itself. It’s a byline to the season, coming after the league (which may well have always been the case) the top three, the ‘battle for fourth place’ the ‘battle to survive,’ the ‘battle to escape the Championship,’ the ‘worlds richest game’ and everything that goes on in the Champions League.
Until the Premier League and Europe are devalued and football stops acting like it’s two thirds business, one sixth branding and one sixth football then we are stuck with this. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to remember what it used to feel like. The harder it becomes to remember an era when being a ‘football fan’ wasn’t synonymous with financial dullardry. Football is supposed to be an escape from the real. FA Cup third round day was once, not so very long ago, the best, most fantastical date in the football calendar. It is no longer and for that, we should look long and hard at what we actually want the game to be for.
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