The FA Cup is a brilliant idea. You play a game. If you lose it, you're out and if you win you go through to the next round. There is nothing else to it. It's like league football - but better, because no matter how shit the game is, there's something at stake.
Once you're out, you have to wait till the next season to play it again. There isn't a next week. If you keep winning, however, eventually you go all the way to that there London, for the final and if you win that, you get the FA Cup to take home for a bit with your ribbons on it. They even write your name on it. Forever.
Lovely stuff.
Cup football used to be seen as the ultimate prize in football. The league was secondary - the sudden death nature of knockout football, the randomness of playing against whatever side came out of the hat creating a high stakes set of one off fixtures. It only takes 6 games to win it (8 for us in our temporary state outside of football's elite) but there's no room for any error. The belief was essentially, you can grind out a league title, lose a whole load of games along the way - but a cup win takes a certain character, a certain fearless approach (because after all, only wins will do) that is ultimately more laudable.
The league might be an endurance test, but there are second chances. Next week... You can finish lower than a team but beat them home and away. The league is a triumph of predictability, of organisation, of aggregated scores and totalled points. The Cup has a simple and gloriously appealing chaos to it. You don't know who you're going to play, but you know one simple truth - Win or you're out. Like a roman gladiator didn't survive a loss, neither does a football team in the FA Cup.
The league's latter day supremacy is born of the modern age. Football is less of a game and more of a soap opera. Whereas the black and white era saw the cup as an exciting novelty where Sunday's backpage headlines could be written, the 21st century 24 hour media landscape needs reliable narratives that stretch over months and by its nature, the cup doesn't give that. As it progresses, it gets smaller, there's literally less teams, less players, less matches. That doesn't suit the way modern football is a packaged and presented, nor does it appeal to the accountancy that drives modern clubs - even a tepid league season has a guaranteed set of fixtures - the cup only promises one game - anything more is down to performance on the pitch and the fickle nature of football fate
If (to pick the current 'crisis club' of the moment) Liverpool lose in their first game, they're gone. After that first event, there's no scope for further attention, no picking apart their ongoing travails, no narrative of redemption versus further fall possible - they're out, gone, finished. It's over, till next season. Attention must fall elsewhere. It doesn't matter that there's a global audience of Liverpool fans hungry for more Liverpool content - they're dead and the team that beat them carry on forward, regardless of whether that's what the world wants to see or not.
The cup doesn't speak to the modern obsession with prize money either. Win it and it makes very little difference to the balance sheet (certainly not for a Premier League club) so it's not important in terms of the breathless way that both top flight and Champions League football are celebrated for their revenue earning potential and their ability to finance spectacular deals that again, add to the narrative of the TV game. It matters far more to the lesser names in the draw than the bigger ones and that rubs off on fans who see the cup as some kind of inconvenience, a pointless set of games that don't speak to the true glory of football - the accruing and subsequent spending of wealth.
The FA Cup is still resolutely old fashioned in the way that, a few million quid aside, the main reason to win it is, you get to climb the steps of Wembley and all cheer at the same time as your captain lifts the cup. It's about the spectacle, the moment, the glory. Unlike almost everything else in football, you get nothing for second place. There's no European also rans mediocrity league where you get to beat Lithuanian or Turkmenistani teams for fun for the semi finalists, no second chance play offs for the team that went out in the quarter final. It's simple. You win it, or you lose.
Whether it's by accident or design, I like that it still is essentially the same competition I recall as a kid, still essentially the same competition (give or take replays) that is pictured on grainy historical footage or ghostly, foggy pictures. from the very beginning of the game. It's never been seeded or had a group stage, or been reimagined as an invitational mini league to be played over the summer break in Dubai. It's knockout football and round 3 is in January when it's cold and muddy.
Let's just fuck off reality and pragmatism. Don't sigh. You know it makes sense. If you're dragging yourself down to Bloomfield Road or Glanford Park on even an occasional basis, you know that reality and pragmatism would really tell you just to give up. So surrender yourself...
If James Husband lifted the FA Cup, it would be unreal. It would be the moment of a lifetime. You'd literally never, ever feel anything like it again. CJ running about with the lid on his head. Fletch doing a dance with it, cheeky Albie Morgan pouting champagne into the cup... It's that exciting a thought, it makes me feel a bit breathless just to think of it. For all the miserable fucks bemoaning the FA Cup 'not being what it was' just imagine the dizzying, nauseating, pulsating tension as the minutes tick down... Imagine the roar of the final whistle, the sweat, the relief, the sheer insane release of it all. Can you even begin to contemplate the build up to the cup lift? I can't. I don't know what I'd do. Cry? Dance? Faint? - it would be the play off finals and more. It would be like completing life somehow.
It's possibly, very probably, almost certainly not going to happen... but it just might... this is the glorious mental trick the Cup plays on us. Win a round and for a blissful short time, you're in the draw, opponent unknown and anything and anyone might come next... the draw might be kind, you might get that bit further, you might just reach a point where you start to let yourself dream about the impossible. Even if the biggest team comes out, you give yourself a chance... For fucks sake cynics, this is a season where Grimsby (that's the actual Grimsby) beat Manchester United. That literally happened. This season. It was great.
Maybe the cup has lost its lustre but, I say, that's just some truism that you can ignore if you want. If you don't care about the cup, then you won't care about the cup. If you decide to care about it, then you will care about it. Just because it's not top priority for those weird armchair watchalong Premier League fans who shout about 'net spend' and 'PSR' or the myriad of random foreign financiers in the boardrooms of the top clubs or the TV executives who've grown fat on the Premier League's week in week out reliable glamour doesn't mean you can't enjoy it, doesn't mean you can't care about it. In fact, it's probably reason you should - because what they want and what you want aren't the same thing. They want less clubs and more big games and less relegation and less inconvenient fixtures and all of that...
Therefore... Stop being miserable cunts and get up for the fucking cup because its here and it's a fleeting chance at glory. Fuck having what we value dictated by others, get knocking up your tinfoil trophies and get down to Bloomfield Road to wave them at the telly because actually, the truth of it all is - you can throw as much prize money and TV cameras at a thing as you want - but it is the supporters who actually make the spectacle and it's up to us what we choose to value. If we want knockout football where only winning matters, then we've got some right here, right now and we can embrace it if we choose.
We're playing Scunthorpe on Saturday. It's fair to say that more glamorous opponents exist in world football- but at this stage of proceedings, Scunthorpe aren't a bad side to get in terms of a decent potential spectacle- they're in really good form, they'll bring a load and they'll make some noise. We'll have to turn up to get a result. There's no point in either side playing for a draw either. It's knockout football.
For us, there's players returning from injury and the first home game of a new era, Ian Evatt back at Bloomfield in the home dugout. After a season of abject disappointment, Evatt's seaside homecoming could be the perfect exorcism of the undercooked, predictable, stodgy and highly unsatisfying football we've seen thus far. A one off cup game offering an ideal opportunity to display the 'fearless' approach the new man evoked in a series of really positive interviews.
Saturday could be tremendous. We could pack the ground out and give Ian Evatt a brilliant welcome and then bask in the rare experience of watching a game where the stakes are absolute. Win and we're 7 games from triumph... Lose and it's over for an entire year. 7 games in the league is a trudge to mid December. 7 games in the cup is a death or glory sprint to May sunshine and Wembley way...
We can be mealy mouthed about the cup and treat it with the same confused disdain that executives at elite clubs treat it - "it's really not valuable. the prize money is hardly worth getting out of bed for" or we can embrace it as the possible start of a tremendous adventure.
What other competition could give you a broadly equal chance of playing against a part time side on a ground not much more than a park surrounded by railings, or a visit to some spaceship beamed from the future like say, the Tottenham stadium to play a team of multi-millionaires?
We've been stuck in the third tier for what feels like ages (it's only 2 and a bit years somehow...!) I'm bored of playing the same teams. Away days have a certain predictability to them after a while in the same division. The cup offers an escape from this, offering as it does, the prospect of playing either clubs like Woodley Sports, Merthyr Tydfill, Hampton and Richmond or Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal... Scunthorpe themselves even - a side we shared championship status with when Ian Evatt was a player for us and who since have fallen as far as the 6th tier, suffered horrendous ownership nightmares and for whom the relative sterility of our (more recent) past would seem like glorious stability.
Every day of every week, you have the endless stories about the minutiae of the Premier League and the elite clubs around the globe plastered all over everything. We're just an afterthought. Blackpool, Scunthorpe, every other shit town team who hasn't been bought up by a global star or global finance power. We're distant, removed, at arms length. A mere provincial backwater in an era of city dominated, heavily financed elites. The FA Cup is the great leveller, even just as a dream. It's the annual anomaly where everyone, great and small, rich and poor gets chucked into a velvet bag, shaken about and drawn out.
Anything can happen in 90 minutes.
The road to Wembley begins this Saturday at 3pm. Starting point - Bloomfield Road. (Just hope that this season isn't the year that Scunthorpe win it...)
Onward!
You can follow MCLF on facebook, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads and Instagram or use Follow.it to get posts sent to your email If you appreciate the blog and judge it worth 1p or more, then a donation to one of the causes below which help kids and families in Blackpool would be grand.
Writing about football is possibly a bit pointless in an era when there's the telly and youtube and videos all over the shop. It's not my living this and it's just something I do because I do so there's no problem with reading it and then getting on with your life - If you do want to chuck some money at the cause of some random fella writing shit no one ever asked him too, then Patreon. is a thing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment