6 January 2008
The Fallacy of FA Cup Magic
This weekend was the third round of the oldest club competition of all; The FA Cup. 731 teams entered and while not all will expect to grace the final, many will have harboured dreams of a prize third round tie with a Premiership team.
However with 16 of the last 19 and 10 out of the last 10 winners of the competition coming from Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea, much like the country’s top league, the Cup is fast becoming (or long-since became) the sole preserve of the self-perpetuating elite.
Because of this; the ease at which the very top clubs can advance to the final stages (assuming they avoid each other) the diminishing belief that any club other than the obvious are incapable of winning the competition, can we really say that the ‘magic’ of the cup is anything other than hype designed to maintain the proud standing of this fading competition?
After all, hype in English football is not exactly a commodity in short supply…
Saturday saw four Premiership teams lose to lower league opposition;
Blackburn 1 - 4 Coventry
Bolton 0 - 1 Sheffield United
Everton 0 - 1 Oldham
Huddersfield 2 - 1 Birmingham
All hail the minnow then. However closer scrutiny shows a more worrying trend.
Bolton, 14th in the Premiership played Coventry 16th in the league below. Gary Megson’s side stand on a precipice; while Nicholas Anelka stays, they can assure themselves of Premiership survival, should he go then they will be in genuine trouble. Megson’s answer; rest his best team for the Premiership.
Here is the eleven he played yesterday; Al Habsi, Hunt, Andrew O’Brien, Michalik, Cid, Guthrie, Joey O’Brien, Cohen, Giannakopoulos, Diouf, Braaten.
Of those only Giannakopoulos, O’Brien and Diouf could be considered first team players. The message to the other eight is simple; you are not first team players, this is not an important match.
Everton are sixth in the Premiership and are genuinely one of the top teams outside of the obvious. Strong defence and defensive squad, decent attack and exceptional midfield as good as they are, the quality of their play revolves around two players; Cahill and Arteta. The team Moyes put out to play Oldham was;
Wessels, Hibbert, Stubbs, Jagielka, Baines, Pienaar, Gravesen, Carsley, McFadden, Johnson, Vaughan.
Not a bad team. However look at the missing players; Howard, Neville, Yobo, Lescott, Osman, Yakubu and crucially, Cahill and Arteta.
Birmingham are 16th in the league and are bedding in their new manager, Alex McLeish. There is no doubt that the big prize for them is Premiership football next season although they did play a ’strong’ team.
Of course this crop of Birmingham players seem to have bought in as an attempt to prove right the saying ‘Championship players give you Championship football’.
Finally there was Blackburn, a team mired in a poor run of form although with players like McCarthy, Bentley, Friedel, Samba and Tugay it would be harsh to say that this was anything other than a first team. Coventry, well-drilled by the shrewd (manager, not in picking his jobs) Ian Dowie perhaps then performed the one genuine shock both in the result and margin of victory.
Sunday’s matches saw only one real surprise, Luton Town holding Liverpool to a 1-1 draw. A superb result for Luton not least for gaining parity with Liverpool but for a club in administration the home and away income could prove vital to them.
Liverpool however who are gradually learning to become crack shots at shooting themselves in the foot yet again embarrassed themselves both in team selection and in their ability to play nothing other than grinding, ineffective football. Still, it would be hard to find someone who would bet against them winning the replay.
Meanwhile, Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea all won without conceding a goal.
The best the minnows can hope for these days is to beat a decent Premiership club’s second team. Years from now Luton’s superb draw against (a predictably depleted) Liverpool will be remembered for the money they earned from the two ties. Should they gloriously win the replay it will always be prefaced by the quality of the team Liverpool played with.
But such cynicism is not limited to the Premiership. Hull, fighting for the Championship playoff places travelled to Plymouth and made seven changes (they lost).
While the grand prize becomes ever more unattainable and the definition of a ‘cup shock’ diminishes to a ‘mild surprise’ and the mightiest teams only ever lose to themselves, the ‘magic’ of the cup recedes to the quaint experience of visiting grounds of the poor and undernourished and dreams of FA Cup glory are replaced with the hope of some sort of intravenous shot of money.
On the radio the pundits talk of how it gives them an opportunity to see real football, hotbeds of the game, where it all begins, the real beating heart of football; it’s a rap artist winding down the window of his stretched hummer to look at the streets he pretends to sing about on the way to his kitsch-filled Beverley Hills mansion.
The FA Cup is now little more than a payday lottery for most, time to experiment for some and acceptable consolation prize for four.
Something even the press hype-machine are unable to reverse.
Winning the FA Cup is worth £1m and a place in the paupers European competition (worth maybe another five or six million).
Finishing above 18th in the Premiership is worth something like £30m. Finishing in the top four could be worth another £20m.
Given this enormous disparity and the belief that only the elite can actually win the FA Cup, those safe in the Premiership seek to save their best players to improve their league position. Those close to the top four save their best players to try and get into the Champions League. Those struggling to stay in the Premiership save their best players to maintain their top flight status. Those in the top four use it as a chance to blood their young players and rest their best.
Every year the footballing regality are led reluctantly by the hand to the commoners zoo to see how the paupers live. Sometimes through their own ignorance or hubris they put their hand through the gaps in the fence and are bitten, but in the end there is never any doubt which side of the cage each protagonist is on.
For the Cup to have any real magic, the smallest teams not only need to play the big ones but the best teams of the big clubs. The clubs who might not win the league have to believe that a good cup run can end in a trophy and not just a quarter or semi final.
Most of all, if the FA Cup is ever to be the magical, greatest domestic club competition again it cannot be about money and inconvenience but hope, glory and lifting the trophy.
Nice article (again), Cwoff.
A couple of points to mull over for you:
1. The FA Cup winners used to be entered into the European Cup Winners Cup which, I believe, was subsequently merged with the Champions League. The removal of a premier european incentive from our main Cup competition has relegated it to the same status as the, erm, League Cup (Coca Cola? Milk Cup? Wonka Toys? i forget…)
2. All being said, how many other domestic cup competitions are actually open part-time Sunday pub football teams. Sure they may never make it past the qualification rounds, let along the first round proper; but still - a chance to say I played in the FA Cup? Priceless still.
3. I don’t use Internet Explorer. Nor do I use Firefox. I do however use Safari. Any chance of adjusting your Javascript so that it doesn’t confuse me with a Windows 98 user…?
Mantooth.
Cheers Mantooth.
1. Interesting point. I’m sure the Cup Winners Cup had a higher profile than the UEFA Cup does now and I do think it’s a shame that the domestic Cup winner (FA not league) don’t count as ‘Champions’ since would it not be better that the best league and and cup teams are entered into the CL? Also, it would completely re-energise the competition and the cup would once again have a profile similar to that of the league.
Michele Platini suggested exactly this and was shouted down by the G14. Quel surprise.
2. Yeah that’s great (it really is) it doesn’t on its own make the competition great.
3. I guess that means that Mac technology is on a par with Windows 98