by The FA Cup was (and technically still is) the world’s oldest football competition. It started way back in 1871, a few years after the London Underground. But while the Underground still sends millions of passengers trundling through the capital every day, the FA Cup is on life support. It’s one more example of something that united and excited people, and that I personally enjoyed, that’s been killed by globalisation and hypercapitalism and pure greed. But here’s why it used to be great:
- All that history. Even though they were aeons before my time, I know that the White Horse final took place in 1923 and the Stanley Matthews final was in 1953. I know about Ronnie Radford’s screamer for Hereford against Newcastle in 1972. The mud, the pitch invasion, the parka jackets. It’s been replayed so many times you couldn’t not know about it. And let’s not forget, there’s some very grim history among it all, most notably the Hillsborough disaster that took place in an FA Cup semi-final in 1989.
- The sheer number of teams in the competition. Several hundred would start out in August, many of them amateur sides in the eighth or ninth tier of English football. A handful would survive to fight in the main competition rounds which started in November, or if they were really lucky, January, when your Man Uniteds and Arsenals entered. There’d be endless interviews with firemen or farmers or factory workers whose team had suddenly – fleetingly – found themselves in the spotlight. The biggest day of their careers, perhaps even their lives.
- The wonderful simplicity of it all. You can’t beat a straight knockout tournament. Your team may well have played just one game. Play, lose, out. Better luck next year. But the next season you might have played six, eight, ten games. A long and winding road as some reasonably well-known band from the sixties may have mentioned. And which teams you played depended on…
- The draw. Unlike tennis where there’s just one draw before the tournament that maps out each player’s potential progress, in the FA Cup the pairings for every round were determined by a draw, just after the completion of the previous round. These draws – numbered balls picked out of a bag, sometimes by famous ex-players – were events in themselves. In the old days, they were made on a Monday in the daytime, and school kids would crowd around radios to find out who their opponents would be. All that anticipation.
- So much unpredictability. Because the draw was entirely random (again in stark contrast to tennis which is seeded), a big team might face another big team in an early round; local rivals and sworn enemies would happen to be drawn together; a team like Plymouth could face a 500-mile round trip; players from the fifth division got to fulfil their boyhood dreams of playing at Old Trafford or Anfield; superstars would have to negotiate muddy, sloping pitches and baying local fans. And shocks happened.
- Replays. You lose, you’re out, the other team fights on. But what if it was a draw? Well, they’d do it all over again a few days later, but with the venue switched – the away team in the first match got to play at home in the second. Because home advantage was a bigger deal in those days than it is now, an away team would often be content with a draw and “take them back to our place”. If the replay was a draw, they’d play extra time, and then it would go to a third match and so on ad infinitum. Some FA Cup battles could turn into soap operas. The 1980 semi-final between Arsenal and Liverpool went to four games. (I was born between games two and three.) In 1991 there was a rule change to allow only one replay, followed by penalties. Now there are no replays at all.
- The lack of live TV coverage. Yes, this was a good thing. Apart from the final and one or two other games, the competition wasn’t televised live. There were highlights, but if you wanted live coverage, you had to either go to the game or listen to the radio (as I did) and imagine.
- The semi-finals. The stakes were massive. Everyone wanted to reach the final and to play at Wembley in front of the cameras. It was what dreams were made of. Unlike the earlier rounds, the semis were played at big neutral grounds. The best semi-final I can remember was between Chesterfield and Middlesbrough in 1997. Chesterfield were in the third division while Middlesbrough had players like Ravanelli and Emerson. The game was a classic which finished 3-3; Chesterfield were unlucky not to win. Middlesbrough won the replay comfortably, but the original game stands alone as something quite special. Now they play the semis at Wembley, which is rather crap if you ask me.
- The final. Gosh. All that build-up throughout the day until the game finally kicked off at 3pm. Always 3pm, that was sacrosanct. You’d see the teams set off in their coaches and make their way to Wembley. Abide With Me was always played before the game, as was the national anthem. Really it was England’s Super Bowl without the ads.
Some surprise winners included Coventry (1987) and Wimbledon (1988). But for all the shocks and unfancied teams making the later stages, for almost the next 20 years it was all big teams from big cities lifting the trophy. That’s until Portsmouth won it in 2008. Back in the day when I listened to all those games on the radio, sometimes a Portsmouth game would come on. They always had a chant that sounded like church bells, which was distinctive and (I thought) rather nice. Their fans seemed pretty mental, but in a good way. What made me think of this is that Portsmouth is one of the very few UK universities that offer an applied linguistics master’s degree via distance learning.
