FA Cup opinion

The horse OU CAN learn a great deal of what

you need to know about different
competitions from the way they’re
dressed up for TV. The Champions
League is contested in gladiatorial

has bolted
arenas, soundtracked by sub-operatic muzak and
further heightened by Close Encounters lighting. The
English Premier League is fought out by pumped-up
supermen with the other-worldly sheen of a Pixar
cartoon. The intention of this kind of presentation is to
blur the boundaries between real life and video game,
the more effectively to sell lager.
On television the FA Cup is packaged differently.
When it comes time to remind the English public of
the place they supposedly reserve in their hearts for
the oldest and most venerable cup competition in
the world, the iconography softens and throbs with
nostalgia. The images used to frame the TV coverage
of the competition are suddenly like something out of
Roy Of The Rovers. It’s as if punk never happened, let
alone PlayStation. It’s as if every boy in every street in

s rom ance, England is knotting a scarf round his wrist, packing a

it
For all d fame, the
thermos of hot soup, stuffing a rattle in his back pocket

an e and making his way through cobbled streets towards

history s not been th e the floodlights in the company of his grandfather, there
ha am
FA Cup e football bec
to watch his plucky local heroes black the eye of some

inc avid over-compensated superstars from the big city.

same s by money. D For people above a certain age the FA Cup

driven or th has a will always mean Ronnie Radford. Ronnie was a

Hepw revive it journeyman striker from a mining community in

plan to
Yorkshire but he played most of his football in Wales
and the West Country (when he wasn’t working as
a carpenter). In 1972 he was playing for non-league
Hereford when they were drawn in the third round
of the Cup against Newcastle, in the days when that
meant a bit more than it does today. The replay took
place at their own Edgar Street ground in front of a
packed house. The whole town seemed to be in or
More than 300,000 fans turned up to watch around the place. Small boys who couldn’t get in were
the first FA Cup final held at Wembley

“The players’ excitement matched

Stadium, in 1923. The pitch was cleared dangling from trees outside the ground. The pitch was
by a policeman on a white horse such a quagmire Roy Keane wouldn’t walk his dog on
it nowadays.

the fans’. None wore headphones In the 85th minute, with Hereford one-down and

images GETTY IMAGES

going out, Ronnie Radford received a return pass 30

or hid behind shades. Cup final yards out. He appeared too tired to struggle forward
through the swamp with the ball. Instead, marshalling

day was a festival, a pilgrimage, that despairing last lung-full of air, he managed to
swing his right foot at it. Miraculously that foot made

an investiture at the palace” contact through the puddingy surface and the ball
not only achieved sufficient escape velocity to get

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 “It simply can’t be
out of the mud but also picked up pace as it made that greatness is judged,” said The Times about his
its way through the murky air, eventually describing performance in the second half. In 1956 Manchester
a path beyond Willie McFaul’s leap and into the top City beat Birmingham City 3-1 despite their

the case that kids corner. The pitch was immediately obscured by the
jubilant figures of small boys in parkas. Luckily, the
goalkeeper, a former German prisoner of war called
Bert Trautmann, playing the last quarter of an hour

in Buenos Aires BBC cameras had been there to record what became
a talismanic goal, subsequently dusted off every time
with a broken neck. He wasn’t diagnosed until three
days later. At the time no subs were permitted and so it

or Bamako have somebody wanted to talk about the magic of the FA

Cup and prove that all it took was one moment of mad,
was either that or play with 10 men. It’s an indication of
how long the Corinthian spirit seemed to hang on that

their imagination small-town inspiration to puncture the biggest, big-city

reputation.
it wasn’t until Kevin Moran in 1985 that anyone was
actually sent off in an FA Cup final.

fired watching Contrast that with one of the main upsets of the third
round of this year’s FA Cup. When Crawley Town of the
By the time I was a kid in the 1950s, the white
suit had been passed on and some of the younger

Chelsea thrash
Conference embarrassed Derby County it was on their members of the crowd had to read the words of Abide
own pristine pitch, there wasn’t a postman, a chippie With Me off the song sheet. Nevertheless the event still
or other part-timer to be seen and the winner was had a very special thrill. It was, after all, the only football

Portsmouth and scored by a player from Argentina, Sergio Torres, who

had been sufficiently well compensated to drop down
match of the year that was shown live on any kind
of TV. This status was so unique that both channels

hearing Abide two divisions to play for Crawley. The top side didn’t
look any sleeker or more superhuman than the non-
showed it, competing to see who could attend it with

With Me sung League side. Here was proof that we live in a flattening
world where haves and have-nots come in all shapes

by a 14-year-old and sizes and giants and their would-be slayers are
not so easily cast. Wither the FA Cup in this new world,

from Britain’s where success is just an indulgent millionaire away,

where penury is in reception in the shape of a VAT

Got Talent.
inspector and players loyalties last only as long as it
takes the spit to dry on their club’s badge?

Majestic it isn’t” T he FA Cup has been contested since 1871 – the

Fans storm the pitch to celebrate Ronnie
Radford’s famous winner in 1972, and (above)
kids play outside the new Wembley, 2010
same year that Stanley found Livingstone in darkest
Africa – but its unique place in the English imagination
was not fixed until 1923 when the final was first played
at the newly opened Wembley Stadium. On that day
300,000 people turned up, most of them without
tickets. The majority of them were persuaded to clear
the pitch by a policeman on a white horse so that the
game could take place. This is a classic case of how
the English continually turn embarrassing cock-ups
into triumphs of stiff upper lip. Parliament made noises
about the dangers of public disorder and decreed that
henceforth all events at Wembley had to be ticketed.
In truth the chances of disorder that day were pretty
small. The majority of the flat-capped and neatly- the most entertaining hoop-la.
collared men who turned up had served in the world’s You would begin watching it at 11 in the morning,
largest conscript army only a few years earlier and genuinely thrilled to be entertained by the gags of the
knew how to keep order. The legend of the FA Cup celebrity fans, the live links from the team’s hotels and
unfurled in the shadow of the First World War and the coaches as the teams made their way through the
lots of its reputation for sacrifice and stoicism was choked streets of north-west London in the direction of
established then. In 1927 for the first time TP Ratcliffe the Twin Towers. It was, as they were fond of saying, “a
climbed the rostrum erected in the middle of the pitch special day”. It would be because most of the players
and conducted the crowd in community singing. The had never been to Wembley before. You could see
highlight was the secular hymn Abide With Me, a tune it all over their pimply faces. Nobody was wearing
which hummed through the bones of anyone who’d headphones and hiding their eyes behind shades
spent six months in a cold trench in Flanders. to keep the world at bay. The players’ excitement
Around the same time the BBC, which has shaped matched the fans’. Cup final day was a festival, a
the English imagination ever since, first began telling pilgrimage, a holiday, an investiture at the palace, a
us what a dignified occasion we were witnessing. The night on the town. In the days before widespread car
mythology of the final tended to self sacrifice. In 1953 ownership meant that going to London was just a
Blackpool beat Bolton Wanderers 4-3 with Stanley question of pointing your car on the right motorway,
Matthews laying on Stan Mortensen’s hat-trick. “It the phrase “up for the cup” had a special magic.
is by the power to call souls out of the abyss into life Not all the finals lived up the billing. A few did. When

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 annual opportunity to prove to people that they still
matter. The top five sides have squads big enough to
get into the final without busting a gut, which is why 18
of the last 20 winners have come from that echelon.
They like to do well in it but they’re not going to weep
in a ditch if they don’t. To be fair they no longer
treat it with cavalier disregard. Everybody now sees
Manchester United’s withdrawal from the competition
in 2000 to take part in the Club World Championship
in Brazil as an unmitigated embarrassment. Given last
year’s vote, that’s probably the last time any English
club will be persuaded to jump through hoops on the
faint promise that England might get the World Cup.
Proposals to revive the competition include giving
the fourth Champions League spot to the side who
win it or adopting the German policy of letting the team
from lower down the divisions play at home.
I suggest we should go further. Now that UEFA
president Michel Platini’s plans to maximise home-
grown players have got some wind at their back, why
not reorganise the FA Cup so that only the players from
the home nations can play? That way Blackpool would
go into the competition with an advantage against
Arsenal and Manchester City. Let’s make it British and
Irish. The last final I went to was the Liverpool-Everton
match of 1989 which took place just five weeks after
the Hillsborough disaster. Gerry Marsden led the
community singing with You’ll Never Walk Alone. Of
the 22 players who started the game only one, Bruce
Grobbelaar, didn’t come from the home nations.
Nobody needed song sheets that year. It was coming
from the heart.
As well as giving a shot in the arm to home-grown
players and lending the competition the distinctive
flavour of a good family argument, this would be a major
boost for the medium-sized towns that have always
been the backbone of English football. The remorseless
advance of the Premier League has resulted in a
competition which is overly concentrated in London and
Manchester. The big sides are thinking about Europe’s
big cities: London, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona. There’s
more to Europe (and England) than that.
The FA Cup should be a celebration of towns that
only the Brits have heard of. Hereford, Wycombe,
Stevenage, Coventry, Colchester, Wrexham, Yeovil,
Barnsley and Bournemouth: these towns may not
have their names on the Cup but are nonetheless on
its roll of honour. These towns and the clubs that bear
their names don’t figure in the reckoning of today’s
international superstars. They merely fly over them
in their private jets. But it’s in England’s backwaters
and byways, the places that Carlos Kickaball has
never visited, that the English FA Challenge Cup has
traditionally flourished. And might flourish again.

“Reorganise the FA Cup so that only

players from the home nations can play.
Blackpool would have an advantage
over Arsenal and Manchester City”
Ian Porterfield scored for Sunderland against Leeds
in 1973 it was the biggest shock in finals history and
the biggest football event of the year. But then Bobby
Stokes of Southampton did much the same against
Manchester United three years later. And three years
later Alan Sunderland’s last minute goal for Arsenal
proved that the competition still had the power to put
you on the edge of your seat.
they have done their well-mannered best to convince An aerial shot of Wembley
us that this competition means almost as much to them on the day of the 1928
final, and (above) Crawley
as it does to us. We Spurs fans managed to persuade
Town’s Sergio Torres
ourselves that it was “Ossie’s Dream” for Ardiles to (left) celebrates an FA Cup
go to Wembley in 1981. If it ever was true it isn’t true success with a team-mate
anymore. It simply can’t be the case that kids sit there
in Buenos Aires or Bamako and have their imagination
fired watching Chelsea take apart Portsmouth before

S INCE THE advent of the Premiership and the new

establishment of a hereditary aristocracy at the top
of British football, the FA Cup hasn’t been certain about
its place. Every year around this time some reporter will
shove a microphone in the direction of Carlos Kickaball
and ask him if the FA Cup is as special to him as it is to
our home grown players. Of course, he will say, it was
always the one that gripped him most when he was
watching back home in the favelas. The tragic thing is
English football is so hung up on its own heritage that
we’re credulous enough to believe it. It’s like hanging
around Buckingham Palace and asking tourists how
much they love our Queen.
Since the first overseas players came into our game
receiving the Cup from Prince William and hearing
Abide With Me sung by a 14-year-old contestant from
Britain’s Got Talent. Majestic it isn’t.
The fact is that the FA Cup will never matter as
much as it did in the days before the game became
all about money. The managers of the middle ranking
Premiership sides (this year Blackpool foremost among
them) know that they’re not likely to get the sack for
getting dumped out by Southampton by putting out
second-string sides. The big sides that live in reduced
circumstances and think they deserve better, sides
such as Leeds, put a lot into it and generally produce
the most exciting ties. It takes a lot of hurt to make the
noise that their supporters do and the FA Cup is their

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