where has the romance gone

When I was a young lad, growing up as a football fan, always the most important game of any season was the FA Cup final.  It’s the oldest, and at the time most prestigious competition your club could win.

 

And the beauty of the cup as a knockout competition was that any club could win it.  OK, in reality that’s stretching it a bit, but one of its most endearing qualities was (and still is) that clubs from lower divisions could knock out clubs from higher up the football pyramid.

 

There are many famous such occurrences, with the biggest upset probably being Hereford United, a non-league club at the time, beating the first division’s mighty Newcastle United.  I'm not a fan of either club, but I can still remember Ronnie Radford's winning goal for Hereford - a 30-yard screamer on a mud-bath of a pitch - almost taking the back of the net off!

 

Games were always played at 3pm on a Saturday, and those Saturdays become synonymous with tales of “giant killings” being told, and cup fever gripping a smaller town before the big boys visited.  Local bakers (possibly the home team’s goalkeeper!) would produce FA Cup cakes and shop windows would be adorned with silver foil replicas of the trophy.

 

Sadly though, things are now different.  There are still giant killings, yes.  But the importance of the cup has been diluted with many teams, even those from the lower divisions, fielding weakened teams with the league now becoming their priority.

And television must shoulder some of that blame as well.

 

Back in the day, the FA Cup Final was one of only a handful of games covered and broadcast live.  Now we have reached saturation point, with a game from somewhere in the world available 24/7.  Well, almost.  Gone is that feeling of it being a special day.  Now it’s just another game on the box.

This “dilution” hit home last night (I’m writing this on Tuesday, 27^th February) when non-league Maidstone Utd, from the sixth tier of football in this country played Coventry City away in the fifth round of the competition.  On a Monday night for goodness’s sake!  Yes, their reward for knocking out Ipswich Town (pushing for promotion to the Premier League) was a cup tie played on a Monday night.  

 

There was the romance gone.  Gone too was probably any chance of victory stolen away (they lost heavily).  And all because television money dictated the game should be played six days before its originally scheduled date.

 

It’s tragic really.  Tragic.