This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most famous FA Cup Finals: second-tier Sunderland 1, feared and storied Leeds United 0. The match was memorable not just for the upset but for Sunderland keeper Jim Montgomery’s astonishing double save, keeping out first a Trevor Cherry header and then a piledriver from Peter Lorimer, the fiercest shooter in the game.

Montgomery is still going strong at nearly 80 but both Cherry and Lorimer have died in the last few years, and it’s not hard to feel that much of the old Cup Final magic has gone the same way.

Cup Final Day was the day in the football calendar: the one match you’d always watch no matter who was playing. It was love-’em-or-hate-’em Cup Final songs such as “Ossie’s Dream” and the “Anfield Rap”. It was hours of build up before the long procession out onto the pitch, the teams side-by-side with their suited and booted managers at the front.

It was Ricky Villa’s twisting run, Keith Houchen’s diving header, Gazza’s self-inflicted injury, Bert Trautmann’s broken neck, Kevin Moran’s red card, “ … and Smith must score!” before he didn’t, the Crazy Gang beating the Culture Club, and the all-Merseyside final in 1989 with Hillsborough still raw and rival fans sitting together in solidarity.

Then came 1992 and the brave new world of The Premiership, the Champions League, money and satellite TV. It was a while before this fully filtered down to the FA Cup, and arguably the rot began to set in only when Manchester United, fresh from their 1999 treble, chose to forgo defending the Cup in favour of the World Club Championship.

Nowadays most teams view a long cup run almost as a nuisance, a distraction from the more lucrative business of seeking Champions League places or striving to remain in or reach the Premiership (Sheffield United, at the time second in the Championship, didn’t select a full-strength team in this season’s fifth round tie against Spurs. They won anyway). The Cup is nice: top flight football is lucrative. In those terms, and they are the terms under which every major team now operates, there’s no contest.

The irony is that all this downgrading has made the tournament less rather than more competitive. The big clubs are so much better-resourced than everyone else that they can win even while rotating their squads. In the 30 years since 1992, only four teams (Everton, Portsmouth, Wigan Athletic and Leicester City) have broken the five pronged monopoly of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and the two Manchester giants. Wigan’s 2013 triumph made them the only side ever to win the Cup and be relegated from the top flight in the same season. Until 30 or 40 years ago, plenty of fans and players would have at least pondered whether that was a worthwhile trade-off. No longer.

Any competition is about much more than just its final match. The magic of the FA Cup has always shone bright for the lower league sides

This is not an “everything was better back in the day” moan. By any rational yardstick, football has improved hugely in the past 30 years. The players are fitter, the systems are more inventive, the pitches are exponentially better, the coverage has improved by light years, and we have the privilege  of seeing men every week who beforehand might only have appeared at the odd World Cup, if that: imagine an Egyptian and a Senegalese leading the line for the great 1980s Liverpool teams, as Mo Salah and Sadio Mané did until recently at Anfield.

But the first law of thermodynamics, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, applies in some ways to football too. We lose some things even as we gain others, and one of the biggest losses is a Saturday in May now being just a Saturday in May rather than the apogee of a season.

By the same token any competition is about much more than just its final match. The magic of the FA Cup has always shone bright for the lower league sides, who have no real chance of winning the tournament but can certainly dream of taking a few scalps along the way.

In 1991 a busload of us stood in the away end of Highbury as third-tier Cambridge United took on the mighty Arsenal, and for ten minutes at 1-1 we dared to believe that Dion Dublin or John Taylor would conjure the winner that in the end turned out to be Tony Adams’s. It didn’t matter: we had all had a grand day out, and the memory of that run sustained players and fans alike through many freezing Fenland nights at the Abbey Stadium.

Hull City manager Liam Rosenior agrees. “A proper cup run cannot not only sustain [small clubs] financially for years, but also give their supporters an opportunity to live the dream of competing with the big boys and tell stories to grandchildren about the day they were there. Tell me that’s not what football is all about?”

He’s right, of course: and indeed the tournament doesn’t even need to involve giant-killing to be worthwhile. The first preliminary round of this year’s competition back in August featured Walsham Le Willows, Baffins Milton Rovers, Pontefract Collieries, West Allotment Celtic, Heaton Stannington and Bugbrooke St Michaels: small clubs, community clubs, grassroots clubs. London Colney and Witham Town played their tie in front of 30 people. Thirty!

But that’s the true essence of sport, that you play just the same when no-one’s watching. There will almost certainly be a familiar name on this year’s trophy, but the real glories will be for those far from the engraver’s chisel.