Last weekend was the third round of the FA Cup, though thanks to some televisual weirdness, that weekend began Friday night and will end Tuesday evening -- quite a remarkable feat of stamina for a tournament currently in its 134th year.
Looking for the lost magic of the FA Cup
The FA Cup was magical once and could be again. But not if everybody keeps shouting about MAGIC all the time.
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With the third round the tournament has, at last, expanded to included every team in the country, and as such, we need to talk about the Magic of the Cup. Or MotC for short.
As those of you in the United Kingdom have doubtless noticed, the BBC has gone big on the world’s oldest tournament this year. Live broadcasting of the draws, splashy coverage of the early rounds, and, in the buildup to third round, much mining of the cup’s glorious moments from the past. And at every turn, the search for the MotC. There it was, in the memories of Hereford and Bradford. Where would it be this year?
Some magic tricks involve rabbits coming out of hats; the MotC, so the coverage has insisted, means minnows knocking out sharks. Or, er, trout putting the nut on carp. Bigger fish losing to smaller ones, anyway. Rochdale did their bit, overcoming Nottingham Forest of the division above, and Blyth Spartans briefly threatened to be the story of the round, before Birmingham City woke up and reinforced the natural order of things. Sheffield United didn't get much credit for overturning Queens Park Rangers, since their recent record in cup games is just as impressive as Rio Ferdinand's form isn't; their city counterparts Wednesday led Manchester City, but only briefly.
It’s slightly odd, this insistence that the MotC means small teams beating big teams. Odd and distorting. As John Nicholson points out over on Football365, “as soon as the lower league sides look beaten, you can almost hear [the commentators] interest immediately wane, as though only a giant-killing has an interest or currency and anything else is worthless.” By setting the terms of magic so narrowly, and pursuing it so doggedly, the effect is to ensure that most of the football that actually happens is instantly downgraded to second-class. Not magical? Not interested.
The other problem, of course, with the relentless pursuit of the MotC, is that it fundamentally misunderstands how magic works. Nobody manufactures "magic", whatever that might be, by running frantically around shouting "Where is the magic? Do you have the magic? Is it over here? Who had the magic last?" It's perhaps worth remembering at this point that non-league Hereford's 2-1 win over first division Newcastle, one of the great FA Cup upsets and an undisputed source of cup magic, was only supposed to be a five minute section at the end of Match of the Day. Nobody went looking for the MotC, and yet it arrived, launching John Motson's career in the process.
It's a simple question of expectations, and the deleterious effect of hype. Most football games are okay. Quite a lot are rubbish. A few are great. Some are surprising, though not many, for such is the nature of surprise. Approach a slate of games with this in mind and things will be okay. Approach it in a frothing state of manic magiclust and there's no way to be satisfied. The BBC and BT Sport spent a couple of weeks talking themselves into a situation where, essentially, one of Yeovil, Blyth Spartans and AFC Wimbledon had to beat, respectively, Manchester United, Birmingham City and Liverpool, otherwise everything would feel like a let down. Two down, one to go. No pressure, Wombles.
There are, of course, bigger problems with the FA Cup, a competition that has declined roughly in tandem with the rise of the Premier League and Champions League. Apathy is widespread throughout the top two divisions -- as evidenced by heavily rotated teams -- and presumably the media’s hysterical approach to the weekend was, in some ways, a response to that. But you don’t make something amazing by shouting THIS IS AMAZING over the top of it; that just makes everything worse and leads to headaches.
FA Cup
And that’s a shame. Whatever the solution is -- A Champions League place? A vastly swollen prize pot? -- it would be wonderful if one were to be found, because when it’s done right, knockout football is the best football of all. The potency of the MotC comes, after all, from the knowledge that there’s no coming back next week: this isn’t the league, where one shock result can be placed aside and moved on. This is it. Fail to take Hereford seriously, and you’re done.
That sense of mortal peril should, in a game between two teams who want to win the competition, lead to football with an extra edge. (It can also lead to mutual defensive cowardice, as with much recent World Cup knockout football, but then at least penalty shootouts are good fun.) But in a game where one side has been patronised to saturation point, the other is resting 12 first teamers, and every single journalist within a five-mile radius is checking behind the bins to see if there’s any magic knocking about?
The draw for the fourth round is Monday, as is Wimbledon’s attempt to salvage the magic for the television people. Whatever happens, the search for the MotC will relocate to the fourth round, then the fifth, and will then quietly peter out as the Premier League teams assert themselves. But that’s fine. Magic is supposed to be rare, it’s supposed to be surprising, and it’s supposed to be -- above all else -- spontaneous. The first step towards resurrecting the FA Cup is to make it matter again, but equally important is that the TV companies just let the thing breathe. Show, don’t tell, as the saying goes.
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