Meet Exeter City, Brazil’s first opponents and Liverpool’s FA Cup adversaries

To that end, the BBC have decided to spread the festivities outside the weekend proper. On Friday night, Liverpool — mighty Liverpool, seven-times cup winners Liverpool, newly-Kloppified Liverpool — are travelling over 250 miles (as the fans’ coach drives) to take on a side 76 places below them in the pyramid.

Exeter City!

[Wikipedia]

Exeter City Football Club were founded in as St. Sidwell’s United in 1901, took their current name in 1904, and have been nicknamed “The Grecians” since 1908. They currently play in League Two, which is the fourth tier of English football. But you knew that.

[/Wikipedia]

Exeter is a city in Devon, in the southwest of England, a strange and terrifying part of the nation known to outsiders as “rugby country.” It can boast an excellent cathedral, a sprinkling of Roman ruins and a now-knackered Norman castle that played host to the trial of the Devon Witches, often thought to have been the last people to be executed in England for witchcraft. But that was in 1682, and everybody’s calmed down since then.

Exeter’s position in the history of English football is a modest one, but over on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, they are generally thought to have been the first-ever opponents of the Brazilian national team. That game took place in 1914 during a tour of South America, though nobody seems quite sure whether Exeter lost 2-0 or achieved a 3-3 draw. Either way, the club are still partnered with Rio de Janeiro’s Fluminense.

Back in this hemisphere, Exeter have never been higher than the third tier of English football, and their only trophy to date remains the 1990 Fourth Division Championship, though they have reached the quarterfinals of the FA Cup on two occasions, in 1930-31 and again in 1980-81. Following relegation from the Football League in 2002-03 they were taken over by a Supporters’ Trust, and have remained fan-controlled throughout their return to the league.

One more minor, trivia note: one of the stands at St. James Park — not that one, or that one, or that one — is named after perhaps Exeter’s greatest ever player, Cliff Bastin. However, he only played 17 times for the club, before Herbert Chapman spirited him off to Arsenal, where he scored 150 goals and won pretty much everything.

Well ... possibly. Liverpool do have an awful lot of injuries at the moment, and it’s possible that the fittest central defender at the club at the moment is Jürgen Klopp himself. Though he’s been retired for a while, and it likely in no shape for even a modest gegenpress.

But Exeter have their own problems. They currently sit 16th in League Two and come into this game on the back of four straight defeats, three of them at home. A fortress, this is not. Manager Paul Tisdale — the second longest-serving manager in the country, behind only Arsene Wenger — likes to play neat and tidy football, so if there is an upset coming, it probably won’t come via the good old-fashioned long-ball mugging on a lower-league bog. There might even be passing.

Crystal Palace are a decent club, but back then they had a complete prick of a centre forward. Clinton Morrison fancied himself so much he should have married a mirror. Before the game he gave it all the big s--t in the papers about how good he was.... We were smarting at the injustice [of the first leg], desperate to get Palace back to Anfield to put them and Clinton in their proper place. [...] Stupidly forgetting there was a 2nd leg, Clinton mouthed off again. How thick was that?

[...]

Poor Palace. We absolutely destroyed them [in the second leg]. We were 3-0 up in twenty minutes, smashing them all over Anfield, and eventually won 5-0. Take that, Clinton. He got booed all game by Kopites at their merciless best. Clinton was trapped in a nightmare he’d scripted. At one point, he tried to do an overhead kick and almost broke his back. Liverpool fans pissed themselves. By the final whistle, Clinton was like a little sheep walking off the pitch with his tail between his legs.

That said, they’ll both end their career with the same number of league titles, so we’ll call it a draw.

Precisely why they’re nicknamed the Grecians is the subject of some debate, though according to Exeter Memories the “likeliest explanation is that the local boys of St Sidwell’s fought the boys of the city during the annual beating of the bounds ... Because the St Sidwell boys were outside the city wall the were referred to as though they were Greeks outside the walls of Troy.”

Beating the bounds, since you ask, is an old English tradition, somewhere between civil surveyance and religious observation. It’s still practised in a few places, though nowadays it just involves ambling around the borders of a traditional parish and having a bit of a singsong. Back in simpler-yet-more-confusing times, however, it was a significant method of marking out legal boundaries, and used to involve crowds of boys armed with boughs of birch or willow, following their parish priest around and literally beating the boundaries of the parish, the stones used to mark those boundaries, and sometimes each other. Because, well, what else is going to happen when you get a group of boys hopped up on ecclesiastical jurisprudence and then issue them with sticks? Exactly.

In conclusion, whoever ends up in central defence for Liverpool on Friday will definitely need to mark that giant wooden horse.

Update!

We are profoundly grateful to Mr Gary Andrews, Exeter City fan and erstwhile friend of SB Nation Soccer, for providing us with a little insight into how Exeter’s season has been going so far ...

Been an odd season. Undoubtedly the best squad we’ve had for several years (albeit lacking a striker as Will Hoskins is never fit, Clinton Morison is too old, and Tom Nichols can’t shoulder all the burden) and on our day we can beat anyone — typically we perform better against less physical teams. That said, we’ve massively underperformed in recent weeks and four straight league losses to some of the division’s poorer sides is pretty poor and a lot of fans are not happy. League 2 is a dreadful league though, so we could yet make the playoffs.

Also, all our midfielders are injured and are coming back from injury. In the last few games we’ve played what can best be described as a variation of 5-0-5 and Tisdale has habit of picking unusual formations. If Christian Ribeiro, David Noble, Manny Oyeleke, Matt Oakley and Tom McCready can recover in time then we should be more balanced and be nearer full strength. I suspect, depending on fitness of players, that he’ll try to select the side and tactics with Liverpool’s style in mind.

Also, Exeter have one of the best celebrity fans in Adrian Edmondson and the worst in Noel Edmonds, Joss Stone and Chris Martin (who doesn’t like football but wishes them well).

You can find Gary on Twitter here.