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View from the Kop

It is truly a sad indictment of English football

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Over the past three weeks, two things have been made abundantly clear. One, FIFA has demonstrated that disingenuous, fraudulent, dishonest and corrupt are not just bywords for politicians. And two, the Football Association has made it strikingly clear that the national game has neither the time nor the patience for the FA cup. The former, to all intents and purposes, is actually rather more obvious as just in case you were living under a rock back in November, two of the worlds most oil-rich and bureaucratically insane States surprisingly won their bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. The latter, as we have seen, just isn’t something that the FA deem sufficiently important anymore.

Now, when we think of the FA cup Final, instant feelings of those long Saturday mornings sometime in Mid May usually spring to mind. The routine tradition, the pre-match build-up and nostalgic ceremony that just isn’t found with any other sporting cup competition other than perhaps the Superbowl, of course we didn’t have Janet Jackson’s boobs at half-time, maybe just Mottie’s sheepskin instead.

Nowadays, as we saw two weeks ago, the FA cup final doesn’t even justify the afternoon to itself, as we saw with the other half of Manchester drawing with Blackburn to win the Premiership. I genuinely find this a sad indictment of our game that the FA cup, much like other cup competitions, has had such a severe fall from grace. In some respects, despite the fact that the FA have to take part of the blame, it is the clubs themselves who have created this proverbial rod for their own backs by shying away from the romanticism and hope that a decent cup-run can generate in favour of stability and pragmatic realism that staying in the division evokes. Premiership and Championship clubs are now so concerned with staying in the division or indeed, trying to get there, that every aspect of their season, every decision made throughout the club is with the Premiership Holy Grail in mind.

Is this really the future of English football? Cup competitions provide fans with the opportunity to dream a little, to sense that something, however absurd the odds might be, may just be about to happen. Would it then, be OK for fans of teams such as Bolton and Blackburn to be happy with sacrificing the romantic potential of a decent cup run for dogmatic stability? We all know about the riches the Premiership offers, this is all too obvious, but then what is life if we can’t force ourselves to dream a little?

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5 comments

  • stan howard says:

    i am totally gobsmacked that nobody has had the inteeigence to make that old rogues age an issue, he’s 75 for gooness sake, he will be 79 when his term finishes ? it cant be good or right !

  • stan howard says:

    sorry inteligence it should be or nouse, simple common sense or whatever.

  • Karim says:

    Lets be honest, the FA Cup these years is all about the small team upsetting the big team (Orient drawing 1-1 with Arsenal at Brisbane Road for example). Its not about the final anymore. Yes its great for City, but they are in the Champions League next season so that means the runners up (Stoke) get their place in the Europa League. How is that fair? Im a LFC fan and not having a pop at anyone but how is it that you lose a final but still qualify for a tournament that if you lost in the semi finals, you would have to finish 5th in the league.

    Fair play to Stoke and I hope they enjoy their European days out, but i dont see the logic. That place should have gone to 6th place.

  • jack says:

    It is not just the FA Cup. One thing struck me more than anything when Italy won the World Cup in 2006 was although they were rightly ecstatic with their win the celebrations just seemed to me of a team that just won a domestic cup or league title. Past years the winning of the World Cup was something almost ethereal. The World Cup trophy itself had an aura around it that made it seem something slightly above this world. I think the vast amount of money in the game of football has taken away the magic. It has also left so many clubs in a precarious financial position. Some teetering on bankruptcy. Such a shame

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