Why we actually do need to retain the "magic" of our cup competitions

In both England and Scotland, this weekend has been one of sensational cup results. It's a timely reminder that football is at its best when jeopardy is involved, but will anyone be paying attention?

A split article for you all today. In the first part, available to all, I’ve got something to say about the importance of actually retaining the ‘magic’ of knockout football, but in the second I’ll be taking a bit of a deeper look at the extraordinary story of Queen’s Park, who caused arguably the biggest Scottish Cup shock in decades by beating Rangers at Ibrox on Sunday afternoon. Don’t forget, you can get full access to all these split pieces as well as a host of other stuff by subscribing for just a fiver a month.

As domestic knockout cup competitions have fallen from favour in the calendar of the biggest clubs in recent years, so the words of those who still cover those competitions have started to sound increasingly desperate, with increasing implorations to keep faith with the “magic of the cup”, even though there have been plenty of times over the last few years that this couldn’t have been further from many within the game’s minds.

But while there has been a bit of a sneer attached to talking about football in this respect in recent years, it also feels increasingly as though, in an environment in which league titles can only be won by a tiny number of clubs, there is an increasing clamour for the sheer joy that can come from a smaller club giving a larger one a bloody nose. When the playing field is as unequal as it has been for years, we have to take our kicks where we can get them.

And twice over the course of the weekend in England and once in Scotland, there was a definite feeling that magic could be in their air. On one of those occasions, the narrative ended up bowing under the weight of money above it, but on the other two it didn’t and that matters, because at a time when it feels as though the jeopardy is being systematically ironed out of professional football, we need to know that such results are possible if we’re to maintain our interest.

At Brisbane Road on Saturday lunchtime, Leyton Orient went as close as they could ever have reasonably been expected to. Manchester City may have been abysmal at Arsenal a week earlier, but the gulf between the resources of these two clubs—Orient’s record transfer fee paid is £200,000; City currently have ten players in their first team squad whose base weekly salary is more than that—means that simply looking at the Premier League table and then looking at the League One table don’t really cut it, in terms of understanding that difference.

Jamie Donley’s fifty-yarder which bounced off the underside of the crossbar, down and into the goal off Stefan Ortega’s bum was the best sort of FA Cup goal, in that it made you jump out of your chair shouting, “What the hell was that?” before beding you double with laughter at the sheer extraordinariness of it. And more broadly, Orient gave it absolutely everything, to the point that Pep Guardiola was given little alternative but to introduce a couple of The Big Guns in order to finally bend the will of the afternoon in their direction.

Phil Foden and Kevin De Bruyne were both introduced into proceedings with 72 minutes played and it was De Bruyne who scored the winning goal for City, with another expensive substitute, Abduqodir Khusanov, having brought them level just over ten minutes into the half. Even though the result ended up going City’s way, it certainly didn’t feel like much of a ‘victory’ for them, even though it was in the only way that really, truly counts.

That’s the thing about financial inequality in football. It’s certainly not just about your starting eleven any more. Being able to introduce such players when the weakened team that you put out in the first place are flapping under pressure is one of the bigger advantages that such clubs have, and we can only imagine the psychological effect that it might have on players who’ve spent the previous 70-odd minutes keeping the serial Premier League champions at bay, to see players of that calibre warming up to finish you off.

But there are times when even that isn’t enough, and early on Sunday afternoon Plymouth Argyle demonstrated this in putting in one of their greatest ever performances to knock Liverpool out of the Cup at Home Park. The gulf between these two sides is enormous. Liverpool are six points clear at the top of the Premier League with a game in hand. Having just finished top of the Champions League 36-team Megagroup, they might just be the best team in Europe at the moment.

By contrast, Plymouth were only promoted into the Championship at the end of the season before last and only avoided relegation straight back at the end of last season by the skin of their teeth. At kick-off time, they’d won just five out of thirty games in the Championship so far this season and are rock bottom of the table, having sacked Wayne Rooney at the start of this year.

Liverpool have only been beaten in the Premier League by Nottingham Forest so far this season—and they’re unbeaten away—while Spurs beat them in the first leg of their EFL Cup semi-final but were battered in the return match and PSV beat them in their final Champions League group match, although this came after qualification for the next round had already been assured.

And… they deserved it. There was no doubting the award of the penalty kick that ended up deciding the match, and the kick itself was put into the goal with no doubts whatsoever. Liverpool had chances to get back into the game but the Plymouth defence held firm, and they even had a couple of half-chances to put the result beyond doubt before the end. Liverpool even sent goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher up for a corner in the sixth minute of stoppage-time, a level of desperation which speaks volumes in itself for the plight in which Liverpool found themselves by the end of the match.

For a watching neutral audience, of course, this sort of surprise is what everybody (supporters of the vanquished excluded) wants to see. But the problem, of course, is that this sort of jeopardy is precisely what the Biggest Clubs don’t want, and they are almost entirely calling the shots in terms of how the game is governed in this country at the moment.

Perhaps it’s time to take a step back and reflect upon this, to move away from the idea that everyone just wants to see an ever-diminishing number of Biggest Clubs endlessly playing each other. Perhaps it’s time to understand again that this very jeopardy is a big part of the reason why so many of us fell in love with the game in the first place.