FA Cup magic left the room a long time ago

by Sean Whetstone

It’s very hard to find much magic in this the FA Cup these days.

And the short reason why is it doesn’t matter to anyone anymore.

Not to the big clubs, who between them win it every year, celebrate for a couple of hours and forget it.

Not to the medium-size clubs who never win anything but spurn the opportunity each season to put a famous piece of silverware in their trophy cabinet because the bigger clubs field under-strength sides in the early rounds.

They simply respond by naming under-strength line-ups themselves.

Not to the small clubs, who are more concerned with banking the cash from the odd televised home game or a trip to a big stadium than they are with writing themselves into the history books

And, most significantly, not to the fans, who now see the old competition as an irrelevance purely because time has moved on and there are bigger fish to fry – the Premier League title, the Champions League, avoiding relegation, winning promotion from the Championship.

The FA Cup Final itself was once what the Super Bowl is to American sports fans, the television showcase of the year.

Now you can watch live football almost 24 hours a day and Cup Final Saturday resides in the graveyard occupied by those previously “must-see” TV events.

This season it has proved even less magic with no supporters, no gate money, reduced prize money and drawing the fourth and fifth round together.

I would forgive David Moyes in resting as many of the first-team regulars as possible knowing we have to face Manchester United or Liverpool in the next round before we have even played Doncaster Rovers.

That the fourth and fifth rounds of the competition were drawn at the same time was just a bad joke which reduced the FA Cup’s importance and relativity even further.