The Premier League has taken its leave for a few months, and all we have left are the dregs of a season finished.
We have two games to look forward to before we sit down to watch England face the Republic of Ireland in South Dublin and a couple of Euro qualifiers – truly stupid games to have at this time of the year. I don’t think i’m being ultra-critical when I say that – in the 2011 Nations Cup, a competition played at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium between The Republic and Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the attendance was very poor indeed. Just 529 people saw Wales beat Northern Ireland 2-0. That’s under 1% of the stadium’s capacity.
So we have an FA Cup final and a Champions League final to look forward to and that’s it, really.
And as great as FA Cup final day is, it just isn’t what it used to be.
In 1989, just weeks after the Hillsborough disaster, Liverpool beat Everton in an emotion FA Cup final at Wembley. But beyond being simply emotional, it was a thrilling game between two of the best teams in the country. Liverpool won 3-2 after extra time, with Everton’s Stuart McCall becoming the first player to score two goals in an FA Cup final after coming on as a substitute – while four minutes after he managed this, Ian Rush matched his feat.
FA Cup finals have been great spectacles since then, of course. Steven Gerrard dragging his team over the line in 2006 was a great day, as was Wigan beating Manchester City in the dying seconds in 2013, just days before their relegation was confirmed.
But the days where a nation stopped what it was doing just to watch the FA Cup is long gone. There’s just so much football on TV these days. No longer do families sit down in front of the TV watching with eager anticipation of a giant killing.
Bradford coming from two goals down to beat Chelsea this season still shows that the FA Cup is capable of magic, but the fact that there’s football on TV almost every day during the season makes us appreciate it less.
The fact that there’s so much live sport isn’t really a bad thing in my book, but it makes the FA Cup a little weak at times. Watching Premier League clubs play weakened sides is certainly much less exciting than watching a Premier League or European game.
In years gone by, the FA Cup was a tournament that everyone watched, not it’s seen sometimes as a distraction from the real stuff, and that’s only to be lamented.
There’s so much meaningless football. The Home Nations tournament that I mentioned earlier, the Club World Cup, the European Super Cup, the tournaments that no one really cares about. The FA Cup will never be on the same level as these tournaments, thankfully. But because these tournaments exist, because of the public’s insatiable hunger for live football the FA Cup gets bumped down in the list of tournaments.
When the big clubs take the competition seriously it’s a great competition. Aston Villa and Arsenal are certainly two of English football’s traditional powerhouses, and both are high in the list of most FA Cup wins. So it’s great that they’re involved in the final this year.
But it also shows that clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea didn’t take it as seriously as they could have. It even shows that some midtable Premier League clubs didn’t take it as seriously as they could have – the clubs that really could have challenged more in the latter stages.
It’s still a nice competition to win, but clubs only really seem to take it seriously when they find themselves in the final stages. Arsenal’s win last season saved them from a trophyless decade and a win next weekend will probably cap off a good season. It would show real progress for the Gunners to have won two trophies in two years. So it’s not like no one cares about the FA Cup – we’ll always see it as a major honour.
But it’s lost the magic that it once had. It’s lost its ability to draw entire families to crowd round their TV screens, to make people have street parties on cup final day and to look forward to the best cup competition in the world.
We don’t have that anymore. We have a distraction for lots of clubs even if it can still create some magic and giant killings from time to time, and even if it is still a major honour and a chance to play a couple of games at Wembley.
There’s probably no remedy for the FA Cup’s ailments. It’s chronically ill, but chronically ill is still better than dead. The FA Cup is getting old, a relic from an older time it still works as well as it used to, but we just have newer toys to play with now.
Like a childhood teddy bear we’ll always keep it and we’ll always cherish it, but we don’t get the same enjoyment out of it as we used to. But once a year, on FA Cup Final day, what’s wrong with dusting it off and enjoying it again? The final at least always gives us the same special thrill.
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