Why the FA Cup is still current

... as long as you can still remember your first Final

Which was the first FA Cup final you can remember? That was the most important question asked all weekend.

If the majority answer ever becomes ‘I don’t know’ or, worse still, ‘I don’t care’ then the Cup is in trouble.

If Gen Z are more likely to recall their ‘first Brits’ or ‘first Oscars’, the FA Cup’s place in the nation’s heart is shrinking faster than Sabrina Carpenter’s wardrobe.

Reports of the death of football’s oldest competition have been greatly exaggerated for a long time now. 7.4 million BBC viewers watched a 3^rd round tie in January. That’s about 3 times the size of the TV audience for The Brits.

While Cup games remain visible, football fans will watch them and, even better, still care about the FA Cup.

It was during a live BBC game yesterday that commentator Steve Wilson revealed that his own FA Cup recollections roll back to the 1975 final when Bobby Moore lined up against his beloved West Ham at Wembley. Alan Shearer immediately raided his memory bank to counter with Alan Sunderland’s late winner for Arsenal in 1979. Both men would have been 8 years old when they went on their first dates with the Cup.

Earlier in the day, Sam Matterface and Ally McCoist on ITV were recounting the 1983 final involving Jimmy Melia’s Brighton. Sam was just 5 when Gordon Smith’s shot at glory came and went. How old were you when the FA Cup first came into your life?

There will be less FA Cup football on free-to-air terrestrial television next season. Less eyeballs. The Beeb will be junior partners in a new deal with TNT Sports. Balancing income and reach is a daredevil trick for sporting bodies to perform. Grassroots need cultivating and tending. Fertiliser doesn’t come cheap. But nothing grows a garden quite like natural sun light. The FA Cup will wander out of mind if it ever goes out of sight.

At the weekend it was front and centre of television sports coverage. No Six Nations, no Grand Prix, not even a sneaky Premier League fixture or two prised into the competing schedule. The Cup’s place in the new world order has been steadily compromised by midweek dates, lost replays and squad rotation but when it gets our attention, it still makes the headlines.

The 5^th Round draw offered few, if any, appointment-to-view fixtures but those ties have produced a quarter-final line-up full of clubs for whom an FA Cup win would be historic. And history is everything to the FA Cup.

Only 8 clubs have lifted the Cup since 1995. Portsmouth, Wigan Athletic, Leicester City and the 5 ‘usual suspects’. For all the indifference the Premier League’s fat cats exhibit in the early rounds of the competition, one of them invariably ends up winning the Final.

Those first Cup final memories we get doe-eyed about were more likely made by Davids than Goliaths. Nobody has used a sling to any effect in an FA Cup final since Hull City went 2 up against Arsenal a decade and more ago. Ben Watson’s late winner for Wigan was the last seismic shock occurrence in 2013. The FA Cup needs a final to remember and a mass audience to remember it. Its past is its future.

A first major trophy for Bournemouth, Brighton, Fulham or Palace would be a landmark moment in the history of clubs on upward trajectories for which silverware should represent a valued crowning. When today’s 8-year old fans are bouncing children on their knees, they would still be talking about the FA Cup in the same precious way that older followers of Coventry City, Wimbledon and Southampton do today.

Or, at least, that’s the hope, that’s the elixir for the good health of the competition.

The harsh reality is that all eight of the Cup survivors would probably swap the romance of seeing their reflections in the old trophy for Champions League qualification. But what you think you want most and what you actually enjoy most are often two very different things. Joy is the oxygen of the FA Cup. The moments, the magic. Television pictures spread that joy. They need and deserve to be seen by millions.

TNT have a bit of a history of celebrating new rights deals with boldly banal statements about indulging their ‘maverick side’ and ‘telling the story in new ways that push clubs beyond their comfort zones’ (it says here). I know the guy they’ve entrusted with shaping their FA Cup coverage and I think he’s too editorially smart to try to reinvent one of the longest spinning wheels in sport.

25 or so years ago, I attended a private meeting at FA headquarters called to brainstorm a new look for the Cup following an ITV rights coup. I was full of too-clever-by-half ideas of my own. I proposed a draw where all the home team balls were pulled out first so that halfway through the ceremony there was still the suspense of not knowing any of the ties. Blank looks around the table. Then, I suggested the away team players ran out onto the field a minute before the home team (as they did when I was as a boy). More blank looks. Shut up, Clive.

Think of the FA Cup and you think of tradition. History never goes out of date. Those Pathe newsreel pictures of Cup ties from another age are the images that make the Cup uniquely loved. Like Attenborough, like James Bond, the appeal is charismatic and enduring, the nostalgic hook remains the same.

VAR might come and go but the essence is timeless, changeless. We know somebody wins and somebody loses. Always have, always will.

I was actually taken to an FA Cup final aged 8 in 1963. I was later lucky enough to hold a microphone for a few at a time when it was still the biggest gig of the year for a television commentator. I’m not quite old enough to remember the Pathe finals but I can recall an era when the Cup final brought the nation to a halt.

The status may have been lowered but the loyalty is still strong. While the FA Cup is allowed the stage on which to create memories, we will always want more of them.