The ‘magic’ of the FA Cup might be a cliche – but it still has some clout

I got a phone call from my mum today. After the usual exchange of how are yous (mum: blocked drainpipe, sniffle. Me: bathroom falling into the kitchen, arm rash) she asked if I’d watched the match. 

This caught me off guard; my mum doesn’t care at all for football and only watches when England are playing in the World Cup, when she says things like “well, they’ve blown it now” before tutting and walking out the room.

But evidently this weekend my mum had been charmed by the magic of the FA Cup. The game she was referring to was eighth-tier Marine taking on the Premier League’s Tottenham Hotspur, the greatest ever gulf at this stage of the old competition, which she had either sat down voluntarily to watch or, more plausibly now I think about it, had found herself involuntarily gripped by as she passed through the living room.

That would be understandable because it really was an incredible story. An Arsenal-supporting school teacher got the chance to play against Tottenham. A trainee plumber hit Joe Hart’s crossbar. A refuse collector man-marked Gareth Bale. This was as close as it’s ever got to a group of ordinary folk testing themselves against some of the best professional footballers in the world. And for a fleeting few minutes it looked like they might even pull off the unthinkable.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is plenty of talk in football right now about the merits of the FA Cup, both in the short-term as elite sport plods on through the pandemic, but also in the long-term as the game tries to balance old traditional cups like this one with more lucrative domestic leagues and European tournaments in an increasingly squeezed calendar.

Yet this weekend was a reminder of what makes the FA Cup special. No competition exists in which your local handyman can have a bowl at England cricket captain Joe Root, for example. Nor should there be, you might argue. It’s absolutely ludicrous that one of the greatest managers of all time, Jose Mourinho, had to watch his team while sitting two feet from someone’s back garden in Crosby. But it is undeniably compelling and a little heartwarming too, even for those who don’t love football.

Perhaps my mum’s attention was caught because there isn’t much else to do on a Sunday in winter under lockdown in a global pandemic. And yes, once Spurs had scored a couple of goals she decided the Merseyside minnows had blown it and walked out the room. But for half an hour she was engrossed in something entirely unique to the FA Cup, something football should never take for granted. 

Yours,

Lawrence Ostlere

Assistant sports editor