FA Cup third round rumbles into view

 FA Cup third round rumbles into view.

In the days when the FA Cup was all about public schools, universities and those with few pretensions to Wembley Cup glory, the world game was still finding its feet.  Now though the oldest and still the most highly respected Cup competition in the world is still oozing animal magnetism, timeless popularity, vastly appealing to the romantics and idealists, still clinging onto the last vestiges of old time nostalgia when the rattles and rosettes that once decorated the 1950s, 60s and 70s were symbolic reminders of what the FA Cup meant to the whole of England.

We may have come a long way since the Royal Engineers, the Old Etonians, the Old Carthusians, while Oxford and Cambridge still took a very genuine interest in a predominantly working class game. Now the game has moved on since the iconic old Wembley once groaned and creaked painfully in the first FA Cup Final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United in 1923. The Wembley Arch now stretches across North London like some spiritual sign and the protagonists now seemed to consist of players from South America, France, Italy, Germany, Africa, South Africa, the United States of America, Australia, Spain and Senegal. The game is wholly cosmopolitan and multi cultural, full of ethnic diversity and rightly racially intolerant.

This weekend the FA Cup third round arrives on football's doorstep rather like an old school friend who keeps attending the same reunion over and over again. Football's hierarchies and class distinctions have always struck an awkward note when the Premier League season becomes the only consideration. And yet the FA Cup becomes football's ultimate level playing ground, non judgmental, somehow impartial and never knowingly accepting that underdogs should ever be considered inferior.

The whole concept of giant killing heroism, fairy tale romanticism, the wonderfully unexpected, the truly unconventional still gives the FA Cup just a sprinkling of stardust. The gallery of heroes from yesteryear are still woven into the fabric of the game, like a dinner jacket in high society. There was  Yeovil, Leatherhead, Sutton United, Hereford United and the usual suspects who were never meant to be in the third round of the FA Cup, uninvited guests, impostors, interlopers, strangers, peasants, plebeians, the underclass, the chimney sweeps rather than the earls and dukes.

Then there was Ipswich Town, then in the old First Division who were supposed to be just country yokels from Suffolk with combine harvesters and tractors as singular evidence of their rustic status. And yet how insulting that must have sounded when Ipswich visited the old Wembley for the first time in 1978. When they came face to face with high flying Arsenal there could only have been one script. But when Roger Osbourne, exhausted and emotional, scored the winning goal for the Tractor Boys your belief had been suspended and it almost seemed the unthinkable had happened. Over the weekend Rotherham stand in the way of Ipswich in the third round of the Cup.

Five years earlier Bob Stokoe's gallant Sunderland in those dizzying red and white stripes came to Wembley and dared to challenge the finest in the land. Don Revie's Leeds were overwhelming favourites in the 1973 FA Cup Final  so much so that the bookies simply stopped taking bets. Then the sadly late Ian Porterfield trapped the ball adeptly on his thigh from a Billy Hughes corner and the orange ball billowed the net for the game's opening goal and subsequently winning goal.

Of course there had been the warmly companionable and ever cheerful Alec Stock with his valiant Yeovil in 1948. The Somerset club must have felt like sinister intruders who were simply kicked out of the Garrick gentleman's club for wearing the wrong tie. Sunderland had top flight football stature, impeccable pedigree and were expected to make mincemeat of their non League opposition. You can probably guess the next sentence. Sunderland were bundled out of the FA Cup unceremoniously. The giants had been toppled from the loftiest of perches.

So what about this weekend's FA Cup third round. This season the FA Cup will somehow feel  traditionally British and yet played against a recent backdrop of an exotic World Cup. Argentina's unforgettable World Cup Final victory over France before Christmas gives the game an even richer lustre and social cachet. The FA Cup trophy in May throws football into a much sharper relief, spoilt beyond reason and yet ready for another glittering cabaret before the main act. 

The one stand out tie is quite obviously the one between Manchester City and Chelsea which might have graced another May Cup Final rather than the third round. Here are two fashionably attractive Premier League sides one in hot pursuit of leaders Arsenal and the other breathing hot and cold. City are Marlon Brando's contenders chasing the Arsenal bone while Chelsea are still recovering from the shock of losing Roman Abramovich as chairman but still in a genuine hunt of silverware.

At Gillingham's Priestfield Stadium very little of significance has ever taken place. But when they face Premier League Leicester City, the FA Cup will have an infinite repertoire of tricks up its sleeve. Spurs, who once won the Double of the Cup and League in 1961, were always the flashy sophisticates, push and run as demonstrated so masterfully in the days of Arthur Rowe and Bill Nicholson. Portsmouth, of course won the FA Cup in 2008 in one of the strangest and most improbable of Cup Finals against Cardiff City. 

Once again Boreham Wood of the non League are knocking on the door of the FA Cup's country estates. They meet Accrington Stanley, the team once immortalised by Ian Rush, once Liverpool striker in a TV milk advertisment, a tie that surely has a dastardly sting in its tail. Blackpool, who once captured all of our hearts in the 1953 FA Cup Final with Sir Stanley Matthews elusive Cup winners medal, come face to face with Nottingham Forest who came agonisingly close to winning the competition for only the second time. But even Brian Clough, the game's great psychologist, couldn't understand the Cup conundrum. When Spurs beat Forest in the 1991 Wembley spectacle, Forest subconsciously threw in the towel of surrender, settling for victory over Luton in the 1959 Final.

And finally there are those now familiar faces in the third round of the FA Cup. Little Stevenage will take on Aston Villa at Villa Park. Villa have similarly been starved of FA Cup success over the years and the Hertfordshire club will go into the match believing that the impossible could still morph into the realms of dreamland. You somehow think otherwise but then presumptuousness can often leave the messiest egg on everybody's faces. Preston against Huddersfield sounds like one of those old fashioned Cup ties where black and white images are accompanied by boggy, muddy pitches, baggy shorts and the heaviest of boots.

Wherever you may be going over this weekend's FA Cup fairground be sure to brace yourself for the dramatic, sudden, the occasional bout of hiccups and who saw that one coming. Liverpool, the Cup holders won't have it all their way at all against fellow Premier League counterparts Wolves. At three o'clock, five in the evening and either Sunday or Monday, the bugles will be calling and once again the bandwagon will trundle into action yet again, the non League confronting their allegedly haughty superiors. Let the show begin.