The “Magic” of the FA Cup – A Thursday night in Bournemouth

The Swans continue their FA Cup journey tomorrow night with a trip to the South Coast and a fourth round tie at Bournemouth.   A 4th round tie taking place on a Thursday night for nothing other than financial reasons.

There will be many who relate to what is written below especially those of a certain age.   I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s when the FA Cup final was the date that every football fan had on their calendar.   It was a time where there was not wall to wall football on your TV screens every seven days.

Live football was restricted largely to games such as the FA Cup final  rather than the scenarios we see now where hundreds of games are screened live every season across a multitude of viewing platforms and, frankly, as a direct result very little (if any) concern is given to the average supporter who otherwise may decide that they want to head to Bournemouth on a Thursday evening.

It will be the first of five days worth of FA Cup football this weekend that continues with four games on Friday night, six on Saturday, four on Sunday and closing with Wrexham’s trip to Blackburn on Monday evening).    There are just four of the sixteen matches over this round in the competition that kick off at the traditional time of 3pm on a Saturday afternoon.

TV coverage at this stage of the competition is worth £110,000 to the clubs involved but it just highlights how far the competition has come away from that competition that people of a similar age to me will remember.   The day of the FA Cup final would normally start early with a series of FA Cup “specials” on the TV, generally some of your favourite TV programmes with a FA Cup flavour and the anticipation would build all through the day until the teams took to the pitch at around 2.50pm with that walk under the twin towers.

You can call it romanticism if you like but that was the way it was.   Gradually over time these all day specials reduced, more so after the Premier League was formed in 1992 and Sky effectively became the “owners” of football and kick off times.   It was gradual, games started with Sunday and Monday kick offs and then grew into Friday nights, Saturday lunchtimes, double headers on Sunday, Monday nights and before you knew it more games were being played outside the traditional time for football than in that 3pm Saturday slot.

During our seven years in the Premier League I grew to resent that even more.   Plans to make trips to watch the Swans in different places were often thrown into disarray when TV companies dictated that we would be shown live.   It started with our very first game in the league at Manchester City and never really changed.

The sheer fact that both Bournemouth and Swansea City agreed to this kick off time tells you much that both clubs would rather have the money that the TV companies provide compared to maximising the support that may follow them.   Bournemouth away may not be the most attractive of fixtures (and with the boot on the other foot neither is Swansea City at home) but it is a much easier trip to do if you choose to do so when its a Saturday afternoon than a Thursday evening.   If you elect to travel from Swansea for the game the reality is you are accepting getting home at 2am on a Friday morning.    It doesn’t sound appealing does it?   Less so when you can watch from the comfort of your armchair/sofa/pub.

The FA themselves set their stall out when they allowed Manchester United – then FA Cup holders – to miss the 1999/2000 competition so they could compete in the Club World Cup.    And they have slowly decided to make their competition weaker most years since.    Again, being of that age, I remember replays of the FA Cup final itself (or the Swans going to a second replay for example against Crystal Palace) – now games from the fifth round onwards are decided on the night by penalties if it is necessary.  What next?   The toss of a coin just to avoid playing the tie?

The magic of the FA Cup as well used to involve the underdog coming through and doing the unpredictable.   Again, go into my era and you have Sunderland, Southampton, Ipswich, West Ham (twice), Coventry and Wimbledon all winning the FA Cup in a 15 year period from 1973 to 1988.    Even Spurs won it twice!   Only four times since the advent of the Premier League (Everton (2005), Portsmouth (2008), Wigan (2013) and Leicester (2021))  has the FA Cup gone anywhere other than to one of the Top 5 clubs (Arsenal, Liverpool, Man Utd, Man City, Chelsea)  Four times in thirty-one years.

The thing is on this is it doesn’t matter whether we moan about the fact we have to play Bournemouth on a Thursday night or not.   It won’t change at any stage.   Football clubs long since gave up worrying about the fans and the clubs can talk as much as they want about listening to the fans but, as this fixture proves, when the TV companies come knocking, there is not a second thought given to what it means to the supporter, the ker-ching of the money overrules pretty much everything in football.

So has the magic of the FA Cup totally disappeared?   Well, no.   It remains one of my unfulfilled football dreams to see the Swans in a FA Cup final.  We came so close against Manchester City but we all know that it was never meant to be when the decisions went against us (where was VAR when we needed it) and then there was our quarter final that we conceded to Tottenham twelve months previous to that.

But unless we do make that final at some stage in the future then the magic will never be the same again.  Now, where is that TV remote?