Next Saturday, Reading play at home to Grays Athletic in the first round of the FA Cup. There's no doubt that our main priority this season is getting promotion to Division 1, so I thought it was time to address the question of whether the FA Cup was worth taking an interest in. I won't leave you hanging on here - the answer is yes!
The 1999/2000 season must rank as one of the worst that the FA Cup has ever seen (probably THE worst, but I'm not old enough to make any definitive comment on that). The problems started with the "will they, won't they" Manchester United saga, made worse by the fact that the FA left a vacant place for them in the draw. The other main problem last season was the change of dates, so that games didn't take place when people normally expected them. For example, the third round happened before Christmas, instead of on the first Saturday in January as normal.
Really the malaise surrounding last season's competition has been partially with us and steadily growing for some time. It started with the abolition of second replays - I have been to some great matches in my time which were FA Cup second or third replays (none involving Reading, I hasten to add). There was a general build-up of tension surrounding sides meeting after having failed to sort out which was better after several attempts. The change arose because of the ludicrous police insistence that they needed ten days to prepare for a game, and that consequently replays were put back a week further than had previously happened. This rule doesn't apply in the qualifying rounds, incidentally, and is often waived when it suits people. In fact, if a game is postponed due to weather, it is played ten days later but any subsequent replay is held on the following Monday. Ten days between the two games? I don't think so.
Another part of the problem was the introduction of sponsorship. No way am I describing the FA Cup as the "FA Cup sponsored by xxxxxx". Further greed has led to matches being moved around for live TV - I think that that is OK, but it is totally wrong to systematically hold the draw for the next round before some teams have even had the chance to take part in the last one. And it's even worse to hold the draw whilst a game is going on which is what happened on one Sunday last season - what were the fans of those two teams meant to do? We've also seen semi-finals taking place at Wembley, something that we managed perfectly well without for nearly 70 years despite much larger crowds attending games for many of the seasons since Wembley was built, and lessening the importance of the final itself. Perhaps the very existence of the League Cup, Full Members' Cup, Associate Members' Cup, and play-off finals at Wembley also took something away from the splendour of the Wembley day out.
All these things might seem alright at first, but when you put them together they have all helped to erode gradually the values surrounding the first and greatest football competition of them all. It's always worth reminding ourselves that Reading are an exceptionally old football club - in fact, that is part of the reason why we use the founding year of the club as the URL for this site. Well, the FA Cup is almost exactly the same age. Unfortunately Reading weren't ready to enter in that first season, or for a few afterwards, but the competition managed to get going without us. Many of the early winners no longer exist, or at least not as football clubs, but that doesn't take away from the pioneering spirit that these Victorians showed to set up a template for competitions held the world over today.
Getting back to last season, I have never blamed Manchester United for not entering last season's FA Cup, and I think that it was only poor handling of the situation by the Football Association that presented their non-entry as a "bad thing". The main point is that the decision as to which teams had entered the competition HAD to be made back in September before the qualifying rounds started so that the correct number of clubs could progress to the later stages of the competition. At that point, the FA should have respected Manchester United's decision to take part in the Club World Championship and sorted out the FA Cup entries accordingly. This would have meant that we would not have had to put up with continual speculation about whether they would take part or not, and have avoided the ludicrous "lucky loser" draw at the conclusion of the second round.
Something else we saw last year was a reluctance of fans of "bigger" clubs to condescend to watch their team play at home to smaller teams. The logical consequence of this will be in a few years' time that ties might be switched to the home of the smaller club to maintain interest. Not so many years ago, Leeds fans would have filled Elland Road for a cup tie against Port Vale, but last season they managed only 20,000 with the main complaint being that they would not pay standard prices to watch Port Vale when they could pay the same amount to see a Premiership club. Reading saw something similar two seasons ago, where the Round 1 visit of Stoke attracted a considerably smaller crowd than for the League game a few weeks earlier. The exact opposite would have been the case as recently as ten years ago.
Another change for this year is that the final won't be at Wembley. Apart from a replay staged at Old Trafford in 1970, that's the first time since 1922. Will this generate new interest, or count as a further step away from tradition? I don't think we can answer that yet, although there is no doubt that the people most in favour of Wembley were those who hadn't had to suffer sitting there to watch games. I'm not even sure if there has been a definite announcement that the 2001 final will take place in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff but it seems pretty likely. As long as the pitch is OK (and it hasn't been so far, as the egg-chasers have been given free rein to destroy it and to determine how long the grass is for all games), the new stadium should be a fine location for the Cup Final.
Perhaps by entering in Round 1 of the competition (for just one more year!), we avoid some of the worst aspects of the creeping commercialisation of the FA Cup, and realistically the venue for the final is not of that great concern - by that I mean we'd happily watch Reading in the FA Cup final even if it was staged at the Manor Ground. A couple of games in the early rounds get moved for Sky TV, but by and large there's little difference between most Round 1 games now and how they would have appeared 70 years ago. Well, as long as you've managed to find a winner by the end of extra time of the replay.
I have always enjoyed going to new places to watch Reading play - Barry Town, Dartford (the then home of Maidstone), Welling, Wealdstone, and so on. We even ventured to some Mickey Mouse outfit in Wycombe in the 1970s. Home ties against non-league opposition don't always look attractive but they can also produce good games. The Yeovil match last season was one of the most enjoyable matches in the first 18 months at our new home. Scoring six goals against Bognor after the non-league team's manager had described his players as "too good to be playing in the third or fourth division" was another highlight. It's only the FA Cup that can produce that sort of excitement and we have to make sure that we do not lose that or football will be the worse.
44 years ago, we had a crowd of nearly 23,000 to see a win over Bedford Town in the second round, and at that time Reading's League crowds were hovering just below the 10,000 mark (i.e. less than we're getting at the moment). So make sure you're there for Grays Athletic's big day out.
Incidentally, there won't be future articles asking if the League Cup, or the competition formerly known as the Auto Windscreens Shield are important, because to be honest, I don't think they are.
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