IF it's snowing it must be time for the FA Cup third round.
One of the few elements of English football that retains a piquant sense of heritage, the third round briefly allows the cats of the lower divisions to gaze upon the kings of the Premier League and squat menacingly in their palatial rosebeds.
The
notion of the FA Cup being a great leveller is somewhat undermined by the statistics. Of the last 20 finals, 17 of them have been won by a club from the four-cornered axis of wealth and power formed by Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. Two of them were claimed by the moderately illustrious and hardly cash-strapped Tottenham and Everton. You have to go back to 1988 to find a plucky underdog triumphing, and you'd hesitate to use the word "romance" in the same sentence as Wimbledon. Lawrie Sanchez's stubborn fondness for the long-ball belligerence that gave him his greatest afternoon two decades ago recently cost him his job at Fulham.
Come May, it's odds-on that one of those big four red or blue bullies will be parading the Cup past Wembley's corporate suites once more. This is January though, and the touchlines are fringed with pack-ice, the penalty areas are cutting up rough, and lower division defenders have been whispering promises to the new sets of studs they got for Christmas.
One bunch of flashy West London upstarts under foreign ownership, spending big in January, will look forward to the FA Cup as a respite from the quotidian business of league football. In this case the club is QPR, now under the Formula 1 aegis of Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone. They visit Chelsea, surely the role model for what can be achieved in the capital, with the fast injection of money, and a confident continental manager.
Speculations about QPR's exact financial clout are probably best left to the business pages, although the takeover is underpinned by the investment of the Mittal family, who could probably wave their wad in the face of Roman Abramovich with some confidence, and whose wealth far outstrips that of the American owners at Manchester United and Liverpool.
The manager, Luigi De Canio, has considerable experience of jousting with giants having guided Udinese, Napoli, Reggina, Genoa and Siena into Serie A matches against the Milan and Juventus aristocrats. Since his arrival at Loftus Road in October, the only way has been up. Recent performances, dismantling Leicester and winning impressively away at Burnley and Watford, have confirmed that QPR's present lowly status in the bottom half of the Championship is a temporary blip.
The leading two in the Premier League face tricky trips to hallowed old stadiums bedecked in claret and blue. Manchester United hate those colours when they are worn by West Ham United players, and may find Aston Villa equally tricky opposition. Martin O'Neill, through a judicious balance of trusting his impressive crop of young players and pivoting them around the imposing Scandinavian presence of Olaf Mellberg and John Carew has taken Villa on an impressive climb up the league table in recent weeks.
Arsenal visit Burnley, a paradoxical side from the Championship whose impressive run of form under new manager Owen Coyle crashed into a brick wall over Christmas. For a forward who was fond of the direct approach, Coyle has a surprising penchant for pretty football in his managerial career. Which is a shame for those anticipating those soft southern nancies from the Emirates being met by some resolute clog-wearing whippet-fanciers fresh from a 12-hour shift at t'mill. Those days are sadly gone, and besides, Arsenal are now not averse to hoofing long balls up to Emmanuel Adebayor, and feeding off the scraps.
Liverpool face a trip to Luton, who gave them a scare in this competition a couple of seasons ago. Rafael Benitez came alive to the FA Cup's importance round about the time Steven Gerrard struck a ridiculously dramatic equaliser in the last minute of the 2006 final. He may be the only man who believes that Liverpool can still win the title, and will brush aside Internazionale in the Champions League, but there must be a glint of rationality that will persuade him that taking this tournament seriously might keep him in a job.
Taking this tournament very seriously probably won't keep Sam Allardyce in a job, although losing at Stoke on Sunday will hasten his departure from the Newcastle dugout. Elderly Geordies will croak that the club has a glorious Cup history, with six wins, but the last of them was 53 years ago. Every final they have reached in what could feasibly be described as the modern era has ended in humiliation.
Allardyce will look enviously at Tony Pulis's Stoke team, an efficient, un-enterprising and industrious outfit, whose fans are grateful for decent results and don't venture to demand such unreasonable luxuries as entertainment, flair or invention.
If Stoke v Newcastle is strictly for masochists, those in search of a third-round classic will gravitate towards White Hart Lane, where Spurs renew acquaintance with Reading, a couple of weeks after coming out on top in a ten-goal thriller. There simply hasn't been enough time for both managers to take their defences through detailed video analysis of all their mistakes in that match, so it's not inconceivable that we could witness a repeat. The Reading forward Dave Kitson has already said that "he doesn't give two *****" about the FA Cup." So he's bound to be man of the match and score the last-minute winner.
CHASETOWN DREAM ON, PAGE 12
The full article contains 951 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
