"And Here Is The Draw"

The FA Cup is probably the only sporting competition that has as much interest and mystique invested in its draw as it does in its matches themselves. The anticipation and excitement as the day of the draw approaches is palpable, and speculation about who players, managers, and supporters want to be drawn against puts all thoughts of league games, or any other competitions, to the back of everyone's minds. These days the draw becomes a TV spectacular once the competition reaches the First Round Proper (and where else other than in England would we deem a competition to have a 'proper' stage?)  Where possible this involves holding the draw in the bar of a non-League club that is still in the competition, with tenuous links that anyone at the club may have with a Premier League club drawn out for all they are worth, while young supporters wave tin-foil FA Cups around. It's all a bit of harmless hokum, but a million miles away from the gravitas that surrounded the FA Cup draw in days long gone past.

A draw made by ex-players like Ruud Gullit and Paul Ince, and overseen by someone such as Mark Chapman, is some way off, although the FA Cup will reach its third stage - the First Qualifying Round - this Saturday, when 232 teams will do battle; 344 teams have already been eliminated from the competition, and the cricket season hasn't even finished yet!

In these early stages of the competition, there is no glamour, nor pomp and circumstance to the draw. I don't know exactly how the Football Association administers it, but without the glamour of it being live on TV, it is quite possible that it is an unwelcome chore for some FA employee responsible for the competition's Preliminary and Qualifying Rounds, and who has other pressing concerns on the day. He (or she) will groan as their PC pops up a reminder "12.15pm, FA Cup draw, post online 1pm." They will then look around the office for a collaborator, and having found some unfortunate person whose eye they caught, will drag them off to a break-out area with a box containing three hundred and fifty odd-numbered pieces of paper representing the teams still in the competition. At the conclusion of the draw, there will inevitably be one team left over, which prompts a frantic search for the missing numbered piece of paper, which if not located, requires a process of elimination to determine which team will complete the final tie. That may not be the way it works, but the FA would endear themselves to me no end if there was a smidgeon of truth in this.

There was a time when the FA Cup draw took place religiously at one o'clock on Monday afternoon following the previous round's matches. In the days I'm talking about, all of the ties would have been played - if not settled - on Saturday afternoon, unlike today, when at least one tie will be outstanding when the draw is made. The BBC would announce that they were taking us over to FA Headquarters, then located at Lancaster Gate, saying "The first voice you will hear will be that of Ted Croker," whereupon he (Croker), the secretary of the FA, would announce, "Here is the draw for the Third Round of the Football Association Challenge Cup competition," and introduce two FA officials that no one outside the room from which the draw was being broadcast would ever have heard of, to make it. A rattle of the numbered balls in the velvet bag, and we were off, with football fans up and down the country, in offices and factories, listening intently to someone's transistor radio. Even for people with either little interest in football, or those who supported teams already knocked out of the cup, the draw on the radio - especially for the Third Round - was always a high spot of the football calendar.

Ted Croker

I know that times change and the FA Cup draw was always destined to move away from radio and on to television, but at least it still retains a degree of integrity, not least because the draw remains free of seedings.[1] The draws for the World Cup, and the Champions League, as well as having seedings, also have an excess of pomp and circumstance that makes them virtually unwatchable - except this year of course, when Eric Cantona brought an element of surrealism to the Champions League draw by (mis)quoting from King Lear. The only comparable performance to Cantona's is probably the time Rod Stewart assisted at the Scottish Cup draw having clearly been well refreshed beforehand.

Eric Cantona at the Champions League draw.

The Champions League format looks likely to change in future if the rumours are true. Instead of eight groups of four in the qualifying round, from which sixteen clubs will win through to the knock-out stages (the competition proper, if this were the FA Cup!), there is the very real possibility of four groups of eight. The upshot of this would be fourteen games for each team at the group stage, and a total of twenty-one matches needed to win the competition, as opposed to six, and thirteen respectively at present.

If this comes to pass, then the managers of English clubs playing in the competition will complain even more bitterly about congested fixture lists than they do now, and will place even less importance on the Carabao Cup and FA Cup than they do now. Chances are, they will be fielding entire sides lacking even a single first-team player in those competitions, or suggest that their clubs withdraw from them altogether. And four groups of eight might merely be the precursor to two groups of sixteen and an eventual European Super League, an idea that has been around for many years.

A well refreshed Rod Stewart at the Scottish Cup draw in 2017

It's probably fair to say that the BBC have managed to strike just about the right tone with the televised version of the FA Cup draw, with a nod to the gravitas of the draw when it was only on the wireless, and a dash of entertainment, but without the pomp and circumstance of the Champions League's effort. Mind you, if they want to hire Eric Cantona and Rod Stewart for a future draw, I'm sure it would do their viewing figures no harm at all.

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[1] You may say that exempting teams from qualifying rounds and the fact that the Premier League sides don't enter until the Third Round proper is a form of seeding, but by my definition, the fact that in each round there is no filtering to prevent the supposedly two best sides left in the competition from being drawn against one another.