The Magic of The Cup

The FA Cup Final has often been called the centrepiece of the English football calendar, even if it may have lost a little of its lustre in recent years, but the magic of The Cup (and that is how most of us refer to it, the FA element its title being somewhat superfluous) is just as much in the competition’s early rounds as it is in the Final.

Contrary to what certain sections of the media might have one believe, the Cup doesn’t start in January with the Third Round. It doesn’t even start in November with the First Round; it starts in August with the Extra Preliminary Round. This year 737 teams entered the competition. By the end of August over three hundred of those teams had been eliminated and considering that for those that remain only the Premier League and Championship sides, who of course don’t even enter until the Third Round, can realistically harbour any ambitions of winning the Cup, you might reasonably ask why any club would even bother entering a competition that they had exactly zero chance of winning. The reason is the glory and the glamour that the Cup exudes even in its early rounds. Clubs who ply their trade in Step Five (that’s five promotions below the Football League) can dream of progressing far enough to play one of their more illustrious rivals and of the publicity that they will attract for doing so. These days there is prize money as well; £1,500 for a win in the Extra Preliminary Round, £1,925 in the Preliminary Round and so on: a club progressing from the Extra Preliminary Round to the First Round Proper would win over thirty thousand pounds, a significant sum of money for clubs at that level.

As significant an amount of cash as that may be for the clubs competing at this stage, on the weekend of the FA Cup Preliminary Round the FA were paying £308,000 to the one hundred and sixty winning teams while Gareth Bale moved from Spurs to Real Madrid for £85 million. Eighty five million pounds is five and half times the total £15.1 million prize money on offer for the whole of the FA Cup competition this season!

Every year, when the draw for the Cup is made, I along with thousands of other fans of non-League clubs, hope for a tie that is interesting and winnable. An away trip somewhere different from the teams you normally face against a team you really ought to beat is an ideal, and because the draws for the first three rounds are all made at the same time, fans will be charting their potential progress. This year my team, Romford, were drawn to visit Hadleigh United of the the Thurlow Nunn Eastern Counties League, which is a Step Five league that feeds the Ryman League. This was a trip to a team one step below Romford’s, from a league that traditionally produces teams that are tough to beat and whom Romford have frequently found difficult opponents in the past, so not a game to be taken for granted but one which presented the realistic opportunity to reach the next round.

Hadleigh United's ground, flanked by trees.

Hadleigh being the best part of sixty miles away, this game offered the relative novelty of a coach to take players and supporters to the game. At Romford’s level coaches are a luxury; few teams will use coaches for journeys of less than a couple of hours. Apart from those who travelled by coach, a number of Boro fans travelled independently, swelling the crowd to 151.

A few grounds that Boro have visited by such means in recent years have not been ideally suited to accommodating a coach, with approach roads needing to be navigated carefully, and Hadleigh United’s ground proved to be no exception, with the town itself comprising narrow streets and tight turns, with the road into the ground little wider than the coach itself. The ground itself is fairly typical of many at this level. A limited amount of standing accommodation in front of a neat, modern bar and changing room complex (the bar is for many clubs at this level a major source of income) and a small seating stand opposite. Neat and tidy though the ground is, there are a number of improvements that would be required to meet ground grading standards were the club to achieve promotion from Step Five.

Romford supporters enjoying some pre-match refreshment...

...some enjoy it more obviously than others!

With the requirement this season that Ryman League teams log line ups, goal scorers and the like online, the lack of a 3G signal at the ground was a concern: fortunately a friendly home official helped me log into their wi-fi. One of the appeals of the non-League game is the friendliness and hospitability of clubs and officials; there is rivalry of course, but no one ever forgets that everyone involved in the game at this level is doing it because they enjoy it, because they want to contribute to their clubs and certainly not for the money! The non-League game being what it is, we also had the chance to meet up with the father of a former player, who had moved to Hadleigh to run a pub which he had invited us to visit before the game; sadly time did not allow.

And so to the game and while one of the appealing factors of the Cup is its habit of throwing banana skins in the path of teams from a higher level than their opponents, thankfully for Boro this was a day on which pretty much everything went according to plan on the pitch.

The pre-match "Respect" handshake.

As might have been expected, Hadleigh United tried to impose themselves on the match in the early stages and Romford’s defence was the harder worked of the two, but unlike in years past when Boro have played teams from Hadleigh’s neck of the woods, the home team found it difficult to create many clear cut chances. A shot wide of each post and one over the bar were the best they could muster, with Boro ‘keeper, Atu Ngoy having to make only one save of note. 

First half chances were at a premium.

Meanwhile at the other end, Romford were finding chances had to come by, but when they did create a clear one, two minutes before the break, they took it with Lewis Francis converting a Kurt Smith pass with the outside of his foot.

Romford celebrate the opening goal from Lewis Francis.

Five minutes after the interval Boro doubled their lead; Robbie Norris’s shot took a wicked deflection to beat the home ‘keeper. A third goal from the head of Tom Richardson and a scrambled effort from the same player put the result beyond doubt; Abs Seymour’s strike for the fifth was the icing on the cake.

Tom Richardson is congratulated on his second goal of the game.

So for once it was a comfortable passage in the Cup and the post match refreshments and journey home were all the sweeter for it, along with the prospect of a cheque for nineteen hundred pounds of course! Next up for Boro in the Cup is an away tie against Grays Athletic.

Boro skipper Paul Clayton after a very satisfactory 90 minutes.

 One league up from Boro, Grays will be favourites for that match but they, like Romford, will remember the day in 1994 (when the gulf between the two clubs was much greater) and Romford surprised everyone by winning by the odd goal in seven. A repeat next week would be very nice; the fact that we may dream of it is part of the magic of the Cup.