FA Cup replays are on their way out. City A.M editor Andy Silvester rages against the dying of the light.
One of my fondest football memories is, like most football fans, a game I wasn’t born in time to see. 1975.
Non-league Wimbledon, fourth round of the FA Cup, away at Elland Road, home of the all-conquering Leeds United. It’s a rearguard action from the boys in yellow and blue. Dickie Guy, the Wimbledon keeper, somehow stops everything that Leeds team has to throw at him. Then – and I’ve watched the grainy footage hundreds of times – Leeds’ Eddie Gray buzzes into the left-side of the box, chopped down by an absolute dog’s dinner of a challenge by Dave ‘Harry’ Bassett. Stonewall penalty. 0-0. Leeds’ Peter Lorimer steps up.
“It’s deadshot Peter Lorimer…the man who could kill Wimbledon after a great fight…
“He’s saved it! Dick Guy can have the freedom of Wimbledon this weekend! They can make him freeman of the borough!”
It finished 0-0. A replay. A fourth round replay that did wonders for Wimbledon’s finances and helped them become a league club a few years later. That was for the future, though. For now, we’d earned a replay – taking the mighty Leeds to a replay! Wimbledon fans and players celebrated like they’d won the cup itself.
That keeper, Dickie Guy is now president of AFC Wimbledon. It’s a ceremonial title, really. But when I got to shake the big man’s hand one night – the hand that took Leeds to a replay when we were in non-league? That was cool.
In our brave new world, those hands wouldn’t have taken us to a replay. They’d have taken us to extra time. And, maybe, penalties. Who knows – maybe Dickie would have saved another one. Maybe our knackered defenders would have somehow held out against another barrage. Maybe we’d have beaten the mighty Leeds at Elland Road! But a replay, then, was enough. Because getting the big boys in a replay matters. It’s the same emotion for any lower league club battling against a big club: defiance.
Wimbledon moved the game to Selhurst Park to fit a bigger crowd. For those who know what happened to Wimbledon, that now looks a miserable omen. But thousands packed in that night: to see little old Wimbledon at home to the mighty Leeds. We got beat. Didn’t matter. Those that were there – and me, who wasn’t – will always have ‘that night against Leeds.’
Twenty two years later, and I’m alive for this one. It’s a Saturday. Fourth round. Wimbledon equalise away at Old Trafford, last minute. Robbie Earle. I ‘watched’ it, aged 8, on Ceefax.
That Monday morning, I walked into school – south London, full of United fans, it is what it is – like a dog with two dicks. It somehow got better. We did them 1-0 in the replay. A grim pitch, a disallowed Peter Schmeichel overhead kick, a Marcus Gayle header that to this day may as well be tattooed inside my eyelids. School the day after that was as good as it got. I still remember the drive home with my mum and dad. It is among my fondest childhood memories. And for once at a home game on a Tuesday night in Selhurst, the car radio didn’t get nicked.
Extra time, penalties at Old Trafford? Maybe we win, maybe we lose. Maybe the 2000-odd that made the trip would tell me about it in years to come. But I got to see us beat United, at home. In the replay. More to the point, we made the biggest club in the land have to do it again.
FA Cup replays are about more than football
It’s, obviously, not just Wimbledon. Every tiddler football club in the land has an FA Cup replay story. Hereford even beat Newcastle in theirs.
Not anymore though, it seems that for the biggest clubs in football, it has become too much of an inconvenience to actually play the bloody game.
FA Cup replays are out. The 2024 Dickie Guy saves a penalty but his team gets humped in extra time, 2-0, as the legs tell. The 2024 8-year-old watches his team win, or lose, on the telly, with the artificial drama of a penalty shoot-out if required.
The loss of replays is only one moment in the long march to Premier League matches being played in front of hologram fans in a purpose-built stadium on the outskirts of a petrostate’s administrative capital.
The excuse is ‘fixture congestion,’ which does not apparently stop most Premier League clubs darting off to the other side of the world to play each other in pre-season, nor this year – spectacularly – darting off to the other side at the end of the season to play more meaningless, commercially viable friendlies. That’s before one points out that Premier League clubs play 38 league games a year, not 46 like everybody else, or the fact that Premier League clubs have a combined 156 players out on loan, squad players that could take the stresses and strains off the hamstrings of the first XI if they were genuinely needed.
If you haven’t noticed that football has become a business, you haven’t been paying attention. The reason Bournemouth can spend almost £30m on a Colombian defensive midfielder is not because the good people of the Abbey Stadium have chipped in a little bit more for their season ticket. The Casablanca-esque shock and horror at the aborted arrival of the Super League was absurd: you think you’re playing Premier League games on a Friday night because the players have decided Saturday is a day of rest? Give over.
I am, of course, raging against the dying of the light. The football-as-a-business train has long since left the station. The loss of replays is only one moment in the long march to Premier League games being played in front of hologram fans in a purpose-built stadium on the outskirts of a petrostate’s administrative capital. I may as well be trying to turn the sky purple.
But there was still something about an FA Cup replay.
If you’d nicked a draw at home, you had a Tuesday night away at a proper ground to look forward to – WhatsApps flying about whether or not you wanted to do the last train home or take the morning off and make a night of it. If you’d humbled the high and mighty at their place, the sheer joy of knowing that the best in the land, the entitled, the rich, the famous, would have to come to your crumbling little ground to do it all over again?
Frankly, it became so important because it feels like the only way to disrupt the march of modern football. Even lower league fans are next year set to be introduced to more widespread, bizarro scheduling of matches to suit TV. Colchester vs Newport on a Thursday night, here we come.
The Premier League has promised to chip in £33m extra to safeguard the pyramid, ‘grow the grassroots.’ Maybe I’m being churlish. But to me it just feels like buying off those of us who go to our lower leagues week after week. How much does it cost to take away a bit of history? And, as some of those running smaller clubs have pointed out, the money from a replay can be transformative.
Perhaps the worst of it is the Premier League and the FA saying the decision to scrap them would “strengthen” the competition. How dare you lie like that? How dare you be so lacking in shame? How stupid do you think we are?
I’m an old romantic when it comes to football. But if you can’t be romantic about it, what’s the point?
I’ve got little in common with many of those I see, week after week, at Wimbledon. But we’ll always have Marcus beating United in the replay. We’ll always have Dickie telling the biggest club in the land: sorry, lads, not today. We’ll have memories. The next generation, simply put, will have fewer. What a terrible shame.