A pretty crazy weekend of action saw the beginning of the MLS season, some intense regular season Premier Leaugue games, and, most of all, a regular FA Cup Shocker.
The FA cup has been a tournament held high in the hearts of British soccer fans for decades, a competition won by so many of the past and current greats. It is a competition involving 10 levels of British soccer. Stop to think about that for a second. There are 20 premier league teams. There are 734 teams that compete in the competition. If that doesn’t strike you as a sports competition of cosmic proportions, I don’t know what will.
The first three rounds of the cup are played without any premier league teams. This makes sense because it gives the bottom percentage of clubs a chance to beat eachother out in a fair effort to get a shot at the big leagues who, bing 20/734 clubs, are theoretically better than 98% of the teams involved. So what do we expect to happen? Well, we expect that these top 2% of clubs will enter in the third round and, without much of a concerted effort, lay waste to the bottom 98% of clubs.
But history has shown that this is not always the case. In fact, it is more common than you would think for lower division teams to pull of a miracle against premier league clubs. About a decade ago, my personal favorite team Everton, a team that has never been relegated from the premier league (an extremely impressive feat matched by the likes of Manchester United), was brought to their knees by lowly Shrewsbury, a club which currently plays in the third teir of British soccer, League 1, in a 2-1 defeat. In 1988, the great Reds in Liverpool tumbled at the hands of Wimbledon FC in the final match. And, last year, Wigan, a Premier League club who had been doomed to relegation, pulled off one of the most shocking upsets of all time in defeating Manchester City, winners of the Premier league only two seasons ago, defeating them 1-0 at the death with a goal that startled a crowd of blue-clad fans.
Want to know what happened this Sunday? The exact same thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHIrdd6nnOs
Wigan Athletic pulled off yet another upset victory over the big-spending club, defeating them 2-1 and advancing to the semi-finals. Pulling off one upset win over a Premier League giant is a pretty big deal. Doing it twice is just out of this world. It’s like the Giants beating the juggernaut Patriots in the Superbowl of 2008. It could’ve been just a fluke performance, but they did it again 4 years later and marched off the field having proven that they just won’t lose to that team.
This is what makes the FA Cup so wonderful to watch. Because of the way the European soccer season is structured, there isn’t a “regular season” and then a “post season.” There are competitions such as the Premier League, the FA cup, the Capitol One Cup, and European competition all at the same time. This means that a team has to manage the fitness of their players very carefully, making it nearly impossible for star players to start every game the way they would in, say, Basketball or Football or even Baseball. In those sports each game means the same amount, but in Soccer each game is part of a different competition at first, and if you manage to stay in the FA or Capital one cups, the season becomes a constant struggle. Manchester City, a top premier league team, finishes in the top 4 of the Premier League almost every year now, making them eligible for the Champions League, the most prestigious club soccer competition in the world, meaning that they have four competitions to play in every year, each with varying degrees of weight. Teams like Wigan generally only have 1-3 small competitions to worry about, considering they are in a lower division, and priorities are much simpler (get promoted, try to win a big competition). Also, they just generally just don’t face nearly as much scrutiny as a top club like Manchester City would. So when they meet in the FA Cup competition, it’s a regular David and Goliath story, with one massive underdog and a giant that makes the mistake of overlooking the minnow.