Look out: it's the Cup. It has once again been the most shock-ridden of footballing weekends. Not for the FA Cup fourth round the usual loaded collisions between minnows and Premier League prize pike. Instead English football has been treated to a kind of mass defibrillation spread across two days of unusually close and gripping Cup football.
Coming so soon after the remarkable progress of Bradford City to the Capital One Cup final, it all seems a little too coherent and sustained to be dismissed as a narrative quirk, presenting instead a roll call of lower league triumph that is both stirring and entirely deserved: Luton's victory over Norwich, the further collapse of Aston Villa at the New Den, a home thrashing for QPR at the hands of MK Dons, Leeds' emphatic defeat of Tottenham and a thunderously, almost nostalgically feisty victory for Oldham Athletic at home to Liverpool.
The first thing to say is that for some people this will all come as a glorious breath of springlike air after the Premier League's increasingly entropic sense of stasis. If there is a lack of vibrancy to the self-proclaimed best league in the world it is rooted in a sense of fearful high stakes riding on very minor positions. Beyond the struggle for the very summit and a minor wrestle for fourth place, this is essentially what the Premier League is all about. While this can provide gripping theatre at times, it lacks the sense of glorious egalitarianism the cups have provided this season.
It should be said from the start that many of these results appear to have been shocks only in outline. By most accounts and judging by what evidence of actual football ITV found itself able to cram in between the shock-shtick colour spots book-ending the actual business of men kicking a ball around, in most cases there is a sense of a genuine footballing triumph taking place rather than the usual potholed arm-wrestle. Plus of course any sense of genuine shock must be diluted by recent experience. There is a process in train. Look back beyond this weekend and Premier League clubs have lost more than a quarter of all cup games against lower division teams this season, winning 35 and failing to win 20. Something is clearly happening here. But what exactly?
For one thing we should be wary of the Weakened Team argument, trotted out reflexively on these occasions. How weakened, for example, was Liverpool's team at Oldham? Steven Gerrard and Stewart Downing came on as substitutes, whereas Lucas was due a rest, as was Glen Johnson. That's it. As dramatic selection go it's not quite up there with Wigan making nine changes (including two full debutants) at Bournemouth in the last round. Norwich fielded six players from their previous Premier League shellacking at Anfield. Villa made three changes for the defeat at Millwall, two of them recalls for Darren Bent and regular first-choice pick Andy Weimann. Tottenham turned up at Leeds without a centre-forward for no better reason than they do not have one available due to a combination of Cup of Nations absence and Jermain Defoe's troublesome pelvis. Harry Redknapp did pick a noticeably changed team to face the Dons but this seemed less a calculated shuffling of the pack, more an experimental rummaging about at the back of the cupboard for an overlooked tin of beans, a forgotten Pot Noodle, anything that might possible rescue an increasingly forlorn-looking dinnertime.
In fairness to Premier League teams it might be suggested that the weakening is a feature not of personnel rotation but of focus and priority. Is it possible that Premier League teams and managers, fixated on staying in the division in this year of TV rights uplift, or of climbing towards a European jackpot, have simply neglected to raise their usual standard of preparation and focus for the fripperies of the Cup? If so this is a tragedy for those who follow a team not for the thrills of continued mid-table fiscal stability, but for the whiff of glory, the flag days of semi-final and final, the sense of transport a cup run induces.
Plus g iven the vertiginous hierarchy at the top of the Premier League, a domestic cup is pretty much the only trophy anyone outside the Premier League's top three can seriously hope to win. This is it, folks: cup glory or no glory. It was a lovely moment, but it is still tempting to wonder what the collateral damage of Birmingham City's League Cup win in their relegation season two years ago might really be among Premier League managers who remain continually fearful of portents, omens, chairmen and above all the basic career catastrophe of relegation.
Beyond this it is tempting to conclude that the Premier League is not quite the premier league it is cracked up to be. This season interaction with footballing forces from beyond its borders has generally resulted in something of a black eye – the champions Manchester City exited the Champions League meekly, drawn in a tough group but still ruthlessly exposed.
Meanwhile standards in the Football League have risen, not just in terms of skills and fitness (Brentford have a back-room conditioning team of Premier League grade) but in terms of style too. And while English football is often castigated for its failure to reach the most alpine heights, let us praise its depth. Overseas players and managers often marvel at the relative strength and focus of the lower leagues. Just ask André Santos, the Brazil international made to look like an ingenue by the superior speed and technical ability of Will Buckley of Brighton and Hove Albion, a player who has yet to appear at any level above the second tier.
If this augurs well for the future health of the Cup, which was founded out of that basic sense of a hand-to-hand footballing meritocracy, it also hints at the deeper sense of corporeal health in English football beneath the headline dissatisfactions of the top tier. The Premier League is a darkly fearful place at times, with relegation treated as a kind of death beyond the plastic glamour of the self-propelling fiscal inferno. If the Cup has reminded us of anything this season, it is perhaps that it was not always like this - or at least not quite as much like this - and that beyond the frazzled confines of the Premier League the Cup can still bring not just a touch of that old liver-spotted magic but a sense of vibrancy, good habits and a reminder of the benefits of a little social mobility.
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