Penalties are a small price to pay if FA Cup is to remain relevant

The FA Cup is not the draw it once was but if ties were decided at the first time of asking, big clubs might try a little harder
Nicklas Bendtner
Nicklas Bendtner scores aganist Ipswich in the Carling Cup semi-final. One of the Cup’s attractions is there are no replays. Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

This weekend football will be up for the cup, the fourth round of the FA Cup to be precise, but again the attendance figures are likely to suggest that fewer fans are up for it than used to be the case. Ties that would have once packed grounds are now played in front of rows of empty seats. Managers often use cup games to give their regular players a break.

In this season's third round, attendances at all but a handful of ties were well down on gates for league games. Sunderland lost at home to Notts County watched by a crowd of less than 18,000, which was nearly 21,000 below their Premier League average.

The appetite for cup football is still there, given the right circumstances. Southampton supporters will flock to St Mary's today on the chance of seeing their team beat Manchester United in a reprise of the 1976 final. Stevenage fans will be hoping that Reading go the way of Newcastle last time while Crawley's followers will travel to Torquay dreaming of a fifth-round encounter with more vaunted opponents.

On the whole, however, the FA Cup has lost much of its capacity for the dramatic and the unexpected. A shock result is less of a surprise if the victims have fielded a weakened team, and for the Premier League's leading clubs winning at Wembley is a modest consolation if they have failed in Europe and merely made the top four back home. Never has a double been so quickly forgotten as Chelsea's success in league and cup last season. For Roman Abramovich this was small beer compared to the Champions League.

In some respects the Carling Cup has overtaken the FA Cup in the public consciousness. It has become less of a poor relation, more an ambitious second cousin, and this week's return legs of the semi-finals would have distinguished any round of the older competition. Arsenal needed an outstanding goal from Nicklas Bendtner to break the dogged resistance of Ipswich at the Emirates and Birmingham's recovery to beat West Ham after going two behind on aggregate was inspiring.

The final, moreover, will find both participants coming to Wembley urgently needing to win something. True Arsenal and Birmingham have more pressing engagements elsewhere but holding up the prize in a month's time will surely provide the winners with a stimulus for the run-in.

One of the Carling Cup's attractions is that it gets itself out of the way before the struggles at top and bottom reach their climax. And since there are no replays the leading sides have to play only six or seven matches to win it.

Maybe the FA Cup could take the hint. Not so long ago the idea of doing away with replays in football's oldest tournament was an anathema. It was bad enough when, in 1991, the Football Association introduced shoot-outs after one replay. Never again would it take Alvechurch and Oxford City six matches to decide a fourth-round qualifier. Now, streamlining the competition does not seem such a bad idea. If penalties can decide a semi-final or final, why not go the whole hog?

The case for replays was weakened in the aftermath of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster when, with a stronger police presence needed at matches, it was no longer possible for teams from drawn games to meet again the following week. The cops required more notice, otherwise it would have cost clubs a fortune in police overtime. So by the time the sides play again these days, ties have often gone cold. The excellent replay between Leeds and Arsenal in this season's third round may argue otherwise and the smaller clubs would be denied the financial rewards of taking a tie back to a major Premier League ground, but in a crowded fixture list deciding a tie there and then has its attractions.

All right, Ryan Giggs would never have scored his wonderful winner for Manchester United against Arsenal if the 1999 semi-final had gone to a shoot‑out after the original sterile goalless draw, and Wembley would have been denied Ricky Villa's dreamlike dribble in 1981 had Tottenham and Manchester City settled matters on penalties the previous weekend. But that was when the FA Cup held the nation in thrall. Now the nation wants things settled before it goes home or switches off.