Caleb Watts is a professional footballer who has played in the Premier League for Southampton and at the Olympics for Australia. He was part of an FA Cup giant-killing last month, helping Exeter City knock out Championship Oxford United in the third round. So, naturally, we asked him to write about what the oldest cup competition in the world means to him...
It had been forty-four years since any Exeter City team had walked back into their changing room after an FA Cup third-round tie with smiles on their faces. More than 16,000 days had passed since Exeter City fans had a fourth-round cup draw to look forward to. Playing a part in an FA Cup game, let alone contributing to a win that ends a drought that’s lasted longer than my lifetime, is to write your name into a collection of pages that’ll live on longer than every one of us. Every shot, tackle, cross, even celebration on that January afternoon carried with it a weight that cannot be recreated through any type of financial incentive. The FA Cup means more. It means history.
You could walk past the house I grew up in every weekend, peer through the window, and all you would see in the front room would be a parent reading a paper and a sixteen-inch grey box television lying dormant on the other side of the living room. Look further, and you might see two ratty-haired brown kids either fighting or playing together. The TV was off. It was never in use in those days. Some days, you might have found the smaller one of the two young boys sitting at the computer, clicking through what looks like the Google Maps’ Street View feature. A niche corner of the internet, granted, but if utilised correctly, a serviceable alternative to losing both games and fights with your older brother.
Before the internet and social media became inextricable, going online followed a similar pattern. I’d play five minutes of a bootleg iteration of what we all know as Subway Surfers, give up on that, then find myself digitally traversing London’s streets, exploring places that would’ve remained sealed for me had it not been for the family PC.
It may sound boring now, but before Mark Zuckerberg and his mates fried all our brains to a crisp, I can assure you there was no better way to make use of one’s time on the internet.
Simpler times.
And there was only one thing that could guarantee a change from the status quo of my household. FA Cup weekend.
You see, my parents refused to pay even a pound to Rupert Murdoch, thus condemning me to a childhood of early Sunday wakeups to watch Match of The Day, such was the strength of my yearning to see what Sky Sports subscribers had already witnessed. You see that, Rishi? That is how you talk about a childhood lacking regular live football without feigning a background of poverty.
Getting to see ninety straight minutes of footballers running around a pitch doing exciting footballer things was almost too much joy for me to bear. I would glue my eyes to that crackly Panasonic shitbox for the afternoon, ignoring all the annoying parental requests to do my homework, brush my teeth and to stop screaming every time someone had a shot—instead choosing to bask in the ecstasy of authentic football viewing. I love the FA Cup.
These days, I love it because of the giant killings, the Premier League players having to run about on rubbish pitches in cramped little grounds, the harder Mitre ball that reminds me of kickabouts from earlier days, back when a ball to the face meant trying not to burst into tears while your mates laughed behind their hands. Then, I loved it because it was for everyone. Games on the Saturday would still be of value by the following Monday at school, where I could finally join in on football conversations because, for once, I had actually watched what everybody else had and not just overheard it on the radio.
You see, my parents refused to pay even a pound to Rupert Murdoch
As you can imagine, the fact that these such weekends were so few and far between was a cause for much personal pain. It felt like a cruel trick to be allowed to sip from the cup of live football only briefly, just for the glass to be whisked away before I was able to truly satisfy my thirst, the sweet taste of a life beyond the confines of Freeview lingering on my lips just long enough to last me until the next round of games.
A replay was a short period of relief from this torture. All it took was a draw in the main FA Cup weekend of fixtures, and I could drink for some precious more time—rejoicing in the unscheduled and unexpected change from fighting my brother and Google Maps.
Since the FA, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to scrap FA Cup replays—a decision that the EFL claim they did not agree to—there are no domestic unscheduled and unexpected surprises of the exciting knock-out football speciality to look forward to.
Each FA Cup weekend, I am now haunted by nightmares of my former self sat at the computer, wandering the Google Maps’ streets aimlessly, stunned at the bleakness of a world without the treasured extra games to watch.
I could not allow this image to fester, so I recently returned to Google Street View to see if I could prove to myself that that child in my nightmares sitting behind the computer—hoping to be stimulated by a virtual tour of London—wasn't so bored after all.
