Off Topic Domestic Cups - Tarnished or still shiny

Fellow Yiddos have recently had a spirited discussion with a ManU supporter about the season just finished.
His boast was that they ended the season nearly 20 points behind us yet won 3 trophies (community shield EFL cup and Europa League) and we won nothing in spite of us being probably the best performing team in the PL.
My question to you is , although its nice to win a cup, are the domestic competitions a little bit less enticing like they used to be.
BTW was bloody annoying because he was right.

 

Cups are fantastic...managers ignore them to either;
1) get promotion
2) get top four
3) not get relegated
cos those are the things tht cost managers their jobs.

This has led to Wenger clearly stating top 4 is better than a trophy.
This is cos of the money CL brings in and cos the players want CL football and demand to leave if you are never in it.

In turn this has led to fan mocking the league cup and EL.
They are called mickey mouse cups and the Europey cup.

Personally I think trophies trump everything. I have no idea where spurs finished in the league in 08, 99, 91, 84, 82 or 81...but I know we won trophies thouse seasons. Apart from 1951 and 61 the only year I know where we finished was 78 when were came 3rd in the old 2nd division and won promotion on the last day.

Money has changed football fo the worst in my opinion...players demanding massive pay rises year on year when they are already richer than God and clubs willing to pay them ... £145000 per week for Ross ****ing Barkley...oh **** right off

...exterminate exterminate exterminate

 

They don't have the same gloss - nobody can dispute that.
The F.A.Cup final was a big event once.
5.30pm kick off now with little build up demeans it.
Both competitions see leading sides playing 2nd teams/youth players. And upsets are far less frequent - especially at the business end, which means that the romance has gone.
CL is essential for all top clubs. Not necessarily winning it or even doing well, but just to get the revenue.
The PL is essential for all clubs. There's more money at stake finishing 10th rather than 15th than there is in winning either cup.
So the prestige once associated with winning a "major" trophy has been usurped by the filthy lucre to be gained by just faring OK in other competitions. That's not right.

 

I'd take a trophy any day of the week mate. I've openly and begrudgingly admitted on the Prem board in a similar thread to this that Utd and Arsenal have had better seasons than us. Finishing 2nd is incredible and I'm immensely proud of the lads but ultimately nothing beats that feeling of winning a trophy.

If someone said to me would I rather win the League Cup but finish 5th or 6th, I'd bite their hands off every single season, let alone if they said FA Cup/ Europa League.

The trouble is money has ruined football and with clubs being a business, they see CL participation as far more beneficial than a domestic trophy win. We got roughly £35m for an absolute failure in the CL, whereas Utd picked up roughly £300k in total prize money for winning the League Cup and Arsenal got about £5m in total for the FA Cup. Utd probably picked up about £12m for winning Europa too... So basically us, failing in the CL by getting knocked out in the groups, earned more in prize money than Utd and Arsenal did combined in their trophy successes (of course I know Arsenal got CL money too). It's ****ing ridiculous.

 

I am in the trophies camp too, I want to see us parading silverware it should be what the game is all about.

But times have changed, The FA cup used to be almost as important as the league, almost higher in prestige because the final was played in front of a live TV audience. But now top flight teams (actually teams at every level) play weakened teams in order to save players for the important business of league football.

But it cold be made competitive again, and strangely I think that its UEFA who hold the key - From 2018/19 England, Spain, Germany and Italy will all have 4 teams going to straight into the the group stages of the Champions League, with this they could introduce a ruling that the 4th place should be awarded to the winners of the domestic cup in each of those countries, that would surely make the cup a competition worth winning again.

 

Of course it's good to win a cup but don't forget that since the 60's that is all we have aspired to. To compete in the league you have to be a much better side than to win a cup. Cup winning has always had a much greater slice of luck to it than winning a league has. If you watch football and like to boast about your team then cups are for you, if on the other hand you want your team to be as good as possible AND play good football then cups are less significant.

I find the sight of Arsenal fans who have been interviewed throughout the season bitterly complaining about their team about their players and about their manager turned around completely by winning a cup laughable and sad. Easily bought off is my view of that.

For the first time since the 60's Spurs are competing for the main prize, frankly I don't care if they don't win devalued cups.

I'd change my mind if they won the Champions League though.

 

The hypocrisy of a lot of gooners and Wenger is amazing to watch. They have gone from saying winning one of the 2 cups in England and finishing outside the top 4 is worse than coming 4th to claiming the complete opposite.
None of them believed that pompey or spurs had a better season than them in 2008, or United last last season or Swansea etc.
I have loved and will remember this season cos we remained unbeaten at the lane in her last season and gave it a good go in the league.
But to me a trophy is always preferable to a top 4 finish. Unfortunately the money of a top 4 finish is the priority as it keeps and attracks players and allows the club to pay the players more.

 

I really don't understand why those in charge of football in this country have essentially tainted their own product.
They've tried to remove everything that's special about the cups and they've damaged their image and the game as a result.

It annoys the hell out of me when clubs that are in no real danger of relegation and have no chance of winning the title fobbing them off.
If you were to win a trophy with many of these sides, then you'd be well remembered for years.
A lot of managers would rather finish 8th to 12th and win nothing instead, it seems.

Pochettino's approach to them hasn't been quite right either, for me.
Strengthening the squad in the summer might help with it, but it's been far too long since we won anything.
That needs to change.

 

The FA Cup's been tarnished ever since Man Utd sacked it off to go play in the Club World Championship back in 2000, leaving The FA to have to scrabble around for a solution to have the full compliment of teams in the third round.

These days it's got to the point that winning the FA Cup is only important if it's 50% of doing the double...unless you're a petty, small-minded and desperately insecure Arsenal fan, where suddenly it's like winning three World Cups at the same time.

 

Broadcasters and UEFA have damaged the English domestic cups.

Scattering the FA Cup ties for broadcast rights is a joke.
Every main round should be played on a SATURDAY.

UEFA have damaged the League Cup for PL clubs in UEFA
campaigns by their greedy group stage format. That is a
minimum of 6 games forced onto a club, before the possible
maximum 3 games to reach the League Cup SF.

To put it into perspective, Spurs played 8 UEFA games in the
1981-82 season, up to 21 April (CW Cup SF) . The last
7 seasons, 6 UEFA games played before mid December.

 

I'm afraid to say that the great FA Cup has become close to an irrelevance in today's game. In a simpler era, it was THE GAME OF THE SEASON. It meant glory and fame and European football. Remember that there was 1 European Cup place and 3 in the UEFA Cup in addition. 5 European slots as opposed to today's 7. However, everyone knew who won the cup and who scored the goals......Bobby Stokes, Mike Trebilcock, Neil Young, Ian Porterfield.......famous for one thing outside of their own homes. Famous to my generation forever.

The world has changed and football with it. The amount of football on TV, the amount of money in the PL and CL which leads to team's picking weakened sides, the general cost of tickets leading to lower crowds in cup games, no replays, every ****ing cup game being live on the TV, no 'It's a Cup Final Knockout', semi-finals at Wembley, kids supporting Ronaldo and Messi FC, there are so many reasons. Behind most of these is money. Spurs played a stronger team in a friendly in Hong Kong at the end of the season than in a cup tie at Anfield. It's all about the money, folks. Maybe not so much for the fans but we just get given what the clubs deign to give us when they've done what they want.

Unfortunately, I don't see a way back for the competitions. We're much more likely to see additional games played abroad in he PL than the FA Cup being taken as seriously as it was 20 or 30 years ago. As for the League Cup, does anyone take it seriously before the semi-finals? A day out at Wembley is great but it's not taken seriously by anyone but the winners. Everyone else is too busy working out how to make more money. It's a crying shame.

 

One way back is for UEFA to revert to their old tournaments.

Then (depending on the season) the winner / runner up of either cup was
entered into the UEFA Cup Winners cup. So as well as silverware, you
got a UEFA adventure the next season.

 

I'll address the elephant in the room about what's tarnished the FA Cup's prestige: for decades there was little to no live football on TV, so the FA Cup final felt like a big event because it was the one match of the season that everyone in the country were able to watch.

Now look at the current schedules, where there's three or four Premier League games that anyone can watch on Sky/BT every weekend from the safety of their sofa or relative safety of the pub (I'm from Croydon, remember...) which tallies up to over a hundred games you can watch a season and that's before factoring in cup matches or matches from other leagues, and not only does this mean the FA Cup final is nowhere near as special as it used to be when we're getting a constant deluge of live football on our screens.

Think of it this way: how many times in recent years have you seen trailers for films that not only give away some of the best scenes in the trailers, but also large chunks of the plot? Considering the saturation coverage some trailers have, by the time you sit down in the cinema you're already burned out on the film you're about to watch - and that's what the FA Cup final is, something you've seen large chunks of over and over again before you've began watching it.

 

The Portuguese have decided that this will bring back the magic of the cup:



Or someone just watched Spiderman too many times. One or the other.

 

I can see this working. Put Robbie Savage on a hoverboard, place a slingshot and a bag of pebbles ("packet of gravel") under each seat and see who hits the ground first; him, the hoverboard or the ball.

The League Cup would quickly become the most watched competition in the country.

Thinking about it, the possibilities are limitless. A large shark-infested tank in the center circle, John Terry perched above it on a chair and the first team to hit the target with the ball gets to kick off or choose sides.

If you've got a spare £50k down the back of the couch PNP, I think we could be on to something.

 

There's no amount of money that's too much for that kind of joy. I'd pay more for that than to travel in space.

 

It's such a difficult question.

As a child of the PL era, to say that I have been starved of silverware as a Spurs fan is quite the understatement. But the flipside of that is that, unlike many posters on here, all I know of the game is its money-driven incarnation and the shifting sets of values that this set-up unavoidably leads to.

Given the choice between 5th place and one of the domestic cups or 4th place and nothing, I would chose the latter every day of the week. But that isn't purely down to the financial implications of missing out on the CL. It's a hazy memory now - due to the passage of time and the overall ****eness of our CL campaign last season - but many if not most of my fondest memories watching Spurs came from our glorious maiden voyage in the CL in 2010-11.

I have only seen us win 2 major trophies. Too young to take in the 91 FAC victory. Of those two, the 1999 win was surprisingly underwhelming. Perhaps because of the coma-inducing boredom of the match itself. But in truth, most probably because I knew deep down that the trophy was meaningless; that we were stagnating in the league and simply weren't good enough to compete on the European stage. Meaningless in the same way that I'm sure most Pompey or Wigan fans look back on their FA cup wins - what followed outweighed any and all joy they felt at the time.

The 2008 triumph over Chelsea was far more enjoyable. Even though we then collapsed in the league and slumped to a mid-table finish under Wendy Ramos, the fact that we had gone toe-to-toe with Abramovich and his band of merry mercs and prevailed was concrete evidence that we were taking serious strides in the right direction. Most of us felt (albeit naively) that we were making rapid headway on the foundation laid in the BMJ era, and were ready to step up to rub shoulders with the elite. Also, the way we got there - dispatching City away despite being down to 10 men and then thumping Arsenal in the semis...the cup became a vicarious 'statement of intent' for our ambitions in the league.

I guess it all depends on the context. A trophy that merely papers over multiple cracks (as Arsenal's 3 FAC wins have done, as did our LC in 99) is simply nothing to be celebrated. If anything, it is actually more dangerous to win the thing than not to (as we found out the hard way via a further 6 months under Wendy). For Poch to finish 5th and win the FA cup with the squad and first team he currently has is still a massive underachievement when looked at in context, no matter how shiny that trophy is or how many "neutral fans" will "remember" it.

Watching your team tear apart the reigning champions of Europe then defeat a giant of world football on their own turf are memories that will stay with me for a long, long time. Not merely due to the entertainment value, but due to the statements that those games made. They said: this team is ready for bigger things. And we were. Barring our manager dropping the ball to flirt with the FA and the most boring CL victory in the history of the competition, we were.

So we threw the League Cup. So what? Poch is caught between a rock and a hard place, making decisions knowing that he has the team to win the league but not the squad to maintain it over 38 gruelling games. Once winning the league becomes a real possibility, and not merely a pipe dream, every single decision the manager makes must have the long haul in mind. We saw this last season against Dortmund. We saw it this year against Chelsea. And that, at the end of the day, is the difference between Poch and Wenger. A large pair of kahunas. I would love to see us win another trophy, but at the same time I have a lot of sympathy for Poch and the decisions he has made.

 

I'm sorry Spurf, but I'm going to have to call you out on this because it simply isn't true. No-one that I've seen has done a u-turn on the position of the manager. Those who wanted him to stay beforehand have stuck to their guns and those who wanted him to leave beforehand done the exact same thing.

Every Arsenal fan I've seen on different forums or on social media has said that the result of the FA Cup final should have no bearing on Wenger's future because we had yet another extremely underwhelming season. We have experienced our lowest ever finish under him in 21 years at the club, there has been more infighting and hostility than ever and the toxic atmosphere throughout the season has never been witnessed before, some said that it wasn't even this bad under Bruce Rioch (I was too young to remember that time period).

That's not even getting into Wenger's bizarre press conferences, blaming and disrespecting the fans, not reinforcing our personnel, struggling to motivate his players, stubbornly refusing to adapt before it was too late, making the same tactical errors and showing no evidence of finding a solution to the weaknesses suffered over the past decade.

Don't think for one second that the Arsenal fans have forgotten or even forgiven him for these things just because of a domestic cup win.

 

What I have seen kind of bears this statement dammed if you do etc...
I used to (since moving to Oz) stay up past midnight our time 3pm UK, to watch the cup final regardless of who was playing. But I can't actually recall the last time I watched the whole game,aside the highlights. As many have said live football and money has diluted the magic.

 

Before we go on, can we please nail the lie that the Community shield is a trophy. They won 2 trophies. Which is an excellent return, so they don't need to add preseason friendlies to the list. Can't be a trophy if only 2 teams can win it. Will be adding the Emirates Cup next.