The Magic of the Cup™

The cup is one of the last purities remaining in an otherwise corrupted game

I am a Birmingham City fan. And in certain crowds, at certain parties, where weird North London Man Utd fans are as common as £80 grams, that counts as one of the more interesting things about me. The Football League? How quaint. 

For years my club has been a lesson. On the cancer of foreign ownership. On paying a 6 ft 7 centre forward who considered himself the Serbian Lionel Messi £60,000 a week (in the Championship). On hubris. On maintaining your stadium. That if your first time at that stadium is a 7-0 loss maybe you shouldn’t go back. 

Commentators used to call us the longest-serving club in the Championship with a grim voyeurism. We all knew what they meant. How are they the longest serving club in the Championship. Endless last day survivals. Sacking decent young English managers – Rowett, Eustace – for faded men – Zola, Rooney – from another time. A time when football meant something but a time that we have left behind. And when we did, finally, get relegated, it hurt. It had been a while, but it was just as I remembered. 

It was 2011 and we won the Carling Cup, the same Serb scored, and got relegated the same season. The next year we played in Europe from the Championship. 

Which is a slightly long-winded way of saying, being a Birmingham City fan is often shit. 

So, when the draw for the FA Cup fourth round gave us Newcastle at home, and Gary Lineker remarked that Alan Shearer was smiling in the studio. I immediately sent a text: 

“We are going to wipe the Geordie grin off Alan Shearer’s smug face.” 

I’ve got nothing against Alan Shearer. Quite the opposite in fact. He’s an icon. The keystone of Euro 96, the last tournament where the vibes were immaculate for the English. But none of that mattered now. He was laughing. He was smirking. Arrogant in his Saudi luxury. He doesn’t know about Chris Davies. He doesn’t know we play last season’s top scorer off the bench. And he doesn’t know that we savour opposition that push their full backs because everyone in the league apart from Stockport and Wycombe are content with a low block and 30% possession. 

And it was because of these things that we got that game.

The early goal that made St Andrew’s bounce. Bad decisions that couldn’t be overturned by a nerd in a shipping container. Horror tackles. Constant tackles. Nowhere-near-the ball-minutes-after-play’s-moved-on-tackles. A top bins belter. 

It was all of these things that led Shearer, and a lot of Twitter, to shower the game with superlatives. Drench it in the vocabulary of heaven. This was The Magic of The Cup™ in 90 minutes. Some people even said they wanted us back in the Prem.

But they are wrong. Because this season, where Blues go unbeaten for 18 games before falling to a Champions League-ish team in a 3-2 slapper, being a Birmingham fan has not been shit. 

Yes, Tomoki Iwata’s 73 mph equaliser is a contender for goal of the tournament. But Lyndon Dykes’ own volley against Lincoln will run it close – and I’ve always preferred a looping volley, an arcing trajectory, it feels more Barclays, especially because it was prefixed by a juggling chested dribble. 

That game also had no VAR, and after the linesman missed a bad foul, I gave him pelters for the remaining 70 minutes, loud congratulations for his most basic decisions. 

I’ve watched Christoph Klarer manhandle and bully and shithouse whoever he plays against. 

It’s relegation as cure. The two foot long needle plunged heartward to resurrect Uma Thurman. Football means something again.

And I say that deliberately, having read the recent tweets of South London Man Utd fan Dave about the disconnect between him and his club. By turns he called it strange and soulless.

And I think he’s right. Football is empty now. The old cathedrals razed. Their replacements boxes where stuff is sold and you are surveilled by the state, as Sam Diss put it to me in a recent interview. It’s why Shearer and Euro 96 capture the popular imagination instead of the strange but objectively better tournaments captained by Harry Kane, tainted by Covid, or hosted by dictatorships.

That’s because when your club becomes a megacorporation, trophies count for less. Maybe they count for nothing. I don’t think Dave takes comfort in holding and attempting to defend the FA Cup. I cherish the Carling Cup because of what has happened since. 

Football’s not just about winning. It’s about losing. Losing badly, losing well, and losing it.  As Chuck Palahniuk said: “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” And it is for that reason, I loved losing to Newcastle. 

The game gave me hope, excitement, resentment and bitterness, all in equal measure, like bumping into an old girlfriend on a night out. It meant something. 

With replays gone, the wealth divide growing (and my club’s hand in it) and commercialisation afoot, it feels more obvious than ever that big teams view the early rounds as incredibly tedious. Go on Eddie, make nine changes. Box tick exercises beneath their pay grade. But they’re not. The cup is one of the last purities remaining in an otherwise corrupted game. And that’s the duality of sport; in an increasingly dangerous world that feels on the brink of armageddon, sport is meaningless and banal and silly and, yet, it also means absolutely everything.