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Ordinary is Pointless
By Tony Attwood
Now if you just support Arsenal and no one else, you may be forgiven for not noticing that the FA Cup started before the Olympics finished. In fact it started with the Extra Preliminary Round the same weekend that the Community Shield thing happened.
In fact if you know your Arsenal history, you will know that Arsenal entered the FA Cup for the first time in the 1st qualifying round on October 5 1889 – beating Lyndhurst 11-0.
Some of these qualifying round games were rather interesting – like playing the Highland Light Infantry (although hopefully just 11 of them – not the whole lot) and the 2nd Scots Guards. The club entered the qualifying round for the last time in 1903 when 12,000 turned up at the Manor Ground to see us beat Bristol Rovers in the Supplementary Qualifying Round, after a draw in Bristol.
The notion of first division teams starting in the 3rd round happened in 1925/6 – Chapman’s first season at the club – there’s a review of all the FA Cup games and the background to them between 1893 and 1915 (when we played as Woolwich Arsenal) in our book.
Anyway, moving back to the present, the Cup starts earlier than ever these days, and I mention this because some of our old boys are playing in the Cup for Wembley FC.
I have written of this marketing venture before – but in essence it means that Wembley FC have Terry Venables as technical adviser plus Ray Parlour, Martin Keown on the pitch and a rather famous Arsenal goalkeeper as goal keeper coach.
Wembley defeated Langford of the South Midlands League 3-2 to go forwards into the preliminary round. Claudio Caniggia, who played for Argentina in the 1990 World Cup final, was one of the goal scorers.
In the next round this coming weekend they play Uxbridge. Budweiser is the sponsor of Wembley and ESPN is doing a documentary. And the goal keeper coach is of course David Seaman.
Original article on Wembley FC
- Ref Review: Kevin Friend
- How come everyone else spends billions but we don’t
- It’s Arsenal, but not as you know it.
- Ref Review 2012: Lee Mason. Oh dear oh dear oh dear
- Nuri Sahin: part of an extraordinary revolution at Arsenal
- Darren Dein no longer has influence over players at Arsenal
Hope they make it to the first round proper would great and also funny to see clips of the game TV talk about going down memory lane.
So can we make Wembley FC our second team now? 😉
Szczesny
Koscielny, mertesacke, Vermaelen, Santos,
Cazorla, Arteta,
Walcott Chamberlain, Podolski,
Giroud
And the most pointless post of the day award goes to Muke.
WTF is that!
On topic – I’ve heard about this. Is the game on TV at all?
And here I was assuming that “a rather famous Arsenal goalkeeper” was Manuel Almunia…
Rusty,
Mad Jens, surely?
OT but we have a proper-Pole-in-goal, a French one at CB and a German one as LWF? How long before we have or how long since we had a Polish midfielder?
Bob Wilson in goal, surely.