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THE LUCK OF THE DRAW
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This piece reflected on the way in which the FA Cup First Round draw was structured. It wondered why the draw for southern based league clubs gave them a bigger chance of drawing a non-league club, and therefore conversely, in the north, that County were more likely to draw a league club.
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FA Cup first round day normally provides us with an away tie fraught with danger so I suppose we must be reasonably content with entertaining Lincoln at the Park – after all even with our notable treble chance form at home this year it’s the sort of tie you would pick. The concept of the North / South split in the first two rounds seems pretty logical but looking at the way the draw has been split there seems to be some inequality.
There are 19 games in the northern half and 21 in the South – quite why it’s not 20:20 isn’t very clear but its the make-up of the teams which is more interesting. Of the 80 clubs in the hat, 48 are League outfits with 29 non League teams coming through the qualifying process and 3 other major non-League sides enjoying a bye to Round 1 by virtue of their achievements last year. On that basis you would think that in the North there would be 23 League clubs and 15 non-league and in the South 25 and 17 respectively. Not so. The actual split is 26 League and 12 non-league in the North and 22 and 20 in the South. Does it matter?
It all depends on your point of view. But do you prefer to take a chance of being on the end of an upset on some windswept non-league field in the middle of nowhere, (Caernarfon readily springs to mind), or the prospect of going out against somebody in the same division. They say it’s the magic of the Cup. One thing is certain, the way the draw is set up now means that as a northern club we have a 67% chance of being drawn against a League club in Round 1. If we were in the South it would be only 51%, and at the moment the prospect of non-league opposition holds far fewer terrors than it did a few years ago.
On the other hand the complaints that were voiced in The Pink recently by the non-league fraternity in the North seemed to be borne out. The chance of a northern Conference side or teams from the Unibond, North West Counties or any of the multitude of other junior competitions gaining Cup glory is measurably smaller than their colleagues in the South. It may be that there are many more competitions in the South – although I don’t actually believe that – is the FA practising some kind of geographical discrimination? Surely the non-leaguers deserve more chance than being one of only 12 teams in an area stretching from the Scottish border down to Nuneaton.
Whatever the case I think we should be grateful with what Lady Luck has given us this time. Hopefully it will be the start of a Cup run which might see one of the giants at a full EP early in January, and with it the chance to feature on the back break page of the press as giant killers rather than the giants killed.
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October 1995
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