Column

Culture

Football

Sport

17 February 2025

4 min read

FA Cup magic: the cliches that belie football’s real focus

Selfish interests are a symptom of a wider social tendency.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

in a dressing room, celebrating footballer crowd together for a photograph.

Plymouth's players celebrate.

Plymouth Argyle FC

I learned about a concept called ‘thought-terminating clichés’ recently. They’re throw-away phrases often used in cults and cult-like social phenomena as a way of shutting down debate. So, for example, if you’re chatting with, say, an anti-vaxxer, they might say “you need to go and do your research” as way to shut down the debate.

Once you notice this, you see it everywhere. And there was one ‘thought-terminating cliché’ I heard a lot this weekend. “The magic of the cup.”

Can I be honest with you? I don’t like the FA Cup. This weekend saw the latest round of cup fixtures and all it did was remind me why. Okay yes, I’m still a bit miffed about Plymouth knocking Liverpool out. But that’s not it, I promise.

Every single time these weekends come around it inevitably ends up with lots of tedious discussion about ‘The magic of the cup’ as people get starry-eyed and nostalgic about ‘giant-killings’ and the tragic loss of FA Cup replays.

For example, in the last round of cup fixtures, National League team Tamworth took Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur to extra time. They ultimately lost 3-0 but, in previous years, they would have ‘earned’ a reply at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and, as a result would have gained more money in gate receipts than the club normally generates in a whole year.

For some, it was proof that scrapping FA Cup replays was damaging grassroots and lower league football. Nobody seemed to care about the fact that Tamworth only scraped through the previous round on penalties, precisely because there were no replays in the cup this year. In other words, they were only playing Spurs because the replays were scraped in the first place.

Discussions like this can be – should be – a good opportunity for the footballing community to have honest conversations about what the sport ought to look like. Who is football for? What is the point of football? How should the sport’s resources be distributed across the football pyramid?

But of course, as is so often the case in contemporary society, we are simply unable to have an open, transparent, and well-intentioned conversation about these fundamental issues. In particular, one discussion caught my eye over the weekend.

Debate around VAR shows how deeply ingrained tribalism is within football: I would rather my team won unjustly rather than lost fairly.

A lot has been said about VAR since its introduction to the premier league in 2019. Many have lamented its impact. No longer is it possible to simply celebrate a goal. Now there’s always the VAR, always threatening to take away that last minute winner for some small infraction that occurred 5 minutes before the goal was actually scored. All VAR has done, so say the critics, is give greater power to the incompetent referees and their mates.

And the damage of VAR was only proved this weekend in the FA Cup, as this was the last round of fixtures not to have VAR before its introduction in the fifth round.

Fans were able to celebrate goals without worrying that the Grinch With A Whistle was going to take it away. No longer would we have to sit twiddling our thumbs while three men in Stockley Park used a magnifying glass and a series of made-up lines to work out if someone’s little toe was offside. Let joy be unconfined!

And yet, there were loads of officiating errors over the weekend. Blackburn had a goal ruled out against Wolves for offside; Dominic Hyam looked on. Brighton beat Chelsea; Tariq Lamptey looked to have handled the ball. Manchester United scored a dramatic last-minute winner against Leicester City; scorer Harry Maguire almost certainly looked offside. There were multiple other incidents we could reference; you get the point.

But this is all just a small price to pay; it’s The Magic of the Cup after all. And this is where football needs to decide what it’s fundamentally all about. Is it a sport, a competition? Or is it entertainment?

It can, of course, be both – and most of the time it is. But if we decide that football is to remain fundamentally a sport and not completely concede the point that it is now entirely a TV product, then VAR has to be here to stay. My minor inconvenience when I prematurely celebrate a disallowed goal, or sit in a freezing stadium not knowing what VAR is doing, all this is the price we pay for ensuring competitive rigour.

Debate around VAR shows how deeply ingrained tribalism is within football: I would rather my team won unjustly rather than lost fairly. As in so many aspects of life, loyalty to ‘my team’ blinds me from what is best for those around me. Football’s inability to ‘solve’ the perennial problem of the FA Cup, what it’s fundamentally for, and how VAR is best implemented into it, is just a symptom of a wider social tendency towards self-interest over equity and justice.

Sometimes, winning as a collective involves losing as an individual. Sometimes the best thing for football is seeing that last-minute winner rightly ruled off, embarrassing though it may be. The Magic of the Cup indeed.

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Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”