Where to find FA Cup Shocks

So the FA Cup third round has once again come around, and we all know this is where the big guys enter the competition!

Teams from the higher tiers of the English football league could meet anybody and, with nothing to lose, lower league sides or even non-league sides would be going for a famous scalp.

Most of these teams don’t have aspirations for reaching the FA Cup final but are just looking for that famous victory they can recount for years. Nothing says you have made it more than being able to boast about how you scored the winner against a higher division to dump them out of the FA Cup.

The FA Cup is a grassroots contest that goes from the lowest level of the league to the big premier league players. These lower league teams knock each other out until they get into the first and second rounds, and they meet the Premier League teams in the third round and higher.

Now, this is where the FA Cup sparks my interest. This is where shocks are often generated. I use the term shocks lightly here at first because, very often, it’s not a shock that teams get eliminated from the earlier rounds of the FA Cup.

The FA Cup is dying …

For many years now, the relevance of the cup has gone into quite a bit of decline. The prestige and romance of winning the FA Cup is secondary to winning the Premier League, getting a good position in the Premier League, or even winning the European Champions League. So there’s no doubt that the interest in the Cup is declining.

I remember seeing an FA Cup match at Southampton during the week a few years ago, and to my surprise, there was hardly anybody there! I’d forgotten what little relevance is put on to the FA Cup.

However, this is where shocks are generated, where the underdogs can surprise us. For Premier League clubs, the importance is often gone for the players and managers of the big clubs. You start to see the way managers approach these games with a more flippant attitude.

Underdogs at home

And yet the lower league teams will think, well, this is an opportunity for us…

We’re on our home ground where we know the conditions and the pitch so they can go out and do something memorable for the club and get more money. It can be quite a big payout for the lower-league teams or the non-league teams.

Second-round winners net £75,000, and third-round winners £115,000. Big money for small clubs, but not for the Premier League.

For Premier League clubs, the importance is gone for the players and managers of the big clubs within it. Therefore, managers are more likely to approach these matches with some flippancy.

This relaxed approach to these games makes you more likely to find shocks.

Possible shock events to look out for

What should you look out for to spot these shock events regarding the third round of the FA Cup?

• When big teams are playing away, will they be going for that 50/50 tackle?
• Managers might decide to save players to avoid injuries
• Confidence levels within clubs

These kinds of events are what I’m looking for during these stages of the FA Cup.

Even though events like this can happen, you can typically guarantee that Premier League clubs will reach the end stages. You may get one or two stragglers from the lower league teams that have an opportunity to get via a fortuitous route to the later stages of the competition, but generally, it’s completely dominated by Premier League clubs.

I’m pretty sure I remember that if you ditched all Premier League clubs, you would have made money by the tournament’s latter stages for many years. However, a third-round of a cup is a good opportunity to look for a shock, as they tend to prefer to call it.

They will tend to occur between a team that isn’t fielding its strongest side and is probably a little bit lower on confidence versus a team that can build a stronger side from a lower division and is full of confidence.

So that’s what I’ll be looking out for in the third round of the FA Cup.