FA Cup / Gary Boswell / 29 December 2008 /

Gary Boswell uses Google and his own memories to come up with his personal selections for the greatest ever upsets in FA Cup history on the eve of the third round of this year's edition of the world's oldest football competition.

When you punch 'The Greatest FA Cup Shocks Of All Time' into Google, fourth on the hit list is an article I did last year for betting.betfair.com extolling the virtues of backing Chasetown to beat Cardiff City in the upcoming 3rd Round Clash. I'm almost as proud of that as Charlie Blakemore would have been if his boys had been able to hang on to the 1-0 lead they had against the Championship side who then went on to make their way to the Wembley final.

I can see the AJP Taylors of 2029 sucking on their mentholated windpipes reminiscing about the day Chasetown rocked the world and failing to spot that it was actually the round before when they beat Port Vale. It was only The Boz who believed they could do it again against Cardiff!

I love the way the internet is already messing around with the heads of future generations but I suppose it will be no different to my perception of 'The Greatest FA Cup Shocks Of All Time' which has at its head two games about which I actually know very little.

Here's a scoreline for you. Worcester City 2 Liverpool 1. Do you remember that? I challenge you to name the year.

I'd never heard of it but it did happen a year before I was born so I suppose I have excuses. The result led to Liverpool appointing a new manager. A certain Bill Shankly. I'd love to have read some of the quotes he came out with that day. Them Worcester boys have got some sauce perhaps. Nah, that's Dale Winton! Shankly was more 'Worcester have just earned the right to put the word City after their name'!

I was expecting Google to come up with West Brom 2 Woking 4 but in actual fact that incredible scoreline is strangely absent from all the newspaper Top Ten Lists. They've all done it. The Sun,The Observer,The Times even The Independent. Nicking each other's formats and all nominating the obvious Hereford 2 Newcastle 1 and Sutton United 2 Coventry 1 but none of them even mentioned the day the Baggies were sunk by that Tim Buzaglo hat-trick.

I distinctly remember the pain of that day despite no longer being a bona fide Baggy boy. Like all true Black Country Baggy Boys, I always believe us capable of losing to anybody. Anybody except Woking that is. I wasn't following football much back in 1991 and I'd never heard then of Geoff Chapple who I now know as the greatest ever architect of Cup Shocks. Even in exile, I maintained my fascination of listening to James Alexander Gordon reading the results each week and the lurch in my gut when he said 'Woking 4' is an unforgettable emotional moment. I came back to watching football again after that. It was clear the Albion were missing me!

I have it on good authority that Woking were 10/1 to win that day. A pittance compared to the 25/1 you could get on Havant & Waterlooville winning at Anfield last year and of course I wasn't the only monkey going green with my one grand lay at [1.1] when Alfie Potter put the Hawks 2-1 up and Liverpool drifted out to [1.9] in play.

What on earth was I thinking laying Liverpool to a grand at [1.1]? Several Scousers I banter with were prepared to offer me an unofficial [1.01] before kick off, so confident were they that the final scoreline would be 5-2. And then they noticed that Rafa had sent out two centre halfs who couldn't have picked each other out in an Identity parade!

That Roger Daltrey moment when the Liverpool keeper has a wild look at his own captain and his face is full of 'Who the F*** are You?'.

There's all sorts of things that can conspire to cause Cup upsets. Barrow could win at the Riverside on Saturday if Gareth Southgate fields a goalkeeper who thinks he's a Winter Olympic Luge, like Brentford did against Barrow in the last round. You could have a James Agoo moment or another of those Ronnie Radford thunderbolts that the BBC were so privileged to be there to broadcast live.

Betting.betfair's Football Editor Jamie "The Pacman" Pacheco is one of those that doesn't believe in the Romance of the FA Cup. He has already offered me generous odds on a non-league side NOT winning the FA Cup in the next twenty years. And of course if you believe in the invincibility of the Premiership big boys, then you'll probably agree. Personally, I think Histon beating Leeds United in Round Two of this year's competition was nowhere near the shock it was reported as afterwards (The Sun has already catapulted it to number Three in its all-time Shocks list).

The gaps in the footballing pyramid are naturally closing and the credit crunch could close them even further. Wrexham demonstrated in 1992 that the big four were not invincible when they ousted Arsenal. There hadn't been many upsets in the boom years of the late nineties/early naughties but they started again last year (didn't Barnsley beat Liverpool AND Chelsea?) and shrewd City men assure me that was their sign that the economic downturn was on its way!

The only thing that hasn't happened yet , FA Cup shocks -wise, is a non-league team stringing a series of memorable days together all the way to Wembley. Unless you count Wimbledon of course, who did exactly that over an eleven year period from 1977-1988. Admittedly they combined it with climbing the League pyramid likewise. What I'm looking at is a non-league side that could condense those eleven years into one and then I reckon I'll land my wager. Twenty years to achieve it in! Starting with the legend of Chasetown beating Cardiff City..........

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