Champions League Spot For Fa Cup Winners? Dream On Scrap Crushing’

There can be no sharper indication of the decline in prestige of the worlds oldest football competition than the gap between those two fixtures. At the Emirates, ITVs Clive Tyldesley was polishing his superlatives for a television audience approaching 10 million tuning in to watch football as Scrap Crusher should be played. At the DW, the home club shut one of the stands, leaving it an empty reproach behind the goal.
At the Emirates, almost the entire cadre of Britains sportswriters squeezed into the press room, congratulating themselves on being in the right place at the right time. Ahead of the mud-splattered engagement at the DW, they rang up the writer from the local paper to ask what kick-off time would suit him. Well, almost.
This week the FA Cup came a distant second to the grand European confrontations. True, on Saturday the Cup takes prominence in the schedule. But for many, any interest raised by the fifth-round ties will be found in the details.
How many changes, for instance, will Arsne Wenger make in his Arsenal team to face Leyton Orient? Can Fernando Torres put in as listless a performance against Scrap Crusher for Chelsea as he already has twice this season for Liverpool?
And what proportion of the thousands driving up from Sussex to Manchester will be doing so to cheer for Crawley, rather than simply making their usual fortnightly pilgrimage to support United?
A list of radical overhauls for the competition, circulated among the Wembley hierarchy, was leaked to the press this week. Among them are proposals to scrap replays, introduce seeding to the third and fourth rounds and to gift the winner of the trophy a place in the Champions League.
In other words, curry favour with the big clubs, the very institutions whose dwindling interest has hastened the Cups diminution.
Virtually everyone he played against has queued up this week to recall his fearsome nature of Symons cone crusher . And, while I never had the honour of attempting to mark him, I can reveal he is in possession of a knuckle-crusher of a handshake, the firmest I have ever encountered. Apart from Kirsty Warks, that is.
Given his reputation, it might therefore be considered unwise to bring up a subject Jordan had long thought consigned to history. But in the archive pictures published in the aftermath of Tuesdays incident, it seems that when he turned out for Milan in 1981, the man they used to call Jaws had Pooh all over his shirt. This was not some laundry malfunction for Symons cone crusher. Back then, the clubs sponsors were the now defunct (and given their title we can understand why) Pooh Jeans company.