Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
Remember those days when football clubs of all levels used to enter Cup competitions with the aim of winning them? Some of them knew that there was little or no chance of it happening, but would try their hardest to ensure that it did. The people who followed these teams would dream that one day they could watch their side win a trophy at Wembley and when, as it inevitably would in most cases, their team came up short of that aim, they could at least know that it wasn't for the want of trying that they had failed.
What, naive, innocent and gullible fools all concerned were back then! Fancy thinking that the distractions that are the FA and League Cups were worth trying to win, fancy thinking that they were competitions that deserved to be shown respect!
It's incredible how people swallow all of the bollox managers come out with when they field their reserve teams for cup games and I find it embarrassing that, at a club where we all have such recent experience of what getting to a national Cup Final (twice!) can do for a City or Town's sense of pride and the lift it gives club, team and supporters, that there are people on here talking about how they don't want a Cup run because it would damage our hopes of staying up.
I'm glad that I'm old enough to remember a time when far better City teams than this one used to play forty two league games a season, as many as they could in the FA and League Cups and played to win the Welsh Cup every season because that would earn them the privilege of playing in the European Cup Winners Cup for another season.
In 1970/71 we played fifty eight competitive matches, as we missed out on promotion to the old First Division by three points, won the Welsh Cup and got to the last eight of the Cup Winner's Cup before bowing out to Real Madrid, but that's as nothing compared to the 67/68 side which played fifty nine such games as they won the Welsh Cup again and this time were only beaten in the Semi Finals in Europe by a last minute goal - they then went on to spend late May, all of June and early July playing fourteen games in Australia and New Zealand and all of this with the smaller first team squad that was the norm back then compared to what we see now.
Since City were beaten by Liverpool in 2012, our record in and attitude towards Cup competitions has been disgraceful and where has all of this "we've got to concentrate on the television money - sorry, league!" attitude got us - with a worse team and a much lower league placing than we had ten years ago when we might have fielded the odd weakened side in the League Cup, but generally treated the FA Cup as a competition we were serious about.
I may be in a minority of one, but I'm still angry about Sunday.
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