The FA Cup’s best footballing fairytales

Not everyone can enjoy Champion's League , lifting the Premier League trophy or filling a 60,000 seater stadium with fans week in, week out. For the vast majority of true football fans in the UK, the game still has two feet firmly on the ground (unless you're flying through the air like a Salmon looking for that last minute winner of course). There is one magical competition however where even the lowliest of football clubs can have a share of the star studded lifestyle that most Prem players take for granted. No, not the Checkatrade Trophy. Of course, we're talking about the .

The 146 year old tournament may be treat with contempt by some clubs, players and managers in the top flight, but for the rest of us it's a chance to go a little bit further than usual. Even if it's an extra game against a higher seeded opponent or the chance for a bit of a different away day, the FA cup is one of those things in football that lives by the motto ‘all men are created equal'. The truth is, everyone is out to see a giant slaying. So who are this seasons giant killers going to be? It would make sense to start picking your potentials now and take advantage of the odds before the competition even begins to ensure a maximum return on your stake.

Year on year, without fail, there is always that one club that manages to go a little bit further than they should have, managing a sneaky second round win and all of a sudden finding themselves in the mix with the big boys of football. Getting past the third round is the next rung of the ‘here be dragons' ladder and if you manage to get through to round four, you better start packing your oxygen tanks. For or conference teams, the fifth round is usually uncharted territory and no-one ever makes it that far. Unless you're Lincoln. Or Sutton.

It's usually in those third and fourth round games however that we see those all important David and Goliath games where anything can happen. There are plenty of stories of teams like Bradford coming back from 2-0 against Chelsea to win the game 4-2 in 2015, or when Wigan saw off Man City 1-0 to pick up the trophy. In fact, the entire Wigan story could have easily been made up by someone at the pub if you'd never seen a game of football before. After lifting the final, they were sent packing down to the Championship on the receiving end of a 4-1 drubbing by Arsenal just days after lifting the trophy, eventually settling at the bottom of the League One lake after a terrible slide.

Last season could go down as the year that everyone started giving a toss about the FA cup again. Instead of the bland ‘everyone below the Championship out by the fourth round' tosh that had plagued the tournament for ages, we got not only one but two minnows who decided to cause chaos by not getting stuffed by a bigger team in the early stages. Sutton United, who managed to beat the likes of Wimbledon and Leeds before being dispatched by Arsenal in the fifth round had the limelight stolen from them by the mighty Lincoln City. Lincoln went through Brighton, Burnley and Ipswich to reach the FA Cup quarter final. Of course Arsenal spoiled the fun again, but Arsene Wenger must have lost sleep over the prospect of a giant slaying not once, but twice.

To get anything near that sort of excitement we'd have to travel back to something like Sunderland beating Leeds in 1973, but the more contemporary Portsmouth run which saw a Harry Redknapp side featuring Nwanko Kanu (who grabbed the winner), sprightly 33 year olds Hernan Hreidarsson and Sol Campbell and the human lightning-bolt John Utaka lift the trophy. Even their opponents, Cardiff, were enjoying their own unbelievable run. If that isn't a fairytale ending, then I don't know what is.

There is bound to be an underdog next season that can at least match what Sutton achieved. I fancy to reach at least the semi-finals next year.

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