Disaster! Well, maybe…

Filed by: Darren on December 21, 2006 at 12:32
Filed In: Sport

I was planning a bit of a day out on January 6th. My local football team, Bury FC, the team I've supported since I was 13, had actually made it through to the third round of the F.A. Cup, for the first time in years, as far as I can remember (oh yeah... football-atheists, you might as well look away now, there won't be much in the rest of this post to interest you...)

No 3rd Round for us this year. Unless... Might not sound like much, but for a lowly League Two team with minimal support (Manchester United, Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers are all just down the road, so guess which teams most of the kids in the area end up following..?) and who have flirted with relegation to non-league status - and even complete bankruptcy - several times in recent years, it was a pretty Big Deal.

What's more, we'd been drawn at home - giving us the slimmest of potential advantages - against the (relatively mighty) Ipswich Town, a Championship side and therefore a club likely to bring a decent amount of travelling support to help swell our meagre coffers. And to cap it all, fantasy author James Barclay, whose website I run, happens to be a lifelong Ipswich supporter... so much taunting had already ensued, as you can imagine, and we were both looking forward to a flurry of text message exchanges on the day - me sending live from Gigg Lane, he responding from Somewhere Down South.

And then, yesterday, grim news indeed: Bury have been thrown out of the cup, for fielding an ineligible player in round two. Shock. Disappointment. Resignation... (our manager immediately offered his, but the board refused to accept it...)

The details: Bury, as a small club with little or no money with which to fund long-term player contracts, often have to arrange loan deals to bring players in from other clubs. One recent arrival was a lad called Stephen Turnbull, on loan from Hartlepool United. Before the second round game against Chester City, our manager asked Hartlepool's manager for permission to use the player in the match, and was given verbal permission. The secretary at Hartlepool then said they'd send through the relevant paperwork to Bury and the Football Association, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen.

The mistake was spotted after the match, by an official at Bury, and the manager decided - very honestly - to report the omission to the F.A., and they then decided that, rather than fining the club - as they did Leeds United for fielding one too many loan players in a recent match - they'd throw us out of the competition and reinstate Chester instead.

Just a bit hit harsh, I reckon. Honest mistake and all that, hands-up, said we're sorry. Not like we were told we couldn't field the player and did anyway, eh? Bit of paper went astray is all. Don't the F.A. accept emails? Do they even know we've had the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first..?

Anyway, apparently the fact that the F.A. has allowed the club to appeal the decision is "an unusual step". So there's a hearing on the 28th, and our F.A. Cup fate will be decided then.

Mind you, I really hope that the F.A. isn't just holding out false hope there (I have a nasty suspiscion that they've allowed the appeal to go ahead just so they don't look like the bad guys and have to take a load of cheap media flak in the run up to Xmas) and that there actually is a chance we can get the decision rescinded.

Although that in turn would be a bit hard on the Chester City supporters, who will have been celebrating their reinstatement all week, and awkward for the Ipswich Town supporters as well, who won't know which set of travel arrangements to make, and may have had to change them once already.

And there's precedent in both positive and negative directions, apparently. This article on an Arsenal fan-site mentions that West Ham were made to replay a cup game a few years ago after fielding an ineligible player, but then goes on to say that West Ham ladies were expelled from the league cup as recently as this season for the same offence, and the FA apparently showed "leniency" by not fining the club on top, because they volunteered the information. And Everton were booted out for fielding ineligible players the first two times they entered the FA Cup, in 1887 and 1888...

So it's basically a bugger all round, and a situation that could easily have been avoided, most likely if the officials at Bury FC had cheated the system and kept their gobs shut over the Xmas period, letting the F.A. - who obviously aren't interested enough to modernise their systems or, say, get their own officials to check the loan players' registrations in advance of the match - remain in their usual state of perpetual ignorance until it was far too late to do anything about it except shrug, fine the club and let us get on with it.

Such is the price of honesty, I guess. And what sort of message does that send out?

Filed on: December 21, 2006
Filed under: Sport
Tagged with: Bury-FC | F.A.-Cup |

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2 Responses to 'Disaster! Well, maybe…'

clare on January 7th, 2007 1:14 am

Nice piece. I am also a life long bury fan and today wasn't the nicest of days with the 3rd round being played so i decided to go and watch radcliffe borough to take my mind off it all.

It didn't work!

I'm still absolutly gutted and annoyed at the ridiculous, biased reaction from the heartless people at the FA.

Shame on them!
Ariel on January 7th, 2007 12:58 pm

Hi Clare - Yeah, the missus and I were decorating yesterday afternoon, with Virgin radio's rock 'n' roll football on in the background - it was torture. And Chester managed to hold Ipswich to a draw and earn a replay as well! Gaaaaah!

I reckon the rule-book-touting bureaucrats at the F.A. should be deeply ashamed of themselves, especially for dangling a week's worth of false hope over our heads just to avoid the bad publicity at Xmas... I just hope they're happy with the precedent they've set.