Emmet MaloneOn Soccer

There was a time when this was a nail-biting week for your average League of Ireland reporter. If Europe had gone badly for the Irish clubs, the memory of it would be fading slightly by the start of January, only for the FAI Cup and those pesky non-league outfits to come around. A couple of embarrassing results and the sports editor would be waiting with his feet up and an evil grin on his face first thing Monday morning. "Remind me again why it is we cover this league," he'd say, while trying to stifle a laugh.

Clubs like Fanad United, Ashtown Villa and Portmarnock all gave him cause for mild amusement over the years, although his enjoyment of the greatest non-league success of modern times, St Francis' run to the final back in 1990, was comprehensively undermined by his agreement early on in the campaign that one of the paper's reporters, Derek Jones, should follow them as long as they stayed in the competition.

The whole thing must have looked an innocent and inexpensive enough wheeze, but the mood around the department was unmistakably grimmer after the mileage payable for trips to Kilkenny, Cobh and Newcastle West had eaten into his budget.

The semi-finals proved altogether more agreeable with Derry avoided and Bohemians beaten. Still, by the time he made it to Lansdowne Road to watch his adopted team in the final, Derek must have felt almost as much a winner as St Francis' manager Pete Mahon.

Needless to say, we were all at it the following year, volunteering to forego "tie of the round" glamour to get down and dirty with the competition's minnows. Our boss, though, had learned his lesson and introduced a raft of regulations on the reporting of those most precious of commodities, "sporting fairytales" and "giant-killing acts".

The general rule seemed to be FAI Cup heroics would only be written up by members of staff when they occurred at football grounds served, at least semi-regularly, by our friends at Dublin Bus.

In recent years, of course, it has mattered little. Just as the switch to summer football has meant the European results have improved dramatically, so the once fairly common cup upset has become pretty much a thing of the past.

St Francis may not have had the toughest of times on the way to that game at Lansdowne Road - although the win over Bohemians was undoubtedly a major achievement - but Ashtown Villa sparked a serious crisis of confidence amongst sections of the league's support base a year later by beating both Dundalk and Derry City away.

The following decade was liberally sprinkled with embarrassment for the bigger clubs until Portmarnock's Keith Bruen scored the goal that put a dejected looking Dundalk side out at Baldonnell.

Twelve months later, however, Dundalk bounced back to win the competition and not one non-league side beat league opposition. After that, the competition switched to the summer months and the game, so to speak, was well and truly up for the underdogs.

Last year things were particularly and painfully predictable, with eight second round games between league and non-league sides yielding eight wins for the better known outfits.

Killester United did make it to the last eight, but only after being drawn against St Mochtas in the second round and then being awarded a walkover due to the demise of Dublin City a few weeks later. Sligo then made heavy going of putting them out at the quarter-final stage, but out they went, 4-3 in a replay.

The change of season hasn't been the only factor to handicap the non-league outfits. Changes to the rules on qualifying have had the general effect of allowing some weaker sides into the competition while the League of Ireland sides have, quite simply, gotten quite a lot better.

With the country's leading clubs opting to go full-time, pitches rarely serving to even up the odds anymore and managers of top flight outfits hardly ever showing the sort of recklessly laid-back attitude that seemed remarkably common, the romance of the cup has been more or less trodden into the dirt.

This year things have not been helped much either by the slight changes to the calendar. The third round comes three weeks later into the summer, with the result that non-league clubs are at an even greater disadvantage this weekend.

As luck would have it, Malahide United and Phoenix (the latter a product of a merger between Ashtown Villa and Kinvara Ards) will each only be missing one player due to holidays this weekend but their respective managers, Bobby Browne and Harry Kenny, admit the need to rest players after long and successful seasons has been a major consideration as they have sought to prepare, with rather different prospects of success, for games against Cherry Orchard and St Patrick's Athletic.

Fanad United, on the other hand, have four players away on holidays for their game against St John Bosco and their manager, Ollie Horgan, is reduced to hoping the Dubliners are no better fixed.

At least two non-league sides, including one from that game, will make it through to the next round but they are then almost certain find themselves up against professionals, part or full-time, in the third round which, is to be played in mid-August, a week earlier than last year and before most of the amateur leagues have hit any sort of stride.

It is, in short, all rather bad news for those in search of reasons to laugh at the league.

But then, it's not all great for anyone who used to love the cup either.