SOCCER:IF YOU wanted to point to a moment in yesterday's match at Old Trafford when it became clear something unusual was on the cards, you might identify the one, 12 minutes into the first half, when Neil Kilkenny played a short reverse pass to Jermaine Beckford midway inside the Manchester United half. If you half-closed your eyes, it could have been Billy Bremner redirecting the ball with a characteristic little flourish and Allan Clarke gliding on to it with frictionless movement before hitting a smooth, 20-yard drive.

Maybe Simon Grayson’s Leeds United are not quite ready to be compared with Don Revie’s team. But those survivors of the great Leeds of the late ’60s and early ’70s in attendance would have recognised some of their finest characteristics in the performance of their successors.

Kilkenny, a 24-year-old Enfield-born Australian, and Michael Doyle, a 28-year-old Irishman on loan from Coventry City, patrolled the central midfield with a snap and an efficiency that suggested a reincarnation of the partnership with which Bremner and John Giles once stretched and broke their opponents. On this occasion the victims were Anderson and Darron Gibson, exposed as listless and unimaginative.

Doyle’s through ball for Beckford to shoot narrowly wide after 78 minutes represented the epitome of the sort of lethal vision associated with Giles.

At the back, Richard Naylor and Patrick Kisnorbo bolted the door against the assaults of Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov with a resolve that must have brought nostalgic smiles to the faces of Jack Charlton and Paul Madeley.

If Leeds managed to evoke the spirit of their illustrious predecessors, Manchester United achieved something very different. It was as though a team starting with Gary Sprake and ending with Eddie Gray had been confronted by one consisting of the likes of Massimo Taibi, Mike Duxbury, Ian Ure, Clayton Blackmore, Eric Djemba-Djemba, Peter Davenport and Ted MacDougall. Alex Ferguson, having contradicted his claim that he would send out his strongest team by making seven changes, looked on as his reshuffled side fell to their first third-round defeat in his time at the club: an authentic humiliation at the hands of side 42 places beneath them in the league.

What was missing from Grayson’s team, thank goodness, was the edge of malice that made Revie’s players impossible for the neutral to admire without reservation. There were a couple of little scuffles, but although Kisnorbo took the field with his head already bandaged, as if in advance recognition of a brutal physical battle, Leeds tended to leave the nefarious stuff to their opponents, who were not very good at it.

When the likes of Bremner and Norman Hunter bared their teeth, they were not making empty threats. Most of yesterday’s more serious offences were committed by players in red shirts, but the snarling of Gary Neville and the sly trips that brought yellow cards for Gibson and Wes Brown had no effect on the match, beyond tilting the moral balance towards the visitors, who simply got on with the job of trying to play neat and effective football, hurling their bodies in the way in defence and constantly on the alert to exploit Beckford’s pace on the counter-attack.

And after the news of a crowd of 5,000 for the tie between two Premier League clubs at Wigan and of a mere 12,000 rattling around Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium for the visit of Manchester City’s all-stars, it was good to see an Old Trafford crowd close to its 75,000 capacity.

So the FA Cup is obsolete, its traditions dead, its magic extinct? Don’t try telling that to the 9,000 Leeds fans who crossed Saddleworth Moor, or the ticketless tens of thousands watching on television. The West Yorkshire team’s victory over the reigning league champions was a cup tie in the finest traditions of football’s oldest knockout competition, yielding a result that will take its place in the history of both clubs.

For Leeds, it could prove to be a win almost as significant as the one squeezed out by Manchester United against Nottingham Forest in the third round 20 years ago, when legend says that Mark Robins’s header kept a besieged Alex Ferguson in a job.

One good measure of Leeds’s achievement yesterday is that whatever outrages Revie’s side inflicted on your own favourites 40 years ago, and however ineradicable you consider the stains they left on the tapestry of the English game, you could not for a moment begrudge Grayson’s side their marvellous victory. Guardian Service