On The FA Cup:English football has long seemed to model itself on a reliably rubbish 1950s B-movie. We already had the cast of hulking alpha males and air-headed WAGs, flying about in an atmosphere of barely contained hysteria, and now we also have the monster.

Richard Scudamore, the former Yellow Pages salesman turned Premier League chief executive, may lack the prerequisite latex tendrils and claws, but by suggesting an extra round of league games be played across the globe from 2010, he has transformed himself into Scudzilla, the lumbering, hulking menace to all we hold dear.

For most, the prospect of being subjected to the sort of abuse endured only by rapists, paedophiles and British Labour cabinet ministers would have acted as some sort of deterrent, but not Scudzilla. The man seems to be protected by some sort of forcefield - a bubble of impenetrable self-satisfaction that makes him impervious to even the most reasoned criticisms. Instead, he crashes on, eyes ablaze and mouth agape, while in the darkened corners of ruined buildings, supporters huddle together to await the inevitable apocalypse.

There may yet be a glimmer of hope. The resistance is mobilising, and with impressive speed. Foreign associations are manning the barricades, determined to repel the EPL invading armies, and the press is doing its bit, switching to Code Daily Mail and printing reams of morally outraged articles, usually accompanied by photographs of Scudamore looking shifty.

Even Sepp Blatter has vowed to place his not inconsiderable frame in the path of Scudamore's black-hearted minions, although having the Fifa president - a man who has been accused of corruption on a truly Herculean scale and has managed to insult and annoy virtually every group of his self-styled "football family" - is perhaps not worthy of celebration.

It is too early to declare victory, and anyone who knows horror movies will realise the creature nearly always rises from the dead at the end of the reel to inflict one more atrocity on the audience, in this case probably Blackburn versus Middlesbrough on a Saturday morning in Bahrain.

The suspicion lingers that even if this particular plan is strangled at birth, Scudamore's overarching vision of football in the 21st century - untimely ripped from the communities that spawned it, neatly packaged and whored out to the highest bidder - will almost certainly be realised, and probably sooner than we think.

As one commentator put it last week, saying the unthinkable out loud is the first step to making it happen.

Quite where all this leaves the FA Cup is anybody's guess. It would be nice to think the tournament is sheltered from harm, as it falls under the auspices of the Football Association, the English game's supposed moral guardians, and not the rapacious, money-grabbing Premier League, but that would be probably be naive.

If and when the Premier League get their way, the FA Cup will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. It was no coincidence that Scudamore proposed staging his 39th step in January, just after the FA Cup third round.

The implication, which hardly needed to be spelled out, was that clubs could take it easy in the build-up to their 48-hour round-trip to Sydney, an attitude that will result in more weakened teams, renewed calls for the abolition of replays and spiralling crowds. For a tournament already teetering on the brink, it would represent a final shove into the abyss.

The FA finally got around last Friday to declaring opposition to the Premier League's plan, although their tardiness probably stemmed more from annoyance at failing to come up with the idea themselves.

After all, the FA Cup is by far the strongest brand in the association's stable, a competition with global appeal which has been drawing television audiences of hundreds of millions for decades.

The FA might even be able to cash in on the current vogue for Ye Olde Worlde nostalgia by turning the cup into sport's answer to the exported theme pub, with all the tacky trimmings. Players would be forced to wear baggy shorts and severe hairstyles, white horses could patrol the touchlines and supporters could be handed rattles at the turnstiles. The only concession to modernity would be the ticket prices; after all, a man's gotta eat.

If this sounds absurd, it is only slightly less so than the plans unveiled with such greedy glee in central London 10 days ago.

The sad truth is that, when there is money to be made, nothing is sacred and even if Scudzilla is killed off by a combination of public protest and cold feet, another beast will quickly crawl out of the slime to replace him.

The war is probably already lost: all we can hope to do now is limit the damage.