There are only a handful of clubs who start the season with the realistic goal of winning the Premier League, yet there are many more who can entertain the thought of lifting the FA Cup.
Yet so great is the wealth gap between England’s top-flight clubs and the rest that many teams now regard avoiding relegation from the Premier League as an achievement in itself.
Given a choice between top-flight survival and a ‘good Cup run’, there are plenty of clubs who will take the former, with Portsmouth — FA Cup winners in 2008 but now playing in English football’s fourth-tier — cited in some quarters as an example of what can happen when ‘the romance of the Cup’ plays second fiddle to sound financial management.
The third round is the stage of the FA Cup, the world’s oldest senior knockout football tournament, that sees the entry of England’s leading teams and for those involved in third round replays this week, it is a fixture they could do without.
With Leicester mounting a wholly unexpected challenge for the Premier League title, it will be fascinating to see whether manager Claudio Ranieri deploys his first-choice side for Wednesday’s match against Tottenham Hotspur after Harry Kane’s 89th-minute penalty salvaged a 2-2 draw for Spurs first time round.
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