Cups need restructure before they lose all shine

Emmet Malone On Soccer:While it's welcome in the wake of the weekend's semi-finals that there's a clear sense of the competition moving towards its climax, the chronic lack of momentum behind the FAI Cup this year makes it hard to credit at times that it really did start, well, this year.

The league clubs, in fact, became involved in June but the break of two months between that second round and the third did a huge amount to rob the competition of its impetus and the approach of playing a round every month or so since has done nothing to restore any drive to the event.

That, of course, won't matter much to Cork City or Longford Town as they look forward to their day out at the RDS, although the fact that the game won't take place for another five weeks, well after the league season has ended, might just put something of a dampener on it.

The timing of the final is undoubtedly odd and the suggestion that it might have been put back by a week because of the World Cup draw in Durban on the last Sunday in November seems particularly bizarre.

To be fair, though, it's just one of the problems faced by a competition that retains importance for participating clubs because of the prize money and the access to both the Uefa and Setanta Cups it offers but holds little of its former magic.

Most of the latter commodity has been hammered out of it in recent years by the way in which the non-league clubs have been put at such a huge disadvantage by the timing of the early rounds.

This year those drawn against Premier or First Division outfits found themselves having to keep squads together after their own season had finished while those who made it through to August had to get everyone back early in order to face the prospect of kicking off their new season against fully fit professionals.

The more fundamental problem, however, is the apparently erratic way in which the competition appears to butt in on the season these days when contrasted to its more compact schedule in the old winter league campaign.

It badly needs to be restored to that sort of slot in the run in, something that also, in an odd way, enhanced its significance by obliging managers of the leading title contenders to decide whether they really wanted to risk all by either pursuing a double or at least striving to maintain an interest in the lesser competition as a form of insurance.

Proposals for next season's competition are being worked out but it seems that with the impending launch of the new A Championship, 2008 will be viewed as a year of transition.

After that, though, there is a serious need to address the FAI Cup's difficulties and come up with a long-term, settled strategy for its future development, something that was underlined by the rather modest crowd that turned out at Dalymount on Friday night to see what was supposed to be the glamour half of this year's semi-finals.

With the League Cup having been fairly successfully brought back from the brink of utter pointlessness there appears to be an opportunity to divide the season in two while tying in one knock-out competition to each half of the campaign.

The current structure of the more peripheral competition is a rather convoluted affair with many of the rules essentially rooted in the event's lack of importance. Here again, however, increased prize money has helped to bolster interest levels amongst the country's top sides and only Drogheda United, a club with bigger things on its mind, rested the entirety of its first-team squad for its first (and only, as it turned out) outing this summer.

The organisers subsequently took a fair bit of stick over the timing of the final at the Brandywell but it's worth remembering that the competition had become so maligned at one stage that nobody wanted to do much more than get the final out of the way, ideally at the ground of the participating club that was likely to attract the bigger crowd.

Next year the final is set to be played on a Friday night, some small measure of its growing status but in the longer term, the competition could be scheduled to be completed over the early months of the season with participants in the Setanta Cup granted exemptions from the early stages.

The prize of automatic entry to the all-Ireland competition should also be restored as the play-off devalues both events and throws up the potential for an almost farcical scheduling problem for league officials who must wait to see if the winners qualify by another route.

Ultimately, though, the event could be completed before the European competitions with the final potentially marking the start of any mid-season break.

With the European competitions a major consideration in July and August, the FAI Cup proper (last 32) would then start at the beginning of September, with rounds following at three-week intervals until late November or the start of December, though not more than a fortnight after the end of the league campaign.