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BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO THE WEEKEND: Tiddlers take on titans in the FA Cup, the standing of Stokes, and time to tee up once more

Bluffer brings us the essential guide to the sporting weekend as giantkilling in the FA Cup takes centre stage.

It is FA Cup Third Round weekend, traditionally the opportunity for little nippers from the lower reaches of the football leagues to snap at the heels of the sport’s grandest clubs and trouser a hefty TV fee before losing in the replay and returning to obscurity.

Genuine shocks are few and far between, but there is excellent mileage for the footballing bluffer in nominating potential upsets and debating the seismic levels of historic upheavals.

Saturday’s fixture between Eastleigh and Bolton Wanderers has tremendous giant-killing potential for, as any fully qualified FA Cup bluffer knows, the ideal combatants in this scenario are a once-great-club now past its best, and a well-funded tiddler on an upward trend.

Bolton certainly qualify as fading giants. Not only have they won the FA Cup itself four times, but within the last decade they have locked horns in Europe with Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid and as recently as 2011 they were in the Premier League and were FA Cup semi-finalists.

In 2012, though, Wanderers were relegated from the Premiership and are now rock-bottom of the Championship and more than £170m in debt.

In fact Bolton had won the FA Cup three times before Eastleigh were formed (as Swaythling Athletic) in 1946.

But more recently the Hampshire club have been making up ground. They are well-funded, have a number of proficient formerly high-flying professionals in their ranks, and are now fourth in the National League.

Through to the third round of the FA Cup for the first time, they are also the only surviving non-League side in the competition.

Brilliantly qualified, then, for the role of giant-slayers. But if they were to slay Bolton, would that be the greatest cup shock of all time?

And what if Scunthorpe, who bluffers will recall defeated Chelsea 6-3 on aggregate in the Littlewoods Cup in 1988, were to repeat the feat in the FA Cup this weekend? Would that top every previous upset?

Bluffers here chew their lips, pause as if to let the cogs of memory click in to place and then pronounce “Probably not.”

Such bluffers will know that the experts at thegiantkillers.co.uk, who take these matters very seriously, have crunched the numbers on every single such result in the history of the Cup and come up with a Top Ten which concludes that the most shocking giant-killing of all time was in fact the 3-1 defeat of Blackburn Rovers (second in Division one, the highest echelon at the time) by Oxford United (18th in Division Four) in 1964.

Why? The calculation involves not just the relative ranks of the teams but also their form: Blackburn then (unlike Bolton now) were in great shape, and Oxford (unlike Eastleigh now) were not.

Cricketing bluffers have a weekend without England in test match action, and they probably need it to digest the statistical extravagances of Newlands. The likeliest matter for debate this weekend, given the star of that amazing show is: “Ben Stokes: the new Botham/Flintoff?”

“It’s too early to say,” is not the kind of cop-out we expect from a qualified bluffer. So instead they can wheel out three chillingly relevant statistics: 45, the number of matches that England are likely to play in the remainder of this year; 13, which is the number of operations that Ian Botham required during his career, and three – the number of years for which Andrew Flintoff was performing at his best on the international stage.

So bluffers can confidently opine that while Stokes’ recently inflated batting average (33.95) is right up there with Botham (33.54) and Flintoff (31.78), his bowling average (41.94) has some way to go to match theirs – and, most importantly, that England’s selectors must employ him with restraint if he is not to match his illustrious predecessors in number of medical interventions and/or brevity of career.

It may seem a little early for a bluffer’s thoughts to be turning to golfing matters, but where the weather is sunnier and the greens are pampered drivers are being unsheathed and putters fettled.

The PGA Tour trundles back into action with the Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Maui, Hawaii. Double major-winner Jordan Spieth leads a 32-strong field, all of them previous tournament winners, and will be looking to consolidate his position as the world’s leading player.

Bluffers who play off scratch will wish to demonstrate their knowledge of current form, however, and may draw attention to the claims of Jason Day.

The snazzy-jumpered Australian has had a couple of months off to get acquainted with his new baby, but prior to that had won four of his last nine tournaments, and not finished lower than 12th in any of them. Day and Spieth seem likely to tussle over the final rounds at the Plantation Course this weekend… and throughout the year.