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FA Cup Diary: Leicester City and Burnley upsets are a sign of the times

The world trembles. These are dark and forbidding times. The old certainties are collapsing, and weak and venal men have seized the levers of power.

But in the midst of such chaos, humanity can be sure of one thing. Just when all hope seems lost, and the darkness seems complete, a hero will rise, and through their inspiration will show us all that there is a better, more hopeful way. That there is still space in this world for beauty, truth, and laughter.

Still, nobody expected it to be the FA Cup.

Human beings — simple sacks of meat that we are — love two footballing things more than any other footballing things. Own goals and Steven Gerrard falling over. But in the absence of the former and the retirement of the latter, we’ll settle for cup upsets and last minute winners, and we’ll feel utterly spoiled if we get them combined. Twice. In one day.

So it was at Burnley, where the forces of good — Lincoln City — looked to be hopelessly outmatched by Sean Dyche and his armies of evil. Well, partly evil. Well, Joey Barton. But Turf Moor has been an extremely awkward place to go for most of the Premier League this season, so Lincoln’s confident, committed performance came as a refreshing surprise, and their last minute winner a genuine pleasure.

(Not so Barton’s latest exercise in tedious indignity, a trifecta of foot-stamping, head-clutching and face-raking. It takes special skill to be simultaneously that annoying and that boring, so kudos to Barton for that, at least.)

Then to Millwall. Admittedly, the prospect of an upset looked much more likely from the outset here. Millwall, as a club, are riding high on the euphoria of having defeated, at least for the moment, the most implacable and destructive force in Britain today: London property re-development. Meanwhile Leicester are in freefall, as they deal with the consequences of Claudio Ranieri’s decision to mortgage, re-mortgage, and re-re-mortgage the club’s form for the next ninety-nine years in exchange for a league title. Worth it, obviously. But the bank are on the phone, and they’re angry.

Leicester, to give them their due, were the better team for much of the game and could have scored a few. But such is the nature of footballing momentum. When a team is collapsing in the farcical style, the bad games go badly and the good games also go badly. And when a team is collapsing in the Leicester style — they’ve been so bad after being so good that they’ve become their own concept — then the good games end with the opposition down to ten men and their right-back dancing through the defence to win the game.

Beyond the headlines, the FA Cup did good work in several of the other games as well. Huddersfield Town earned themselves a deserved replay against the “Pep” Guardiola Project, and Oxford United came agonisingly close to earning one against Middlesbrough. Poor Oxford. Who could have predicted that Boro would manage to score three goals in a single game?

Wolves couldn’t overcome Chelsea, but managed to make John Terry look moderately silly in his first game for ages, which is probably as good a trophy. Then on Sunday, Blackburn Rovers, who have basically been awful all season, turned in a sparky performance and came extremely close frustrating the Premier League’s worst best team, Manchester United. They only crumbled when Jose Mourinho, displaying the kind of innovation that sets him apart from more mundane coaches, decided to bring Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Paul Pogba on for the last half hour. If only Owen Coyle had thought of that first.

We’re not done, of course, and we have to hope that the FA Cup isn’t done either. For if Sutton United manage to overturn Arsenal on Monday evening, then we can be sure that whatever else happens, 2017 will go down in history as the greatest year in human history. Even when human history ends around July in a thermonuclear cloud. We don’t ask for much, oh mighty FA Cup. Give us this, before the seething fires claim us all.