[Devongone]

What is it about football administrators and administration that encourages pettiness?

VAR is on the verge of its first successfully disallowed goal for offside after a player gets an erection, so it comes as no surprise to me that the FA remains as petty and rule-bound as it was when I ran teams and helped to run a league over 30 years ago. Good men so obsessed by bureaucracy that only an interest in BDSM could tie them up more artistically.

We have to replay our cup match ten days after winning at Stockport in a way only slightly more ludicrous than seeing who could fart loudest. One of our players, in the team all season, is ineligible due to pointless procedures so incorrectly being followed that it has taken ten days to correct.

Personally I would simply withdraw from the competition, and avoid the excitement of a game against Rochdale. We could invent a Covid case!

[spireitematt]

I must disagree Dev. This isn't the FA's fault but the clubs fault. Its incompetence to the highest level and remember this has happened before back in 2014-15 with Georg Margarita at MK Dons and the tie had to be replayed then which we won.

Fans have had enough of this amateurish, incompetence we aren't a pub side we are a professional club playing in the 5th tier of English football.

Can't imagine how Pemberton and the players feel, can only guess they are fuming.

I think we should withdraw from the competition and let Stockport go through instead of playing the game again.

[Devongone]

Normally I might agree with you, but you may have noticed that the club was shut down for months, it has been sold, staff were on furlough ....... AND these matters should never rely on the efficiency or otherwise of clubs anyway. This is 2020, the days of ledgers and fountain pens are sadly in the past.

Eligibility or otherwise need not be a matter of chance and the rules need not be complex or time-consuming. Team sheets should be transmitted online to the governing body before the game, a computer should immediately throw up any ineligibility, transmit that info in nanoseconds and this NEVER need happen. Online soccer games have thousands and thousands of players in their scope. They can immediately flag up which player is ineligible through cup tie, suspension, injury and prevent him being named on a team sheet. If online games played for fun can do it, surely properly organised elite sport can manage it?

And this comes to light within the slow-turning of football administration, and instead of moving quickly a whole week crawls by before the decision is reached that a replay is necessary .........? So the teams have to play midweek at the drop of the hat and again at the weekend and poor old Stockport are wholly innocent in this. They come through a crippling week against us lumping high balls into their box and then they get to play an EFL side two divisions higher in the next round .......... a couple of days after?

My entire childhood saw my dad running local football teams with such efficiency his teams were never caught out in this way. Of course even in the current circumstances someone should be holding their head in shame, but there is no need for it even to be possible, there is no sense behind the rule, there is no attempt to cheat or defraud.

The FA is a bunch of nice, honourable old buffers - a lot like me - but they need to get real and join this century, because they are allowing their major competition, the FA Cup to die.

[Lord Snooty]

I'm with you 100% there, Devon. The FA are pathetic.

---

I bet they're still using fax machines.

---

And anyway, if they are going to be pedantic about this, shouldn't you be kicked out?

[Devongone]

Yes Snoots you are right. If you play an ineligible player you should be kicked out, but I've seen this kind of FA decision back when I was involved in local football. Their decision says they know their rule is pointless and just one more matchstick to trip up the unwary, but they also can't let Stockport go out of the competition having played against a nominally ineligible player. So the nice old boys compromise, they add together two wrongs and hope that will make a right everyone can live with.

Why doesn't every loan agreement automatically assume the loaning club agrees to the player appearing in any game played by the loanee club, but also allow the loaning club to indicate if it doesn't want the player becoming cup-tied by appearing in the FA Cup for instance? Then the Loan agreement itself would specify any ineligibility to his temporary club as well.

Every year clubs fall foul of FA Cup rules. And now there is no need. If rules operate to make things worse, we are right to challenge them.