English FA Cup brought shocks, but are Premier League sides doing the competition a disservice?

Long ago, deep in the mists of time, England would come to a standstill on a May afternoon for the FA Cup final. It was by far the biggest game of the season, and TV offered devoted, dawn-to-dusk coverage.

Helicopters would follow the teams to Wembley almost like a state occasion, a day on which the glamour trophy every club craved was won and lost. A crowd of exactly 100,000 wearing rosettes — this was so long ago that replica shirts had not yet been invented — would gather at the iconic national stadium, where the lush, manicured green surface contrasted starkly with the mud heaps on which most league matches were played up until the year 2000.

Those old finals entered football folklore, and by the time the TV, radio and newspapers had finished, the nation knew the life story of every player and what they had eaten for breakfast that morning. So how has the oldest and most famous domestic cup competition in the world been allowed to fall into such a sad state, with many Premier League managers treating it as a sideshow played out in half-full stadiums?

In the 1970-71 season, crowds to watch the FA Cup went over 3 million in total for the competition, with packed houses up and down the country. Those attendances have dropped by nearly 50% over the past half-century; it’s hard to escape the conclusion that fans, seeing the kind of depleted lineups that many top-flight clubs put on the pitch, are saying “well, if you don’t care too much about this competition, why should we?”

It feels as though the “magic” of the cup has become a myth. It is still there for teams from the lower divisions, for whom the prize money and potential fees for live TV coverage can by a lifesaver, but for Premier League teams, such money pales by comparison to the vast riches that can be earned just by staying in the Premier League.

For public consumption, managers pay lip service to the competition at their news conferences, but their team selections tell a different story.

You would think that Newcastle United, a club without a domestic trophy since 1955, would be aching to see their vastly improved team win the FA Cup and with the money and players now at their disposal, it would have been a realistic ambition this season. But Eddie Howe made eight changes against the in-form League One team Sheffield Wednesday and saw his team lose 2-1 at Hillsborough. It was a miscalculation as Josh Windass grabbed the headlines with two goals.

Howe tried to rescue the game by introducing first-team stars Bruno Guimaraes, Joe Willock and Miguel Almiron from the bench. They made a difference, but it was too late.

A sheepish Howe — and perhaps his first false step as Newcastle boss — admitted afterwards that “obviously with the result and the benefit of hindsight, we could have done things differently. But we have a small squad and we have to protect that squad for the games ahead. We felt we were strong enough to win the game.”

They were not.

Aston Villa were another team to find out their squad players are not really good enough. Also making eight changes, they conceded two dramatically late goals to give their fourth-tier opponents, League Two side Stevenage FC, a memorable win at Villa Park. You have to ask yourself why midtable Villa would not go all out for cup glory and a much-needed piece of silverware. Instead, they go out in Round 3 for the seventh successive year and only have themselves to blame. A day to forget for manager Unai Emery.

Perhaps you can excuse Nottingham Forest for feeling like they needed to keep their best players fresh for a relegation fight. They changed all 11 players and lost 4-1 at struggling Championship team Blackpool.

Leeds, another team worrying about their top-flight status, rotated the team heavily, played without their usual intensity and found themselves 2-0 down at Cardiff City, who can hardly buy a goal in the Championship. Credit to Jesse Marsch’s team for fighting back to get a replay, but had they played their normal team and won, they would have saved themselves from adding another game to a punishing schedule.