The early rounds of the FA Cup are supposed to be straightforward. While every lower-division team that faces Premier League opposition dreams of pulling off the unexpected, these matches tend to look more like Manchester City's 10-1 thrashing of League One side Exeter City on Saturday. The money and talent gap between divisions is just too ginormous for upsets to be much more than pipe dreams. The best one can usually hope for is something like Wrexham's win over Nottingham Forest on penalty kicks last Friday—a nice story, to be sure, but the Championship's ninth-placed team besting the EPL's 17th-placed team isn't exactly David killing Goliath.
But the thing about dreams is that sometimes they do come true, especially in a low-scoring sport like soccer, and especially especially in a single-leg knockout match. Just ask reigning FA Cup champions Crystal Palace, who went into Saturday's match against sixth-tier Macclesfield FC expecting to win comfortably, only to see its cup defense end in stunning fashion at the hands of a semi-professional side.
I won't argue that Macclesfield dominated Palace or anything of the sort, but watching the match, I was blown away by how not overmatched the (please hold while I search for the club's nickname) Silkmen looked on their home ground (capacity: 5,300, only 2,900 of those getting actual seats). While Palace predictably dominated possession, the 61-39 split wasn't as lopsided as you would've expected, and Macclesfield had shots (eight) to go with its possession. Hell, the Silkmen (now that I know it, I'm going to keep using it) didn't even need questionable refereeing or penalty kicks for its upset; they were actually up 2-0 before Yeremy Pino's 90th-minute consolation goal for Palace made this colossal embarrassment ever so slightly less humiliating.
Palace can't even blame the loss on a heavily rotated starting XI, for two reasons. First, Palace should have enough talent in its reserves to beat a team 117th places lower on the pyramid. Secondly, the Eagles' starting lineup actually did have some of its biggest hitters—chief among them the highly coveted Marc Guéhi, who himself was partly at fault for sloppy defending in the 60th minute that led to Macclesfield's second goal.
The historical aspects of this result are amazing. No Premier League side had ever lost to a side five tiers lower in the English pyramid before this. The last non-league team to beat a first-division side in England? To find that, you'll have to go back MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED YEARS, to when, coincidentally, Crystal Palace itself beat Wolverhampton Wanderers in 1908. This was far and away the biggest upset in the history of England's most storied cup tournament, at a time when the gap between the top division and the rest of the pyramid is arguably at its most chasmic ever.
I am not a domestic cup enjoyer, by and large. I prefer the domestic leagues all over Europe, where a season-long narrative builds for every team, twisting and turning every matchweek. However, save for Leicester City in 2016, it's hard for a long league season to produce something as unthinkable as a sixth-division semi-pro team beating Premier League side, which is what makes the FA Cup so beautiful. Every club in the English system has a chance to do something like this, and the fact that it's incredibly unlikely only makes the times it does happen that much more special.
