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The soccer calendar has been particularly quirky this year. There’s always an international break in March, but because this year’s edition involved World Cup qualifying playoffs, most games were scheduled for the Thursday and the Tuesday, which meant there was very little soccer played over the weekend; barely even a smattering of friendlies.
For a Saturday in early spring, it all felt very weird; it was a day for pacing the floors, wondering how on earth people who don’t like soccer fill the time. And with the Carabao Cup final falling the previous Sunday, and the FA Cup sixth round this weekend, that has meant a three-week hiatus in the title race. Which has been disorienting and, perhaps, not entirely to Arsenal’s benefit.
The Premier League dominates the landscape to the extent that the temptation is always to read everything in terms of what it might mean for the title. That’s not unreasonable, but the English system’s domestic cups deserve respect in their own right. Manchester City’s victory in the Carabao Cup final was a tactical triumph for Pep Guardiola and was rapturously celebrated by fans who, after last season’s chastening, have perhaps remembered that no silverware should be taken for granted.
And this was a spectacular weekend of FA Cup action, from another excellent City performance intensifying the doubts about Arne Slot at Liverpool and Port Vale running into reality to Leeds’s exhausting and incident-packed penalty shootout victory at West Ham.
But the main event came on Saturday evening with Arsenal’s defeat to a Southampton side wearing a pale yellow and blue kit in tribute to their FA Cup final victory over Manchester United in those colors 50 years ago. Self-conscious nostalgia is all part of the FA Cup package – as is the emergence of unlikely heroes.
Ross Stewart was a target man of promise but uncertain return – 15 league goals in 63 games for Ross County – when, in January 2021, aged 24, he joined Sunderland. In League One, he started just two league games in the remainder of that campaign but the following season he started every game, racking up over 4,000 minutes of league football, scoring 24 goals and attracting the nickname the Loch Ness Drogba as Sunderland reached the playoffs (he was actually born in Irvine on the Ayrshire coast, but Ross County are based in Dingwall, in the Highlands and only about 30 miles from Loch Ness, which makes it just about legitimate). He then got the second at Wembley in that playoff final, a clever reverse finish from the edge of the box, using a defender to screen the goalkeeper, as Sunderland beat Wycombe Wanderers.
In 2022-23, despite a hamstring injury that kept him out for three months, he’d scored 10 goals in 11 league games when, in January, he suffered a ruptured achilles in an FA Cup game at Fulham. That summer, with doubts as to whether he would ever be quite the same again, Sunderland accepted an £8m bid from Southampton for him. A comeback was interrupted by a muscular injury that ruled him out for four months. It wasn’t until October 2024 that Stewart started another league game, against Arsenal. He lasted 26 minutes before suffering another hamstring problem.
Since that ruptured achilles over three years ago, Stewart has started just 12 league games. But he started on Saturday. It was in the FA Cup, the competition in which he suffered that initial injury, and it was against Arsenal, the opponent against whom he suffered perhaps the most frustrating of his hamstring issues. The significance was ramped up, and the FA Cup delivered. Stewart was a persistent threat, physically troubling Arsenal’s Cristhian Mosquera and Ben White, and took his goal superbly. He is 29 now and perhaps will never have the career it looked as if he might when he scored in the playoff final four years ago. But he gets to go back to Wembley in an FA Cup semi-final and he has now scored two goals that fans of those respective clubs will never forget.
If the FA Cup’s only function is to elevate previously unsung pros, it is worth it.
For Arsenal now there are major questions. They’d gone 14 unbeaten in the league before the international break and have now not only lost two in a row but, since half-time against City, looked anxious and out of sorts. The return of goalkeeper David Raya, whose passing ability helps them to break the press in a way that Kepa Arrizabalaga cannot, may help with that but neither his absence nor Arsenal’s lengthy list of injury absentees can explain just how many basic passes were misplaced. Southampton might easily have won by three or four.
If City have clicked into form at just the right time, there might be a title race yet.
On this day …
In 1988 when the United States was awarded hosting rights for the 1994 World Cup, the US Soccer Federation promised Fifa that it would set up a professional league to replace the North American Soccer League, which had collapsed in 1984. As in the 60s, rather than existing clubs being grouped into a league, various companies bid for the right to run the league. The USSF, whose president was Alan Rothenberg, selected Major League Soccer, whose chair was Alan Rothenberg.
The first player signed by MLS was Tab Ramos, who was assigned to the New York/New Jersey Metrostars a month before Major League Soccer was officially registered as a company. With 10 franchises signed up, the league began on 6 April 1996 as San Jose Clash beat DC United 1-0 at Spartan Stadium in front of 31,000 spectators including the Fifa president, João Havelange. Eric Wynalda scored the only goal with two minutes remaining. DC United lost their next three games as well and won just two of their first nine, but they recovered to qualify for the playoffs with a 16-16 record and lifted the MLS Cup. They also won the US Open Cup that season.
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This is an extract from Soccer with Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look from the Guardian US at the game in Europe and beyond. Subscribe for free here. Have a question for Jonathan? Email [email protected], and he’ll answer the best in a future edition.
