Warrington Town’s tie with Exeter City on a Friday night in November at a Cantilever Park that sold out in three hours flat reeks of the romance of the first round of the FA Cup.
The Northern Premier League Division One North side will be targeting the sort of result that still resonates despite a saturated football calendar, but the match against League Two opposition marks a milestone for the BBC too.
The FA Cup and the BBC, two venerable institutions, much loved but constantly under attack, have been estranged since a spectacular falling out in 2008 when the FA’s chief executive at the time, Brian Barwick, sold the rights to ITV and Setanta to the fury of the BBC and Sky.
So while Match of the Day has proved unexpectedly resilient as the weekly digest of the Premier League soap opera, there has been no regular live domestic football on the BBC in the six years since.
“It feels like a very good fit, the FA Cup and the BBC. It’s the national cup competition, it’s the most respected and revered cup competition in the world still. For the BBC, we’re in a good place in football,” says Philip Bernie, the BBC’s head of TV sport.
“We’ve just come off the back of a very well-regarded World Cup, it’s the 50th anniversary of Match of the Day, which is really flourishing. To add in live TV and pretty regular football is such a big deal.”
With the FA Cup out of intensive care but still vulnerable and the age old debate continuing to bubble away about its relevance, its return to the BBC – which is sharing the rights with BT Sport in a £200m deal – is critical for both parties.
After the tumultuous years that followed Manchester United’s failure to defend the trophy in 2000, in which the FA Cup threatened to spiral into permanent decline, Bernie believes it is back on an upward curve.
“It’s quite an interesting journey that Arsenal, for example, have been on. From the teams that were picked a few years ago to last season when it was vital to them. There aren’t that many trophies to be won,” he says.
“The supporters love it. If there was some wavering among the clubs I think that is diminishing and they are recognising its significance again.”
With all the fervour of a lover spurned then reunited, the BBC is throwing the kitchen sink at its presentation of the competition with even the first and second rounds accorded the full cross-platform promotional treatment.
There are innovations, with a live interactive Final Score showing the goals as they go in, and some once proud traditions revived, such as shifting the draw back to the Monday. The main difference from last time the competition was on the BBC will be in the prominence it is afforded.
“I know some people knock it, but it’s still a great competition. We can work with BT to make it still greater. We bring that unique multiplatform presence. You won’t be able to avoid it across all BBC outlets, making it feel like something of great significance,” Bernie says.
The FA conducted a wide ranging review of the FA Cup as recently as 2010 but more radical suggestions such as abolishing replays and introducing seeding were scrapped in favour of moving the final to teatime and trying to accentuate the positives.
Bernie said any decisions on the format were a matter for the FA but added, intriguingly, the BBC is “very open to consultation”.
A man who has been at the BBC ever since leaving university in 1984 and has overseen almost all of its flagship sports properties from Match of the Day to Grandstand, as well as his fair share of World Cups and Olympics, Bernie has had a front-row seat for the seismic changes in sport and media.
But in its 50th year, he said Match of the Day was in ruder health than ever. Received wisdom had it that highlights would diminish in importance as more live matches were shown on pay TV and technology allowed fans to catch up on the move. If anything, the opposite has happened.
“It has bucked the trend. But it is a unique proposition,” he says. “People can get the clips they want to, they can watch Football First if they want to, they can watch the 12.45pm match on a Saturday and yet they still come to Match of the Day because it’s a great digest and it’s different to all those other things.”
Grumbling about the pundits on the Match of the Day sofa is almost as much of a tradition as settling down to watch it on a Saturday night but Bernie will hear no criticism in the wake of the reshuffle that followed Alan Hansen hanging up his golfing jumper for good.
“It needs to keep evolving and developing. We’ve got a really good range of pundits there now, brilliantly led by Gary who is just outstanding,” says Bernie.
“We’ve evolved the team in the wake of Alan Hansen leaving really successfully,” he adds. “There’s some really good young guys coming through now and they take it very seriously. No one is going to agree with them all of the time. That’s football. But overall we think we’ve got a really good team and the audience response has been very warm.”
But this weekend, the BBC will weave a tapestry from football stories that are the polar opposite of the big egos and blank cheques of the Premier League.
After presenting the tie in Warrington, the increasingly ubiquitous Dan Walker will head to Weston-super-Mare to present Saturday’s Football Focus before the club’s match with Doncaster Rovers.
“It’s about making the FA Cup feel bigger in both the wider sense of what the BBC can bring and in the local sense,” Bernie says. “It’s a great opportunity for us, we really want to seize it and make what remains a great institution into something even stronger.”
BBC’s opening live FA Cup tie – Warrington Town v Exeter City – BBC2, 7.30pm, Friday
