(Due to circumstances entirely under my control, I managed to approve a post that had no text in it – here’s what should have appeared!)
Something a bit different this week – Millwall are the first Championship club to reach the semi finals of the FA Cup for five years and as there’s a full league programme next weekend I’m going to concentrate on the Lions.
We’ll start with a few facts in case anyone gets carried away and without sweetening the pill too much, it’s fair to say that history isn’t on Millwall’s side. Since 1872, only eight second tier sides have won the FA Cup and the last time anyone outside the top division was successful was over three decades ago. In order to West Ham’s win into perspective, the Hammers won the old Second Division by thirteen points when a win was only worth two; that’s the equivalent of a team winning the Championship by twenty points and winning the FA Cup.
Since the turn of the century, only eight of the 52 semi finalists have been from the second tier and we’ve had precisely none since 2007/2008. Five years ago, three of the four semi finalists were Championship clubs – but Portsmouth (then a Premier League club) won it. In the past decade, the Championship has only produced two finalists (Cardiff in 2008 and Millwall in 2004) and neither team scored in their respective finals.
But before I get carried away with how the odds are against Millwall, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Kenny Jackett’s side could pull off an upset. First of all, those records aren’t going to last forever. There was a gap of 42 years between West Brom winning the cup in 1931 and Sunderland’s victory in the early 1970s. Then there’s the fact that although Millwall have lost both the Football League Trophy and the League 1 playoff final to Wigan, this time round the FA Cup is more of a distraction to Wigan who are involved in a relegation battle at the foot of the Premier League. There’s a still a possibility that this game could be a Championship match this season.
The biggest advantage Millwall have is that Wembley is practically a home game. It’s about half an hour from Bermondsey to the National Stadium on the tube and with Wigan rumoured to have returned 10,000 unsold tickets (a sign that the fans may not be taking this seriously) there’s a definite psychological advantage for the London club. Some Millwall fans may not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s no denying that they can create an atmosphere.
Since beating Blackburn in the quarter final replay, Millwall have only lost once. Chris Maguire’s last minute winner for Sheffield Wednesday was the first loss at the New Den since the start of last month and their form away from home is even better. The Lions have kept three clean sheets in their last six road trips.
As I mentioned before, we don’t often have Championship teams in the FA Cup semi finals, so it’s time to put our differences aside today and support the Lions.
