Published: 20 February, 2014
by PAUL COWLING

TO borrow (and alter) a popular Arsene Wenger phrase: 'Every football fan thinks his (or her) Mum makes the best roast dinner at home', that is until she tries to find the Bacofoil – the last of which (if you remember) went on your homemade FA Cup trophy.

I will always warm to memories of this wonderful competition – those shiny cut out cups waved about in anticipation by six year olds (like me), and the celebration of a giantkilling on a mud bath pitch in front of a packed out crowd. The Seventies might have been all power cuts and brown Austin Allegros, but wasn't the FA Cup something else?

Some people question if the magic (and the desire of the clubs and their supporters) is still there. You only had to see the half empty stadiums at Sunderland and Brighton last week to see that this could be so.

Brighton (at the time of writing) and Sunderland are still in this year's competition, and either club could yet face Arsene Wenger's Arsenal in the Semi-Final, providing Arsenal get there of course!  That we don't know the route to the final by a pre-ordained draw is at least something!

But do Brighton and Sunderland fans deserve to see their clubs still in the Cup draw? Because in their Fifth Round ties, a lot of them couldn't be bothered to turn up.
Is this a fair point?  Or is it simply not fair that fans of these clubs have to shell out more money on top of their season tickets?

Sunderland charged £15 for adults for the match against Southampton.
Not unreasonable you would think, but surely £10 will have got a few thousand more through the door and created a far better atmosphere than there actually was.

To see the Sunderland/Southampton match on television and all those empty seats being beamed around the globe was an afront to the World's most famous cup competition. It deserves better, and certainly the fans do!

German football seems to care more about its fans. The cheapest tickets for the Bundesliga are Ten Euros and this is reflected in the attendances. OK, the Premier League is more exciting (and commands a global audience to prove that), but shouldn't tickets be cheaper for fans over here – not just of clubs in the Premier League, but those from the lower three divisions.

Because of the English league structure, and the  attendances and away support that you get there, English domestic football has a culture unrivalled anywhere else in the World (take crowds of 15,000 at Portsmouth for fourth tier matches). But in Germany, fans of their top flight tier support their teams with a passion too.

18,000 Bayern Munich supporters applied for tickets for their away match in the Champions League to Arsenal; this despite the Gunners charging them £62 for a ticket.

Step in those generous and caring Bayern Munich officials who shelled out close to 75,000 Euros to subsidise just under 3,000 tickets for their raucous fans.
And judging by their team's performance and the result of the match, the gesture paid off with aplomb. What chance Arsenal officials doing the same for Gunners fans for the return trip to Munich? The Gunners will certainly need their fans there to pull around that 2-0 deficit!

Finally the Penny might have just dropped. It does look as if English football is finally looking at ways to help the cash-strapped fan.

Premier League clubs have set aside a £12m pot for the next three seasons to make travel for their own club's fans more affordable…a great move. It seems that this action has been influenced by the Football Supporters Federation (FSF), who launched their 'Twenty's Plenty' campaign in January 2013.

Their aim is to get a '£20 across the board' ticket price for away fans travelling to league matches across all four tiers. Premier League fans will get better value out of this for obvious reasons, then say a Plymouth Argyle fan (like me) travelling to Accrington Stanley on March 22nd for a mid-table League Two game.
To be fair, lower league clubs like Stanley offer slightly cheaper tickets than £20 for everyone, especially if bought in advance. This is a boon when you add on the prohibitive cost of train travel.

But we still need more to be done to make it fairer for away fans, especially. It costs them enough anyway with train fares and food, and when kids come too, you're not getting much change from a couple of hundred quid. No trip 'Up North' to see your Super Greens is complete without chips, mushy peas and gravy, and that has to be factored in too!

So, let's look after the football fan, and especially our beloved FA Cup. Everyone wants to see those shiny foil cups held aloft by kids dreaming of a cup run. As well as  cheaper tickets for away fans in the Premier League, there should be discount prices for FA Cup matches. This is the only way to keep this great competition alive, and keep it where it should be in the annals of England's fantastic football heritage.