James Lawton: FA Cup romance is fatally damaged

Any Football gathering in which Thierry Henry is listed among the no-shows is seriously diminished but if it should happen that his manager, Arsène Wenger, excludes him from the semi-final with Manchester United, crocodile tears on behalf of the FA should be greeted only with extreme contempt. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges at Villa Park could well be the avoiding of a step into a pile of humbug.

In recent years hardly anyone inside football can claim a record of disinterested support for the game's most romantic knock-out tournament, but any league table of direct assailants would certainly have today's competing managers up around maximum points.

Wenger did plenty of damage with his notorious, dismissive aside that it was more important to finish fourth in the Premiership than win the Cup. Naturally, he said this when Chelsea were in the frame. It is certainly reasonable to wonder if Arsenal would have been so prominent over the last few years had they not failed so miserably to make a serious impact on the Champions' League.

The real killer blow, however, was struck by Sir Alex Ferguson. He did it with his meek acquiescence when the Football Association so misguidedly argued that United's participation in a catch-penny Fifa plan to stage an inaugural World Club Championship was more important than preserving the integrity of the Cup. United might, the disordered reasoning went, just conjure up a little extra support for a World Cup 2006 bid that the rest of the world knew, for impeccable reasons including one of honour, was already doomed.

So in the wake of United's "glorious treble" of 1999, Ferguson flew his team off to Brazil rather than defend a trophy that has always meant so much to the supporters of every club in the land.

Ever since then every slight to the status of the old tournament, and, heaven knows, there have been plenty, has been just another flesh wound. From the moment that United, the reigning FA Cup-holders, got on the plane to compete alongside obscurities from Melbourne and Mexico, the very best you could hope for was that the circumstances of the more powerful clubs would from time to time give them a compelling reason to treat the competition with a degree of respect. But then you knew that, irrevocably, it was no longer the Cup that cheered. Now it simply wheezed. It was the Cup of convenience.

Certainly that is what it became this season for United when they were dismissed from the Champions' League by Porto and collapsed so unaccountably in the League. Suddenly, the old, abused trophy was again a shining bauble. It could prevent United's rude separation from a winning tradition. Now comes another twist with Wenger hinting that he may leave Henry out, at least at the start, along with other key players.

According to today's customs, Wenger is well within the margins of acceptable behaviour. On Tuesday night the great prize of the Champions' League trophy is at last in his sights as Chelsea come to visit at a time when Arsenal, for the best of reasons, are beginning to display some signs of weariness.

Their manager was, some weeks ago, talking about the inevitability of a certain loss of sharpness at this point of the season, and his current "rage" over the Premiership's refusal to alleviate Arsenal's physical pressure with rearrangement of the League programme is no doubt partly a reflection of his concern.

An even deeper expression of this would be a seriously weakened Arsenal team. It would also be another hole beneath the water line both for the FA Cup and Ferguson's hope for some redemption this season with the spoiling of Arsenal's attempt to rival United's Treble achievement of four years ago.

Then, the roles were reversed in the epic semi-final replay - the last one to be played before the switch to extra time and a shoot-out - when Dennis Bergkamp missed a penalty and Ryan Giggs settled the issue with a magnificent run.

It says so much about the ever-increasing domination of big-money European football that four years on, the prospect of such a thrilling engagement between two of the strongest teams in the land, in the FA Cup, is now so remote.

Arsenal, in the most cynical view, cannot lose. If they win, the Treble ambition remains in place, indeed becomes almost a formality with a final against either Millwall or Sunderland. If they lose, with reduced forces, they can easily disparage any United claim of genuinely denting the glory of their bitter rivals.

These, of course, are not the authentic tunes of old glory. They are the sounds of today's football, disputatious, self-serving and quite detached from any interest in the wider benefit of the game.

In this way the comments of Wenger and Ferguson over the years are constantly reversible. A few years ago Ferguson demanded that the season be extended to benefit United's interests, a move that would have been unprecedented in English football history and would have surely had somebody like Don Revie - who once had to get through an FA Cup semi-final and two replays, two European Cup semi-finals and the usual Easter League programme in the course of two weeks - raging in the football afterlife. Now Wenger demands a similar consideration to the one demanded by Ferguson.

Both managers have damaged the trophy that, practically speaking, their teams will fight over today. It should be a riveting occasion but the suspicion must be that in fact it will prove a rather small item on a much wider agenda.

Another problem will emerge tomorrow if Millwall happen to beat Sunderland. Then when we travel back along that once thrilling highway known as the Road to Wembley, we will see that Millwall progressed through victory over Tranmere, who reached the quarter-finals for no better reason than a victory over Bolton Wanderers reserves.

Sam Allardyce, the Bolton manager, was far from shy in justifying his decision to choose between the League Cup, in which his team had already reached the semi-finals, and the FA Cup. It was all done in the best interests of the Wanderers, who in 1953 contributed hugely to the greatest of all the finals, against Sir Stanley Matthews' Blackpool, and then five years later, in another match of huge emotion, beat a Manchester United rallying from the Munich aircrash.

The fact is the FA Cup will never again know such days and no one within the game has any right to complain - least of all, we have to say today, Arsène Wenger or Sir Alex Ferguson.