James Lawton: Three wise men who deserve a Millennium Stadium journey

Of the surviving FA Cup managers, three of them ache especially hard for a redeeming run down to the Millennium Stadium in May.

We are not talking career enhancement here. We discussing precisely where a football man lives for most of his waking life. We are speaking of his entrails.

Two of the managers, Gordon Strachan of Southampton and David Jones of Wolves, close down the weekend action on Sunday night after Terry Venables of Leeds United has his fate shaped around his latest High Noon. Whoever said football's oldest knock-out tournament has been pushed into the margins of modern football? Not these guys, surely.

The sweetest taste that would come with going all the way is reserved, it is also fair to guess, for Jones. Indeed, a simple victory in the sixth round over his old club would probably hold him for a year or two. It is not rare for a football man to resent the club he considers to have unfairly done him down. But Jones's case surely flies way beyond that of a manager scorned. Jones put in some outstanding work at the old Dell before his life entered the vortex of unfounded charges of child abuse in another life as a care worker. It's history now, but some history dies hard – and Jones can be forgiven if Sunday's game stacks up in his mind as a crusade rather than just another football game.

The Saints dropped Jones in a blizzard of double-speak. They bombarded him with platitudes about their belief in his innocence, but they had dumped him in favour of Glenn Hoddle long before he went into court and fought successfully to clear his name.

So what we have at St Mary's, or Legoland South, is potential pay-back time. A time when hypocrisy and bad faith get skewered, when the more romantically inclined see a football pitch as a battleground where a form of natural justice can be exercised.

This, however, is a plot not without its complications. If there is any surplus of vindication this weekend Gordon Strachan is not exactly an undeserving cause.

He was accused of having a fitting for dead man's shoes when spotted in the grandstand at Southampton shortly before the fall of his predecessor, Stuart Gray. But what does a footballer do when, despite the fulminations of phone-in hosts and abusive fans, he still believes he can do a job? Does he wait for a football club of impeccable practice, one which never listened to the howl of a fan or the convenience of the moment, to get on the phone? Does he draw up a list of clubs who pass such a test of morality? Or does he try to find himself a bit of new space and time and hope that his belief that he can still do a job is rewarded?

Strachan got terrible abuse at Coventry after beating the bullet for the best part of a decade as player, coach and manager. At one of the harshest points of pressure he was branded by his old manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, as untrustworthy in a blockbusting autobiography. Strachan admitted later that he lingered a year too long at Coventry. He had survived long enough the various stages of decline, selling the nucleus of a competitive Premiership team when forced into parting with shrewd signings like Robbie Keane, Dion Dublin and George Boateng and losing, on a free transfer, his old midfielder partner at Leeds, Gary McAllister.

On one nationally broadcast phone-in a Coventry schoolkid was invited to offer his critique of the drowning manager. The kid was withering, said that Strachan hadn't got a clue. It is to be hoped that the manager who held back reality for so long, and as a player performed with marvellous craftsmanship at Aberdeen and Manchester United and Leeds, where he was crucial to winning a title, was tuned out.

Around that time Strachan revealed how he had told his chairman Bryan Richardson that he would not be party to the kind of arrangement which saw Venables parachuted into Middlesbrough when Bryan Robson, after years of success, had clearly lost the thread of Premiership survival. "I've gone this far on my own," said Strachan, "and if I'm doing the job, I'll do it the only way I know. If I have to give up responsibility, I'm gone."

He was, soon enough, but Southampton, two appointments removed from the Pontius Pilate job on Jones, came calling. He was delighted with the character of the squad he found and he has made that sturdy quality go a long way indeed.

Venables goes to Bramall Lane to take on Sheffield United knowing the uplift which comes when you take an embattled club into the release of Cup final day and a match in which you have, at the end of a desperate season, nothing to lose. He did it with Spurs in 1991 when the banks were closing in around White Hart Lane and he had been forced into the hands of Sir Alan Sugar, the kind of football benefactor for whom the game will never be more than a commodity. Spurs won twice at Wembley, beating the championship-bound Arsenal in the semi-final and denying Brian Clough a Last Hurrah with Nottingham Forest in the final.

Venables walked out of Wembley with his shoulders up and his fist clenched. Now, he wonders if he can win another final with another cash-strapped giant of the game. Can he, after watching Leeds sell off his team, ride the inspiration of Harry Kewell for another end run in the tournament that so quickens the blood when you most need its rewards?

Who said the the old Cup doesn't matter any more?