Comeuppance for the giant-killers

Well, Barnsley finally met their match. After seeing off both Arsenal and Liverpool, their magical FA Cup run came to an end at the hands of fellow Championship strugglers Cardiff City. A ninth-minute goal from midfielder Joe Ledley, playing for his hometown side, proved to be the difference between the two sides: Cardiff created many more chances, but couldn't tack on an insurance marker. Barnsley had their own chances, though, particularly when Kayode Odejayi broke in alone but could only find the side of the net in what Soccernet described as "quite possibly the worst miss seen at the new Wembley". In the end, Cardiff was deserving of the win and a berth in next month's final against Portsmouth.

What's interesting is how Barnsley cranked it up to beat top-flight sides like Arsenal and Liverpool, but couldn't seem to do the same against a club from their own league. Perhaps it's the downside of an upset: all of a sudden, the expectations are weighing on your shoulders instead of those of the opposition, particularly when matched up against a club that's an underdog in its own right. You can't play the "Nobody believes in us!" card any more, because all of a sudden, everyone believes in you. Meanwhile, the other side can play with the freedom low expectations bring: if they happen to lose, it was the predicted outcome, but if they win, they've knocked off the giant-killers. In Cardiff's case, no one would raise much of a fuss about joining a roster of defeated adversaries that prominently displays such names as Arsenal and Liverpool.

The other aspect of this is the danger of buying into the hype. You pull off a miracle win, and all of a sudden, you start reading your own press clippings and believing you're up there with the best. As a result, maybe you stop putting in the extra effort that carried you this far. You think, 'Ah, this will be easy! We've beaten the best, now we can coast!' This kind of attitude tends to lead to abandoning the hustle and work ethic that made the wins possible. Meanwhile, the new underdogs have you firmly in their sights, and you can bet they aren't slacking off.

The best other example of this I can think of is from this year's CIS basketball championships. After Acadia pulled off a miracle double-overtime win in the semifinals against the five-time defending champion Carleton Ravens, beating the seventh-seeded Brock Badgers for the title must have seemed like a piece of cake. Instead, Brock went out there and pulled off an upset of their own. Granted, there were other factors involved, including the far-too-short turnaround time between the late-night semifinal and the early-afternoon final, but there's still a good chance that Acadia thought the hard work was done. There aren't any guaranteed wins, and no opponent should ever be taken for granted: it's far too easy to go from underdog to target.

Another interesting aspect of Cardiff's win: it's only the second time a Welsh club has advanced to the FA Cup final. The previous appearance was also by Cardiff, back when they beat Arsenal in 1927. As the Globe's esteemed soccer writer Ben Knight pointed out a while back, being Welsh also means that they won't get the UEFA Cup slot reserved for the FA Cup champions even if they win, which is a great injustice.

Sidebar: It's interesting to see Cardiff doing well again. I remember watching them play the Vancouver Whitecaps in an exhibition a couple years back, and I was pretty impressed. For all the bashing it gets, the Championship actually has a decently high calibre of play.

A weekend of Cupsets

I'm still in a bit of shock after watching Manchester United knocked out of the FA Cup by Portsmouth yesterday. United dominated the match, and looked sure to score at many points, including when a Michael Carrick effort was cleared off the line, but they could just never put the ball in the net. A perhaps overconfident halftime substitution saw Tomas Kuszczak take over in the goal for Edwin Van der Sar, but manager Sir Alex Ferguson can't really be blamed: at that point, it seemed inevitable one of United's efforts would slide home, and given the crucial fixtures upcoming in United's quest for league and European glory, it made sense to try and get Van der Sar some rest.

Kuszczak had played pretty well thus far this campaign in the limited action he saw as well, so it didn't seem like an unreasonable decision at the time. Unfortunately for United, Kuszczak made a critical error, taking Milan Baros down on a breakaway (one of Portsmouth's only legitimate scoring chances of the game), and received a red card as a result. Defender Rio Ferdinand was forced to replace him in goal, and guessed the right way on the ensuing penalty, but that wasn't enough to stop a terrific blast from Sulley Muntari. Portsmouth then tenaciously hung on for the last few minutes, and in the process booked a place in the final four. It was their first victory at Old Trafford since 1957.

In the aftermath of this shocking debacle, Sir Alex found perhaps the conventional scapegoat: the referee. However, his comments were unusually vitriolic. "It's absolutely ridiculous," Ferguson told the Associated Press. "Managers get sacked because of things like that and he's going to referee a game next week. He's not doing his job properly and he needs to be assessed. I'm assessed as a manager, players are assessed, referees should be assessed properly by the right people. That performance today should not be accepted by our game." It didn't seem quite that bad from my perspective watching it, but there were certainly many things that went uncalled: apparently, you can do anything to superstar Cristiano Ronaldo and get away with it. Good on Ferguson for speaking his mind: those kind of quotes are what us journalists love to hear, as they're far more interesting than the run-of-the-mill 'We gave it our all' stuff. Unfortunately, the FA was not impressed, and there may be a fine in the offing.

The most interesting story of the weekend came from another game, though. League Championship side Barnsley, fresh off a defeat of Liverpool at Anfield, slayed their second giant in a row with a win against Chelsea to put themselves into the semifinals. That's something you don't see every day: Barnsley, a mere four points clear of the Championship relegation zone, knocking off one of the few sides still in the hunt for the Premiership crown. Manager Simon Davey was appropriately at a loss for words as he spoke to the Associated Press. "I'm speechless at the moment," he said. "I can't believe we've really done it. We're in the semifinal of the cup, I've never been to Wembley."

Two more Championship sides also advanced to the Final Four Sunday. West Bromwich Albion beat Bristol Rovers and Cardiff City knocked off Middlesbrough at the Riverside, leaving Portsmouth as the sole Premiership representative in the competition. This is the greatness of the FA Cup: none of these sides could hope to compete with the likes of Manchester United or Chelsea over a long season, but in elimination play, anything can happen. It will be most interesting to see who winds up in the final.

Related: Globesports.com's Ben Knight has a great piece on the upsets, including where all the Premiership teams bowed out.