by Even if modern life takes over, the story is everything in the FA Cup. The new disdain of the competition for reruns has enabled Nottingham Forest to become the first team to win three shots on the FA Cup penalty. The story was made, the novelty was observed, but in a setting that highlighted the traditions of the Grand Old Cup. After Exeter and Ipswich, Fell Brighton, and therefore Forest equaled the feat of the Moroccan Army team Far Rabat, who beat Mc Oujda, Wydad Casablanca and Rachad Bernoussi with penalties in successive rounds to win the Trone coupe in 2007.
It was a game characterized by prudence, reflecting Forest’s usual preference for a low block and Brighton’s mistrust after losing 7-0 against Forest last month. But it may also reflect how two parties cared, a welcome, so retro characteristic, of these last stages of the FA Cup this season.
In relation: Nuno applauds the Nottingham forest after reaching the semi of Wembley Fa Cup
The defeat would have indicated the loss of an opportunity that none of the parties could take lightly. Of the four teams involved in the first two quarter -finals, only one had won the FA Cup: Forest, which won the Cup for the last time in 1959 when their opening goal was scored by Roy Dwight, Elton John’s cousin. It will be their first semi-final since 1991, when they beat West Ham.
Brighton may have been in two semi-finals in the past six years, but there is no sense that they are full. Success for them and the forest remains an improbable dream; Each step further, the mountain opens up new views of the possibility. They do not cling desperately to success, desperately grasping each trophy to avoid the fear of failure, hoarding of silverware as a dragon dark in an Anglo-Saxon epic, this is how it often seems for superclubs.
The feeling of occasion, the desire of a semi-final, was palpable and, as so often in the FA Cup, there was a self-awareness, the game played in the midst of the echoes of the past of competition, as aware of its own story. A fan of the house had brought a cut of the FA Cup, although that, rather than being in cardboard or plywood as he would have been in a Pathé clip, he was shaped with foam and had an inflatable handling that was swallowed. There was even a tribute to Ian Rush in the FA Cup final in 1986 while Carlos Baleba flashed and overturned a remote -controlled camera.
But it was also a very contemporary opportunity, not only because of the pyrotechnics which throws this completely modern stage in the hills of Sussex in a mist flavored with the rope just before the kick -off. Only seven of the starting XIS were British, an obvious contrast with the 1959 final, when the greatest exoticism was provided by Bill Whare, the right back born in Guernsey de Forest.
It is a curiosity that takes on greater importance when considered how many of them played in the World Cup qualifications last week.
In total, 13 players from the two teams were involved in action outside Europe. Seven of them have traveled more than 10,000 miles by doing so. And one of them, Chris Wood of Forest, has traveled more than 23,000 miles to help guarantee the qualification of New Zealand with victories on Fiji and New Caledonia. A hip injury suffered in the latter of those who held the central center.
The two managers, too, were avatars of very modern guys: Nuno Espírito Santo, a classic Portuguese pragmatist with an excitable background staff, and Fabian Hürzeler, a terrifying German devotee of pressing football and noisy swear. They were both sent to the match of the corresponding league for their reactions to the sending of Morgan Gibbs-White.
The most modern aspect of all, however, was the presence of the two players on the respective straight flanks: Yankuba Minteh for Brighton and Elliot Anderson for Forest. It is the still industrial Anderson which seemed to have its ankle hung by the training branch of Kaoru Mitoma in the middle of the second half, only for Peter Bankes to overthrow his first penalty call after a Var review – another intrusion of the modern into the palimpsest.
The two were sold by Newcastle last summer, apparently for regulations for profit and sustainability. It is probably not great that there is an incentive for clubs to sell promising local talents, like Anderson, which they have developed, and it is certainly frustrating for Newcastle, but on the other hand, it could be an example of PSR guaranteeing a broader propagation of talent than this would be otherwise. It would be dangerous to draw too much conclusions from a season, but the meaning is that this campaign has been that, Liverpool and the last three side, the Premier League has been a much more level and competitive division than it has been for a decade.
And then a last modern touch: not a replay but an additional time and penalties. And this season in the cup, in the shootings, the forest was impeccable.
