As quietly as a mouse, spring has sprung. The FA Cup quarter-final between Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur this afternoon is a 5.20 kick-off, but the sun is still glittering on the River Thames behind Craven Cottage as the teams kick off and the football season, which, throughout the winter months, starts to take on the feel of being endless, is starting to feel considerably more finite now.

Imagine a boot with a circle of stars on the sole of it stamping on a human face forever. This evening sees a new low in the status of the FA Cup and a new high in the ascendency of the Champions League over all other football competitions. UEFA has seen fit to spread the Champions League round of sixteen over two weeks this year, and this means a clash with the Fifth Round replays in the FA Cup.

Romance is all very well, but the cold, hard truth is that Crystal Palace need money. With a ten point deduction having almost certainly put paid to their ambitions of making the play-offs for a place in the Premier League, the FA Cup is their best chance of making some money this season. If they're going to get to the latter stages of the competition, though, they are being made to do it the hard way.

Earlier on this afternoon, Bolton Wanderers and Tottenham Hotspur played out a reasonably entertaining match in the Fifth Round of the FA Cup which ended in a 1-1 draw, meaning that the two sides will replay at White Hart Lane a week on Wednesday. The match was played out against a backdrop of empty seats, and this is part of the reason why The Times reports today that the FA's Chief Executive, Ian Watmore, has come up with a set of proposals that he seems to think will reinvigorate the competition.

Ah, the romance of the FA Vase. It's the last sixteen of the competition and somewhere along the line Wembley fever has gripped a small corner of Brighton and a small corner of Cleveland. When we get to East Brighton Park, which sits unsurprisingly, on the easternmost perimeter of Brighton, overlooked by the South Downs, there are two coaches parked outside the ground, one of which is a double-decker.

It was one of the longest journeys that any club in this country had to make over the weekend, but there can be little doubting that supporters of Blue Square North club Workington AFC will be in no doubt whatsoever that it was worth it. Their trip to South London on Saturday afternoon was to AFC Wimbledon in the FA Trophy required leaving their Cumbria outpost in the early hours of the morning, but it ended with a win that was a tiny bit of revenge that they have waited for over thirty years to deliver, for it was Wimbledon that were voted into the Football League in their place in 1977.

Chelsea and Manchester City, then, are the only two clubs left with a realistic chance of winning the double this season. Over the last seven days or so, the press has started to gush about Arsenal again. A decent run of form, including a win at Anfield and a brushing aside of Aston Villa which seemed to indicate that the status quo is still very much correct and in order, had led to acres of coverage being given to the Premier League's equivalent of the renaissance artists.

Manchester City against Manchester United in the semi-finals of the League Cup. A small bead of drool must have formed in the corner of Brian Mawhinney's mouth when the draw was made. There are so many threads to tie together with this match that it is almost impossible to keep track of them all. Matches between the two clubs carry a narrative of its own that weaves throughout the history of English football.

History, it has been said many times, is written by the victors. It's a thought that may pass through the heads of some older Manchester City supporters during their League Cup semi-final against Manchester United at The City of Manchester Stadium this evening. It is a scarcely believable twenty-nine years since the blue half of Manchester made so much as the semi-final of a major competition.

Much as we love the FA Cup, there can be no mistaking the lack of glamour that envelopes evenings like this. The ITV4 coverage flicks over to The Ricoh Stadium just after seven-thirty. There are fifteen minutes to kick off, and it doesn't look like there are many more than a few hundred souls inside the place.

You don't have to scratch very hard at the varnish of the Premier League and "new" football before the veneer starts to peel away. The television companies still plaster their coverage with shots of happy-go-lucky fans with painted faces and suspiciously new looking scarves looking excited, but old football, the old rivalries and quite a lot of the old poison still remains.

This week's "Video Of The Week" is one that we have done goes back to the 1982/83 season for a complete episode of "The Big Match Live". The previous season, Brighton had beaten Liverpool at Anfield on their way to an FA Cup final defeat at Wembley against Manchester United. The following season, they drew the English champions again, this time at The Goldstone Ground, although this time they were a Second Division team, having contrived to get themselves relegated at the same time as getting to the cup final.

After the two sides finished level at Rockingham Road a week and a half ago, it was the only draw that could have been made. Manchester United. For Leeds United, this match is an opportunity to make acquaintances again with their rivals from the other side of the Pennines. Their fall from grace has been bumpier than most, and possibly the most hurtful aspect of the whole sorry saga is that Manchester United supporters have been going whole days, perhaps even weeks, without thinking about how much they despise Leeds United.

It's thirty-three years now since Manchester City last won a major trophy. The year 1976 was hardly the greatest triumph in the history of the club the win was a narrow win against Newcastle United in the League Cup that was sealed by an acrobatic overhead kick by Denis Tueart but nobody then would have guessed that, more than a generation on, City supporters would still be awaiting the next piece of silverware.

These are tough times at Rockingham Road. Kettering Town of the Blue Square Premier have less than three years to go on the lease at the ground that has been their home since 1897, and they have nowhere else to go. Relations with the local council are strained, with the club claiming that the council are doing nothing to help them to find a site for a new stadium.

It requires some planning, quite a lot of peering of timetables and unintelligible weather forecasts, but we decided to go in the end. The bus chunters up through Kemptown and Hanover, eventually depositing us in the centre of Whitehawk, which feels like the very top of the world. The wind is gusting at sixty to seventy miles per hour and as we walk down to The Enclosed Ground the heavens open and rains falls horizontally, a lacerating experience made all the worse for the creeping suspicion that Whitehawk FC is hiding from us.

They wait and watch. That's what they do. About three hundred or so of them on either side of you. The older ones seem to be to the right of you, with the younger ones on the left. Watching football in the away end at Millwall is a strange, surreal experience. It starts at South Bermondsey railway station, where you're funneled away from the home supporters and down a long walkway with metal fencing on each side.

Whilst it is normal for one or two Football League clubs to be given a bloody nose by a non-league club at some point during the early rounds of the FA Cup, predicting where this will happen is a slightly trickier business. Yesterday, ITV went with the "romance of the cup" and saw Norwich put seven goals past a Paulton Rovers side whose defence's pre-match training didn't appear to contain any extra "hap" sessions.

We'll be back a little later on today with a report on the match between Paulton Rovers and Norwich City. In the meantime, however, The First Round of The FA Cup started yesterday evening with three matches. The remainder, of course, are to be played over the next three days. One of the traditions of The FA Cup is the press sending one of their hacks who is probably none too happy at not being to assigned to a Premier League match to write a few words about the smaller clubs that are taking their spot in the limelight.

Just as the Second World War had started at the beginning of the football season, it ended in Britain, at least at what would have been the end of it. It took, however, many years for the country to recover from the end of the fighting, so perhaps it is unsurprising that the Football League was unable to resume fixtures for the start of the 1945/46 season.

Surprise results aren't merely restricted to the latter rounds of the FA Cup. In a Fourth Qualifying Round replay at Priory Lane last week, Eastbourne Borough of the Blue Square Premier were beaten 4-3 by Tooting & Mitcham United of the Ryman League Premier Division. The win for the South London club was a welcome return to the competition proper for the club.

The second of our articles to mark the First Round Proper of The FA Cup heads west to Paulton, a village between Bath and Bristol tonight. This weekend, the village team, Paulton Rovers, plays host to Norwich City in a live, televised match, but the club has already won financially, at least.

It's the FA Cup First Round this weekend so, in the first of five pieces about the Oldest Cup Competition In The World (and there's a phrase that is probably copyrighted by The FA), we take a look back at Wycombe Wanderers' run to the semi-finals of the competition in 2001.

The FA Cup is a competition that throws up surprise results every season, but some records remain and one that may never be broken is that no-one from the bottom two divisions of the Football League has made The FA Cup final.

The loss of Setanta Sports during the summer didn't only have knock on effects for the Premier League, although that was the story which hogged the headlines at the time. The Scottish Premier League had to negotiate a new (and reduced) deal with Sky Sports, the Blue Square Premier started the new seasons without any television coverage at all and the FA were left seeking new partners for the FA Cup.

At later stages, clubs are now fairly open in their contempt for the FA Cup, fielding reserve teams and compaining about fixture congestion, but at this stage it still matters. This weekend sees the Fourth Qualifying Round, the sixth stage of the competition and that at which Blue Square Premier clubs enter.

Non-league football has a tendency to be more transitory than league football. There remains a culture of boom and bust within the non-league game and this has always existed, but sometimes a match is thrown up which represents something more solid and more permanent and so it was with this afternoon's FA Cup Third Qualifying Round match between Dartford and Chelmsford City.