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.