I felt lucky to be at Home Park on Sunday. For all sorts of reasons. Lucky to witness the drama of an FA Cup giant-killing. Lucky to feel the passion of a crowd at a club that still values its own fans more highly than tourists and day-trippers.
Lucky to be at a club that nurses pride in its own regional identity. Lucky to be sitting in the beautiful Mayflower Grandstand with its echoes of club history. Lucky to see what a result such as Plymouth Argyleās victory over Liverpool means to a local community.
Lucky to experience a day that illuminated the best of our game. Lucky to feel the kind of emotions that are an integral part of a football competition which, despite the best efforts of the elite, simply refuses to die.
Sometimes, it can feel as if the FA Cup represents a disappearing world, a last vestige of tradition in a sport whose broadcasters pretend it began in 1992 and whose money-makers see more lucrative opportunities elsewhere.
Sometimes, it feels as if the competition is being constantly devalued and disrespected. Managers pay lip-service to its magic because they know it will not play well if they do not but their actions speak louder than their words.
Arne Slot gave his first team the day off on Sunday. He didnāt even include any of them in the squad that travelled to the West Country. He picked a second team for the FA Cup because Liverpool have five matches in the next 15 days and they have bigger priorities.
Home Park had the passion of a crowd at a club that still values its own fans more highly than tourists and day-trippers
It was a day that illuminated the best of our game as Plymouth Argyle knocked out Liverpool
Arne Slot picked a second-string Liverpool side ā their priorities are currently elsewhere
So when I listened to BBC Radio 5 live on the drive home from Plymouth, I tuned in to the phone-in that Robbie Savage and Chris Sutton host and heard Savage talking to a Plymouth fan. āCongratulations on beating Liverpoolās reserves,ā he was saying.
And he was right. Plymouth had beaten mighty Liverpool but it wasnāt the best Liverpool available. And that is not Slotās fault. His priorities are the Premier League and the Champions League. His players have a crazy schedule and something has to give. And something, more often than not, is the FA Cup.
Some felt, in fact, that Liverpoolās defeat at Home Park might actually be a blessing in disguise for Slot and his team. Liverpool have bigger fish to fry and fighting on one less front will give tired players the chance to recuperate as they chase shinier prizes.
It fits a context where the traditions of the tournament are being eroded. Uefa has established a European Super League by stealth in the form of the ever-expanding Champions League and our elite clubs are committed to a calendar that tries to squeeze the life out of everything else.
The FA Cup is still a showcase for the best that our game has to offer and yet the FA itself is betraying it by degrees and the Premier League, which sees threats to its greed everywhere, is trying to kill it. When Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish spoke about a battle between supermarkets and corner shops, it was the voice of the elite.
Both the FA and the Premier League will deny that, of course, but the facts tell a different story. The FAās abolition of replays, its spreading of matches in the fourth round over five days and its moving of the FA Cup Final to the penultimate weekend of the season are all betrayals.
And yet despite all this, despite the betrayals and the weakness and the compromises and the cowardice of the people who run the game, the FA Cup continues to defy them because it continues to thrive.
That was the other thing that was so beautiful about being at Home Park on Sunday. It was to realise that whatever those who have grown out of touch with the English game do, however blinded they have become, English football fans love the FA Cup too much to let it wither.
Sure, Liverpool played a second team at Plymouth so the giant-killing wasnāt quite the same as it was in the days when Hereford beat Newcastle United and Wimbledon held a Leeds United team that featured Peter Lorimer, Billy Bremner, Jonny Giles, Paul Madeley and the rest of Don Revieās first choice selection.
And maybe some of the fans at Home Park were disappointed not to see Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk running out in Liverpool colours. But that disappointment went when the final whistle blew and when it was written in the record books that their team had beaten Liverpool.
The result still played to our love of the underdog. It was still a black eye for the giants. There was still something about the occasion that got to the kernel of the appeal of the cup: that ordinary players from lower league clubs with uplifting stories and lives that seem almost like yours and mine can fight with the gilded elite and sometimes, they can come out on top.
Thatās why the Premier League and Uefa will find it hard to kill the FA Cup. Because the competition is at the heart of what we love about football and it is at the heart of what gives English football its unique selling point.
The elite think our unique selling point is the Premier League but it isnāt. What makes English football special is its pyramid system. It is the depth of our game, the fact that eight clubs in our fourth tier average crowds of over 7,000 this season.
In the third tier, two clubs average more than 20,000 for their home crowd. Five more average more than 10,000. That is in League One. The sickness of the Premier League is that they see that as competition not as a brotherhood of football.
The beauty of our league is in its combination of the mighty storied clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool and Arsenal and the local teams like Plymouth and Stockport County and Carlisle United and Grimsby Town.
Most football fans in this country know that. They love their own team but at some level, they love what our game stands for, too. The best of it resides in the FA Cup and the people who measure things only in money will not be able to kill it, however hard they try.
Plymouth fans may have been disappointed not to have seen Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah, but that evaporated at full time
The best of football resides in the FA Cup and the people who measure things only in money will not be able to kill it
Mission impossible?
I donāt think I quite have the will to try to keep up with the various Missions and Projects spewing out of Old Trafford now that the influence of Sir Dave Brailsford is growing at Manchester United.
So far, the only tangible effect of Mission 1, which is predicated around Unitedās womenās team winning the WSL for the first time, has been to drive Alan Brazil to the brink of a hernia live on talkSport.
Mission 21, youāll be astonished to know, revolves around the ambition of the menās team winning another Premier League title. No one had ever thought of doing that before Sir Dave came along. Thatās blue-sky thinking for you.
Inconveniently, Brailsford has helped lead United to 13th place in the table, closer to the bottom three than the top four. So maybe weāre all misunderstanding what the mission statement is. Perhaps Mission 21 means Sir Dave is committing to winning the next title before the end of this century.
Rasmus Hojlund might even have scored another goal by then.
Sir Dave Brailsford wants Manchester United to win the Premier League ā but they are closer to the relegation zone than Premier League
No one had ever thought of doing that before Sir Dave came along ā and Ruben Amorim has been clear on how much work needs doing
Sancho raises eyebrows
When Marcus Rashford left Manchester United on loan for Aston Villa and made his debut at the weekend, Jadon Sancho posted a one-word message on Rashfordās Instagram feed. It said, simply, āFreedom.ā
Given that Sancho, who is on loan at Chelsea, is still a United player, it is hardly surprising that some supporters at Old Trafford are less than impressed by his attitude.
They have been paying the playerās wages, off and on, for the last three years, for very little in return.
Liberation works both ways. I suspect theyāll be glad to be shut of him when Chelsea make his move permanent in the summer.
Marcus Rashford posted a series of photos on social media after his Aston Villa debut, to which Sancho commented: āFreedomā
United and their fans will likely be happy when Sancho joins Chelsea permanently in summer
Nothing quite like sport
I was at Twickenham on Saturday for Englandās stunning last-gasp upset victory over France and the best player in the world, Antoine Dupont.
On Sunday morning, I drove down to the West Country to witness Plymouth Argyleās FA Cup giant-killing of Liverpool and revel in the rich culture of English football. On Tuesday, Iāll be in Manchester to see City take on the Real Madrid of Vini Jr, Federico Valverde and Jude Bellingham. And on Wednesday, Iāll get to say what might be goodbye to one of the great cathedrals of our game, Goodison Park, when Everton meet Liverpool in the Merseyside derby.
Very, very occasionally, I might need to be reminded of how fortunate I am to work in something as captivating and rich and unpredictable and inspiring as the world of sport, but it doesnāt happen often.
