Welcome to the scuff podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer.

Our guest today is based in London and one of the hosts of the five-year plan, a Crystal Palace podcast.

He's blessed us with his presence on the Scuffed podcast twice before.

Now he'll have a hat trick, and he has a lot to celebrate this month with Crystal

Palace's historic win over Manchester City two weekends ago in the FAA Cup final.

Jack Pierce, welcome back to Scuffed. How are you? I'm well, guys,

and I must say it was me knocking at your door this time. I just need a reason to talk about

Crystal Palace and Chris Richards in particular. So it's a hat trick in that sense, but I've teed

myself up to nod it in in that sense. I'm grateful to share the ways with you again.

You got to work to create those scoring chances, you know?

I mean, if you don't, any good striker does.

And you can knock at our door any time.

Our door is always open.

Appreciate it.

So this was the 144th F.A. Cup final, Crystal Palace's first victory. We'll get into what that

means for Palace fans, but maybe just, you know, we're talking about this very briefly before

we started recording. Maybe just give us a sense of what the F.A. Cup means in general in

England. We don't, I mean, we have the U.S. Open Cup, but it's obviously miles different. Tell us,

tell us what it means, exactly. So the F.A. Cup, I guess, is one of the things that you learn about

first when you start becoming a football fan in England. So for me, it was in my childhood. My father

gave me no choice but to love football. It was one of those things that was, left to be very early. And the FA Cup is a showpiece and it's a big day in the calendar. I think

it's fair to say that in recent years that has somewhat reduced with TV issues, scheduling

...