Hello and welcome to the Defoe Football Podcast.

I am Joe and I'm joined today by Alex Stewart.

Hello Alex.

Hello.

How are you?

I'm very well.

How are you?

I am well.

Let's talk about football, football, football.

The first thing on the registrar today is Manchester City, Liverpool.

And of course this happened a long time ago now in football time. There's been plenty of FA Cup fixtures since. It's been the whole of the third round. Indeed there's been seven Manchester City goals since. Yes, that's true. But we're not going to talk about those because it doesn't matter when it's in the cup. It doesn't matter. The cup doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

You know what I saw earlier.

Unless you're an Oldham fan.

This is an interesting one. I'll tell you what. Let me talk about this for two seconds. Go ahead. I'll ask you this, right? Okay. I saw a tweet earlier. It was Duncan Alexander of Opta, of Opta fame, who said, making some comment about the sort of constant suggestions that the FA Cup should revive itself.

And I think he was also referring to Leicester City resting players and perhaps getting some criticism for that.

But he made the point, I think that it was in the last 23 years.

Only two times has a team that isn't United City, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool won the FA Cup.

So it made me think that the suggestion that adding, replacing the sort of fourth place Champions League playoff position in the Premier League as a reward and putting it for the winner of the FA Cup for example would make any sense because

it wouldn't make any difference. I think if you're to make the smaller teams try harder.

But I think the smaller teams try hard anyway, and there are various reasons for it.

It's interesting. So I went to the Fulham-Olden game yesterday, and I was talking to my

friend Matt, who's an Oldham fan afterwards, and saying for the next round, you know, having

...