2012-13 FA Cup, Third Round Proper: location-map and attendances of the 64 clubs
…
bbc.co.uk/ FA Cup (bbc.co.uk/sport/football/fa-cup).
…
From guardian.co.uk/football, from 30 January 2012, by Barney Ronay, ‘Week ahead: our muddy romance with the FA Cup
For all the sense of feeling fatally diminished, the iconic football tournament has somehow retained its distantly ennobling quality’.
…
Televised matches, see this.
…
The smallest club still in the competition – Hastings United
Before this season, Hastings United had not won a single FA Cup [Qualifying rounds] match since 2006. Hastings had in fact only made the 1st Round Proper once, in 2002 (losing to Stevenage Borough). Hastings United, nicknamed the Arrows, are a semi-professional Isthmian League/ Ryman Premier League/7th level club that was established in 1894. This season, Hastings leveraged two winnable Cup draws into their first-ever appearance in the FA Cup 3rd Round. There was some good fortune involved (via favorable draws), because Hastings did not have to play any Football League clubs, or even any 5th-Level clubs, for that matter, to get to the rarefied atmosphere of the 3rd Round (which of course is when Premier League and League Championship clubs enter the competition). But that does not diminish this tiny club’s achievement in making it to the 3rd Round. To make it to the 2nd Round Proper, Hastings beat Conference North side Bishop’s Stortford 1-2 on 3 November 2012. To make it to the 3rd Round Proper, the Arrows beat another Conference North club, Harrogate Town, in a 2nd Round replay on 13 December 2012 at Hastings, in a match which which went to penalties (see illustration below). For that 2nd Round replay match, Hastings United were praised for providing around 1,000 tickets, free, to local youth (that is brilliant). That match was a sell-out with 4,008 in attendance {match report from bbc.co.uk/football, here}. Now for the 3rd Round, Hastings have drawn second-division side Middlesbrough and will travel north on Saturday the 5th of January to North Yorkshire to play Boro at the Riverside Stadium there in coastal Yorkshire. Hastings United don’t really expect to pull off an upset of giant-killing proportions, but it will be a nice day out for the Arrows’ faithful and the ticket-revenue-split the club will receive will probably sustain the small club for a couple of years (they’ll use the cash for improvements to their ground plus maybe they can splurge on a hotshot postman/striker or two). As Hastings United chairman Dave Walters said, ‘We’ve got to use this cup run to build a platform to try and move up at least one league if we possibly can’ {see this article from sportyhub.org}. Hastings United are from East Sussex on England’s southern coast. A little under one thousand years ago, Hastings was the nearest town to the site of the Norman invasion in 1066, which was the last time that England was successfully invaded, and which installed in 11th century England a then-new version of the ruling-class (parasites), and which begat the fraught relationship that the English have had, ever since, with France {see ”Bayeux Tapestry (en.wikipedia.org)}.
Hastings United currently average 409 per game (in home league matches), which is fourth-best out of 22 in the Ryman Premier League {Ryman Premier attendance figures, here (nonleague.co.uk/leagues/_/isthmian-league/premier-division-11/)}. They have drawn 5 straight matches in the league and sit 17th. Hastings United’s ground is The Pilot Field, which is a small Non-League-type ground that doesn’t really have any noteworthy features except for that fact that it features a sloped pitch {photos of which you can see in my post on the 2nd Round, here}. Hastings United wear claret and sky blue colors. They are led by player/manager [defender] Sean Ray. Here is the club’s website: http://www.hastingsunitedfc.co.uk/ .
Photo credits above -
soccernet.espn.go.com.
Tony Coombes at hastingsobserver.co.uk.
bbc.co.uk.
___
Thanks to soccerway.com for attendance figures (for Football League clubs, and Conference clubs).
Thanks to nonleague.co.uk for attendance figures (for the 7th-level club, Hastings United).
Thanks to the contributors to the pages at en.wikipedia.org, ‘2012–13 FA Cup‘.
Thanks to bbc.co.uk/football for the Fixture list image on the map page.
.
Thanks to everybody who checked out my maps and who read my posts in 2012. Special thanks to everybody who made comments to my posts in 2012. And thanks to anyone who might have tweeted about my posts in 2012 (due to web-traffic spikes, I am pretty sure a couple of folks did).