With all the upsets last weekend it seems there must be a common reason. One reason may be that once a couple teams got the upsets, others started to believe that they could do it as well, and played harder. But I blieve the main reason may be that a lot of the teams had players that played with big Clubs as youngsters but seemed to have been 'dropped' and now played in the lower divisions. These players seemed to want to show that the big teams had made mistakes, expecially when they played against former team mates. Does anyone agree and have statistics how many players from Oldham, The Dons, etc. played as youngsters at the big Clubs?
10 of the 16 Fourth Round games were played at the same time and there was only one upset in that round before those games started, so I don't believe that.
Villa was 'upset' on Friday, then QPR on Saturday, then 2 of the 3 games on Sunday were upsets (and Chelsea was tied; which was also some kind of upset). This high proportion on Sunday could justify that argument.
Pretty incredible!! Bad marks for Moyles! Not sure Howard could have helped. Defense looked in shambles. Looked like Everton was overconfident and got bitten badly.
In other good news, Wigan didn't have to disfigure any players on the opposing team that weekend...too bad that didn't carry that to this past weekend
Wigan has pulled what could the greatest FA Cup upset after beating Manchester City, 0-1. But the Latics had also become the first FA Cup winners to get relegated to the second-tier in the same season.
No way in the world can a premiership team beating another premiership team be the greatest upset of them all. It's not even the biggest Cup final upset. The cup has been won by teams from outside the top division, after all.
When was the last time that happened? I'm not going to check myself because even if I looked at a list of winners I wouldn't know what level the club was at at the time. Luton Town from Conference National won at Norwich City in the Fourth Round.
As a Stoke fan, the club before the last 5 years or so had a reputation of doing awful in the competition and until we reached the final we were easily the biggest club never to of reached the final, certainly in the Top 10 of all-time FA Cup shocks was us losing to Blyth Spartans at home 3-2 in the late 70's. Proof it's never been easy to be a Stoke fan. In fact it's no wonder we're all fat, balding & die young
My favorite FA Cup upset that I saw was Barnsley vs Liverpool. Granted there are bigger upsets, but I remember watching that on Fox Soccer
There has never really been any clear definition of what constitutes a "giant killing". Personally, I take it to mean, at the very least, a team being beaten by another team from at least two divisions beneath them. For example, a Premiership team being beaten by a team from League One. OK, so that isn't a clear cut rule. It's flexible. A Champions League team, getting knocked out by a team languishing at the foot of the Championship would be pretty much a shock, but then again, some top clubs commitment to the competition have been called into question at times, so it's all pretty subjective. Certainly though, Tier One clubs being eliminated by non-leaguers is an undoubted giant slaying. I can think of a few off the top of my head..... Yeovil Town knocking out Sunderland in 1949, Hereford United seeing off Newcastle United in 1971 and Sutton United beating Coventry City in 1987. All of these were instances of non league teams defeating (then) First Division clubs. Then there was Colchester United (then in fourth tier) beating Leeds United in 1971, at a time when Leeds were one of the top teams in Europe. And just out of interest..... the lowest ranked team ever to reach the third round of the FA Cup, was Chasetown FC, of the Midland Alliance, in 2007 / 08. They beat Port Vale 1 - 0 in a replay after a 1-1 draw in the second round and were drawn against Cardiff City in the third round. Cardiff went on to the FA Cup final that season, only to lose 0 - 1 to Harry Redknapp's Portsmouth. It's difficult to imagine defeating Port Vale qualifying as a "giant killing" act, but I'd say that does.
Seems it's like the NCAA tournament. Get into the Sweet 16 and teams seem to transform into confident clubs believing they can mix it up with the big boys.