Why the FA Cup, not the Premier League, is English football’s prized jewel – and how it’s refusing to die thanks to underdogs like Plymouth, writes OLIVER HOLT

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 value their own fans more than tourists and day-trippers.

Lucky to be at a club that nurse pride in their own regional identity. Lucky to be sitting in the beautiful Mayflower Grandstand with its echoes of history. Lucky to see what a result such as Plymouth Argyle’s victory over Liverpool means to a local community.

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.

Arne Slot gave his first team the day off on Sunday. He didn’t even include any of them in the squad that travelled to the West Country. He picked a second-string team for the FA Cup because Liverpool have five matches in 15 days from Wednesday and have bigger priorities.

So when I listened to BBC Radio 5 live on the drive home from Plymouth, I tuned in to the phone-in Robbie Savage and Chris Sutton host and heard Savage talking to a Plymouth fan. ‘Congratulations on beating Liverpool’s reserves,’ he was saying.

And he was right. Plymouth had beaten mighty Liverpool but it wasn’t the best Liverpool available. And that is not Slot’s 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 Liverpool’s defeat at Home Park might be a blessing in disguise for Slot and his team. Liverpool have bigger fish to fry and fighting on one  front fewer 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 have 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 our game has to offer, yet the FA themselves are betraying it by degrees and the Premier League, who see threats to their greed everywhere, are 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 FA’s abolition of replays, their spreading of matches in the fourth round over five days and their 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 wasn’t 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, Johnny Giles, Paul Madeley and the rest of Don Revie’s first-choice selection.

And maybe some of the fans at Home Park were disappointed not to see Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk run 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.

That’s 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 isn’t. What makes English football special is its pyramid system. It is the depth of our game, the fact eight clubs in our fourth tier this season boast average crowds of more than 7,000.

In the third tier, two clubs average more than 20,000 for their home crowds. 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 such as Manchester United and Liverpool and Arsenal and the local teams such as 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.

It’s more like Mission Impossible at United!

I don’t 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 United’s women’s 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, you will be astonished to know, revolves around the ambition of the men’s team winning another Premier League title. No one had ever thought of doing that before Sir Dave came along. That’s 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 we’re 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.

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 Rashford’s Instagram feed. It said, simply, ‘Freedom.’

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 player’s wages, off and on, for the last three years, for very little in return.

Liberation works both ways. I suspect they’ll be glad to be shut of him when Chelsea make his move permanent in the summer.

Nothing quite like sport

I was at Twickenham on Saturday for England’s 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 Argyle’s FA Cup giant-killing of Liverpool and revel in the rich culture of English football. 

On Tuesday, I’ll be in Manchester to see City take on the Real Madrid of Vini Jr, Federico Valverde and Jude Bellingham. And on Wednesday, I’ll 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 doesn’t happen often.