Grimsby can thrill fans and add to vintage FA Cup run on epic trip to Southampton

M y earliest memory of the FA Cup is from the 1980 final when West Ham played Arsenal. The excitement of the day was largely because it was a rare live game on TV. Today we have ubiquitous live games beamed from every corner of the globe, so few things mark my age more starkly to my kids than the idea that one game a year was live on TV, apart perhaps from the concept of writing actual letters, which makes me sound like a character from a Brontë novel.

Those technicoloured Saturdays are so vividly remembered because the normal TV schedule was replaced by a full-day football extravaganza, roving reporters outside team hotels, a celebrity edition of a Question of Sport, the growled rendition of each team’s FA Cup song, all before the whistle to start the game had been blown.

I don’t remember much about the game itself or even the score but I do remember vividly the sense of injustice when 17-year-old Paul Allen, the then youngest player to appear in a final, was clear through and cynically brought down by Arsenal’s Willie Young. The foul was punished by a booking and a free-kick and Young stayed on. I remember my disbelief and the sense of unfairness to this day. A sense shared by the authorities apparently, because it was a tackle that changed the rules on ‘professional fouls’, with similar tackles now commanding a red card.

Today there is a quiet revolution occurring on and off the field in our unfashionable corner of north-east Lincolnshire in Grimsby. Our town is starting to reinvent itself as the home of the renewables industry and tilting its narrative away from a story of industrial decline to a low-carbon future and a community full of nascent solidarity and hope. On the football pitch, while the Hollywood owners