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An FA Cup shock shouldn’t unhinge Liverpool, but football isn’t logical

Plymouth showed the world’s oldest football competition still has life but Arne Slot won’t be too worried despite his team winning just five of their last 11 games

It was, it has to be acknowledged, a much-changed Liverpool lineup. Of the 11 players who began Sunday’s FA Cup fourth-round match at Plymouth Argyle, only Luis Díaz had made more than 10 league starts this season and only three others had made more than five. Even allowing for that, Plymouth’s victory registers as one of the great shocks of recent times, only the fourth time the leader of the Premier League has ever gone out of the competition to lower-division opposition.

As their quietly charismatic 42-year-old Bosnian coach Miron Muslić pointed out afterward, it was a day that will go down in Plymouth’s history, that will be recalled for generations, as a one-off result more impressive than anything they achieved in reaching the semi-final in 1983-84. It was Liverpool’s ninth defeat to lower-league opposition this century but, in terms of the scale of the shock, it felt perhaps most akin to their exit against non-league Worcester City in 1959 when they were a second-flight club, a defeat that precipitated the decline that led to Phil Taylor making way for the great Bill Shankly.

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© Composite: Guardian pictures

© Composite: Guardian pictures

Plymouth Argyle bring the magic in the FA Cup - Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Troy Townsend as Plymouth Argyle put a stop to Liverpool’s quadruple dreams

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On the podcast today; Liverpool finally meet a tough opponent as the team bottom of the Championship, Plymouth Argyle, deservedly beat them 1-0 at Home Park to halt Liverpool’s hopes of achieving a quadruple.

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© Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images

© Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images

Straight to penalties? Greed is football’s real shortcoming, not extra time | Jonathan Wilson

Shootouts are the least bad way the game has found to settle drawn matches, but they should be a last resort

So Uefa is considering doing away with extra time, at least in the knockout stage of the Champions League, another grand old tradition swept away as the arc of history bends towards the generation of revenue for the already wealthy. This is the way of the world and so it is the way of football, all that is great and glorious about the game desecrated to produce more content to be sold.

But first, a caveat, an increasingly necessary one as middle age hurtles by. Is this about age? Are our responses to extra time conditioned by our formative years? My first FA Cup final was 1982, a drab game enlivened by Glenn Hoddle putting Tottenham ahead after 110 minutes and Terry Fenwick heading an equaliser five minutes later (Spurs then won the replay). The Schumacher-Battiston World Cup semi-final in Seville came six weeks later: at 90 minutes it was 1-1, by the 98th minute it was 3-1 to France and by the end it was 3-3 and West Germany had won on penalties. The following year’s FA Cup final also went to extra time as Manchester United drew with Brighton; although there were no goals in the added 30 minutes, there was the drama of Gordon Smith’s late miss.

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© Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

© Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

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