Comment: Jurgen Klopp’s boycott a symptom not cause of FA Cup problems

Yet here we are, just a few weeks later, faced with the very real prospect of a repeat when Shrewsbury visit Anfield next Tuesday for an FA Cup fourth round replay.

Salop’s prize for creating one of the stories of the season to date is a rematch against the European and world club champions, only this time they will be facing Liverpool in name only after Jurgen Klopp finally decided that, when it came to the fixture congestion facing his team, enough was enough.

There are doubtless many Shrewsbury supporters who, right now, do not particularly care. After all, this is the club’s first ever trip to Anfield in their 134-year history. It should be an occasion to cherish.

One suspects they may begin to feel differently once the match kicks-off and the reality of their team taking on the likes of Luis Longstaff and Tom Hill, rather than Mo Salah and Roberto Firmino, sinks in. It may quickly start to feel more Football League Trophy than FA Cup. Even should Shrewsbury win the tie, the story will still be Liverpool’s line-up.

Klopp’s decision has drawn plenty of criticism yet in many respects the Reds boss is the wrong target.

For one thing, he has a perfectly valid point about Liverpool being asked to play a cup replay during a scheduled winter break they were told to honour by the Premier League.

It says much about the game that, after years of discussion, the top flight finally agreed to a winter break without expanding the calendar to allow sufficient space for it.

There won’t even be a Premier League-free weekend, with 10 fixtures staggered across two weekends, all of them live on TV. Rule No.1 of modern football is don’t annoy the broadcasters.

If there is one area where Klopp is certainly wrong it is his own planned personal boycott of the game, with Liverpool under-23s boss Neil Critchley taking charge of the team.

This is not the same scenario as Villa Park, where the German was required to be in Doha for the World Club Cup semi-final less than 24 hours later.

At the very least he should be at Anfield to greet Sam Ricketts and the Shrewsbury team. That aside, it might be noted Klopp has been fairly consistent in his argument there are too many matches, his response to the proposed expansion of the Champions League containing words which cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

But there also lies the heart of the problem for, when it comes to the subject of fixture congestion, it is never the major international competitions which must compromise.

Instead it is always the domestic cups, whether it be the removal of extra time in the League Cup for all but the final, or the scrapping of replays in the FA Cup from the fifth round onward.

The reason, of course, is money and more particularly its distribution, which has created a game where the haves have little or in some cases no regard for the have nots.

Nothing highlights the divide quite like the FA Cup, a competition which more than 700 clubs enter, yet is constantly threatened with change due to the needs of barely a handful of the elite. For the latter the Cup is expendable because it does not deliver the kind of riches they can gain elsewhere. Any fine Liverpool might face from the FA for fielding a weakened team will be paltry compared to the riches of the Champions League. There is no deterrent to fielding the kids.

That in turn spells danger for those vast majority of those entrants for whom it remains a valuable source of revenue.

Contrary to the ill-informed claims of some on social media, clubs in the lower leagues and non-league are not “dependent” on the FA Cup. At least, not those that are properly managed. No sensible club budgets for a cup run.

Shrewsbury, for example, would not be at risk of going bust if they were denied a replay at Anfield. Yet the potential £500,000 payday remains considerable, offering the chance for progression and growth.

That is amplified further down the pyramid, where the prize money gained by amateur clubs who battle it out in August’s preliminary rounds can sometimes be enough to fund an entire season’s budget. It is easy to rail at the schedulers for the current mess but in truth they have a thankless task, not helped by the second round of the Champions League stretching, needlessly, across five weeks when it could easily fit into two. The FA Cup, meanwhile, has already seen the fifth round shunted into midweek as part of the agreement over the Premier League’s winter break.

Then there is the Carabao Cup, a competition which Manchester City have won in each of the last two seasons but which their manager Pep Guardiola suggested should be scrapped.

Try telling that to the near 40,000-crowd packed into Villa Park on Tuesday, where the hosts edged past Leicester in dramatic fashion. There was proof, if ever it was needed, there is life in the competition yet. Ditto Sunday’s scenes at Montgomery Waters Meadow, where Shrewsbury provided the magic in an FA Cup fourth round otherwise lacking it.

For all the knocks, all the scheduling compromises they must make, domestic cup competitions still regularly deliver the goods. They should not be pushed even further into the margins.