COMMENT: Do you remember when FA Cup third round day was a highlight of the footballing calendar?

Life was a lot different back then, in the late 70s and early 80s, the days when I was growing up and falling in love with the beautiful game.

Let’s go back 40 years, to early January 1981 and the third round of the 100th FA Cup competition. St Winifred’s School Choir were still number one in the charts with ‘There’s No-one Quite Like Grandma’. A more innocent era indeed.

Four decades ago, all 32 third round ties kicked off at the same time on the same day. 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. It had always been that way. That was the law.

But not for much longer it wasn’t. The last time all round ties kicked off on the same day was in 1982/83. This weekend, they will be stretched across four days - starting with Aston Villa v Liverpool and Wolves v Crystal Palace tonight and finishing with Stockport County v West Ham on Monday. In all, there will be 11 different kick off times, from 7.45 tonight to 8pm on Monday.

Of the 32 ties, only 10 will kick off at 3pm on Saturday.

Eight of the ties will be shown live across the BBC and BT Sport. In 1980/81, the only ties shown live were the two finals (Ricky Villa’s mazy dribble to settle the Tottenham v Manchester City replay a fitting finale to the 100th FA Cup tournament). Semi-finals weren’t shown live until 1989/90.

I’m struggling to think of eight live games I watched in the entire 1980/81 season on TV - the FA Cup final(s), the European Cup final, England in the Home Internationals, that was it. Not even the League Cup final was shown live (but the replay between Liverpool and West Ham was).

Yep, times have changed - this weekend ALL 32 ties will be available to watch live via streaming services offered by the Beeb, BT Sport and the FA.

For the first time, they will all be decided on the day as well - due to the pandemic, there are no replays in any FA Cup round this term.

‘Back in the day’ there were multiple replays in the FA Cup and FA Trophy, affecting the minnows as well as the elite.

In 1968/69, Waterlooville and Falmouth met three times - the last occasion at Exeter City, imagine Hawks playing Truro City in a second replay in Devon these days! - and two seasons later Waterlooville needed three games to see off Thorneycroft Athletic.

In 1983/84, Waterlooville played 10 FA Cup ties, but only won through four rounds - needing replays to beat RS Southampton, Hungerford and AFC Totton and also taking Northampton to three games in the first round before losing.

In the FA Trophy in 1978/79, Waterlooville met Woking four times before losing 1-0 in a third replay.

Gosport Borough, meanwhile, needed four games and three replays to beat Farnborough in the latter tournament in 1981/82.

Famously, in 1978/79, Arsenal needed FIVE games to see off third tier Sheffield Wednesday in the FA Cup - ties taking place on January 6,9,15,17 and 22. The last three matches were all played at Leicester’s Filbert Street.

Armed with the glorious benefit of hindsight, multiple replays - stopped in 1991 - were obviously a farce. Not even the most ardent traditionalist can be sad they no longer exist to clog up the fixture list.

Other changes haven’t been so beneficial, though.

Returning to January 1981, and Liverpool were drawn at home in the third round to non-leaguers Altrincham. The dreaded phrase ‘squad rotation’ hadn’t entered the footballing lexicon and Reds boss Bob Paisley fielded pretty much a full-strength XI. I’m sure it never dawned on him to do anything else.

In these days of non-stop moaning by the likes of Jurgen Klopp and Jose Mourinho regarding busy fixture lists, it is worth noting that on Boxing Day 1980 Liverpool played a league game at Manchester United.

The very next day, December 27, they faced Leeds at Anfield and the starting XI only showed one change - Richard Money coming in for the injured Alan Hansen (who he had replaced as a sub at Old Trafford).

The following weekend, exactly the same XI who had started against Leeds faced the part-timers of Altrincham. Eight of those who ran out at Anfield to take on Altrincham started in the European Cup final against Real Madrid a few months later.

Incredible, when you look at the Premier League today.

Compare that to January 2016 when Klopp took charge of his first FA Cup tie as Liverpool manager.

It was a third round tie at Exeter City, and I was there on the home terrace supporting the Grecians (with the tinfoil FA Cup my daughter made me - if you’ve never taken a home-made tinfoil FA Cup to a football game, my heart goes out to you).

I was watching Liverpool Football Club, but in a way I wasn’t. I didn’t recognise many of their players - Tiago Ilori, Joe Maguire, Ben Smith, Kevin Stewart, Connor Randall, Cameron Brannagan, Joao Teixeira, Ryan Kent, Jerome Sinclair. Household names only in their own homes.

The only two I’d really heard of were Jose Enrique, who was appearing in Liverpool’s first team for the first time in 12 months, and Christian Benteke, who spent the entire evening looking as he wanted to be anywhere else in the world rather than at a football ground in east Devon with a bunch of kids as his team-mates.

Of course, it was still a great occasion - better to draw Liverpool than Blackpool, even if it is their reserves/youth team - but a little piece of the glamour had been scraped away by Klopp’s team selection. And if you’re a fan of a lower league or non league club, those days, those nights, don’t come around too often; when they do, you just want them to be as glamorous as possible.

Still, that’s the Premier League era for you - it will be interesting to see how many of Jose Mourinho’s superstars are charged with running out against Marine on Sunday.

And anyway, I guess Exeter should be thankful Klopp turned up - that’s more than he did for last season’s fourth round replay against Shrewsbury.

Due to the Reds being on a winter break, he let under-23 coach Neil Critchley take charge of a youthful side and instead watched the game on his laptop. I like Klopp, but his actions were totally disrespectful to the Shrews and to the competition’s integrity.

Can you imagine Bob Paisley taking a break 40 years ago? Laptops weren’t around then, so he couldn’t have watched it on a screen …

Some parts of society were better 40 years ago, other parts weren’t. Comparisons between 1981 and 2021 are worth making, provide good material for discussion, but are eventually futile; no-one can say whether we’ve lost more than we’ve gained, and whether lives are better or worse, with any certainty.

One thing IS for certain, though, and that’s the FA Cup still has a wonderful magic. If you don’t believe me, you should have been sat in the stand, as I was, at Marine at the end of November when they scored their late winner against Hawks.

Perhaps you should have also been in the room with the Marine officials and players when their name was paired with Tottenham’s the following day.

Will ‘Marine v Tottenham’ go down in the FA Cup third round history books alongside Hereford United v Newcastle United, Sutton v Coventry, West Bromwich Albion v Woking, Wrexham v Arsenal and, let’s be a bit parochial here, Havant & Waterlooville v Swansea City? Fingers crossed, for God knows we could do with a heart-warming story to cheer us all up ...

I’ll be watching some of the ‘classic’ cup ties this weekend - Chorley v Derby (under-23s), Crawley v Leeds, Marine v Tottenham, Stockport v West Ham. Though all four will be behind closed doors, I hope to catch a glimpse of a tinfoil FA Cup perched on an otherwise empty seat. Glinting in the glare of the floodlights, it will be a sign that at least one decades-old football tradition is, despite the miseries of the world we’re existing in, still gloriously alive ...