When it comes to Leeds United and FA Cup pain it's not you Marcelo Bielsa, it's us - Daniel Chapman

Jack Charlton signed off from the world’s greatest cup competition on the receiving end of Sunderland manager Bob Stokoe’s two-fingered salute.

Charlton wasn’t even playing in the 1973 final, when Second Division Sunderland pulled off their shock win at Wembley. He was retiring after 21 years to manage Middlesbrough. A hamstring injury kept him out, so he was sitting on the gantry, commentating and seething, convinced he would have helped Leeds win.

At full-time Stokoe sought him out from pitch level, scanning the press seats until he spotted Big Jack. All so he could stick two fingers up at him.

Sunderland weren’t done. Back at Roker Park, they draped a misspelt banner over a coffin and held a mock funeral for “Leed’s”. Ah, the magic of the cup.

It was a good job Charlton won his medal the year before, completing his clean sweep of domestic honours, plus two Fairs Cups and a World Cup. He’d been desperate for it, believing no top-level career complete without the game’s most prestigious trophy.

The FA Cup had been the team’s ‘white whale’ since 1965, when they’d let victory evade them in extra-time of a turgid final against Liverpool. Don Revie’s Leeds were only a season out of Division Two but felt they’d let themselves down.

Billy Bremner described playing the game as like trying to outrun somebody in a nightmare from which he couldn’t wake up.

A place in the 1967 final was denied by Ken Burns’ whistle in the last minute of the semi-final, disallowing Peter Lorimer’s equalising free-kick on the spurious grounds that Chelsea’s wall was too close.

The 1968 semi-final was lost to Everton. 1970’s final was won by Chelsea in extra-time of the replay, United’s 63rd and last game of a trophyless season. By 1971 they’d won everything else so, naturally, in the fifth round of the FA Cup they lost 3-2 away to Fourth Division Colchester.

It was becoming the most extravagant expression of the curse Revie believed was upon his players, and winning it was their collective obsession for seven years. Charlton’s desire went further back, to joining Leeds as an ambitious schoolboy in 1952.

Leeds took Chelsea to a fifth-round replay that year, then didn’t get past the third round for 10 seasons, Cardiff coming to Elland Road and winning 2-1 three years in a row. Which isn’t to imply Big Jack was a bad omen. Before the fifth-round foray in ’52, the Peacocks’ cup record was played 50, won 19.

And we were reminded this weekend that Sunderland ’73 hardly ended our embarrassment.

There were semi-finals in 1977 and 1987 but, more often, our cups runneth over into a lower-league knockout ‘hall of shame’: from Histon and Hereford to Rochdale and Newport. Leeds are not, to put it mildly, a cup team.

Marcelo Bielsa has worked the nearest thing to a miracle in three seasons at Leeds, breaking a 16-year hex by winning promotion to the Premier League. How can we explain him, then, falling into the same cup trap as Garry Monk at Sutton, without concluding it’s not him, it’s us?

How far you want to believe that is up to you. Not everyone is convinced that the well beneath Elland Road’s pitch is filled with fairytale nightmares. But, if it’s not us, and not him, what is it?

Maybe it’s that cups accelerate the sense of defeat that defines football. The FA Cup is romantic because it’s hopeless. Only one team can go unbeaten through a cup competition, and little wonder they get a trophy for it.

We often make the mistake of thinking football is about winning but, in any season, only one team can win the Premier League. The others might qualify for Europe, get nothing, or worse but, for all but one, May is about dividing spoils of defeat.

Cups speed up that truth. Why wait 38 games to be declared a loser, when Crawley can do it to you in one? Unless you think you can win. Cups are binary that way: either you believe you can win the trophy, or you’re waiting for the inevitable knockout.

Which is why this weekend’s defeat is a different kind of annoying.

Losing at Crawley might be characteristic, but this felt like a season when it didn’t have to be inevitable.

Premier League survival looks, touch wood, assured, giving Leeds a rare relaxed mind until May. Covid-19 is altering the playing field in ways that create opportunities. Leeds had a chance of silverware, but it ended the same as always, and that’s what hurts.

Our only grace is that cups come but twice a year: the League Cup is Christmas, the FA Cup’s your birthday. One year, it’d be nice to unwrap something better than a two-fingered salute.