Football Daily | Getting mildly excited about English football’s fifth most high-profile competition

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With the quarter-finals looming, now is around the time of year that fans who aren’t generally fussed about Fizzy Cup start getting mildly excited about their team’s chances of winning it. While it may be English football’s fifth most high-profile competition after the Premier League, FA Cup and both transfer windows, this season it offers fans of several teams whose trophy cabinets resemble Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard a realistic chance of seeing their team lift silverware, or at least the opportunity of a rare day out at Wembley to see a more famous club presented with it. The eight teams left in this season’s Fizzy Cup have won it 22 times between them, an impressively high number that remains exactly the same if you remove Crystal Palace, Brentford, Newcastle and Southampton from the equation, what with none of them ever having won it at all.

Ten years ago Emiliano Martínez was just sitting on the Sheffield Wednesday bench (alongside Michail Antonio by the way) as a backup for Chris Kirkland, not playing in the Championship as we lost to Charlton Athletic. Now, he’s won a World Cup, two Copa Américas, two Yashin Trophies (the Ballon d’Or for goalkeepers) and a second Fifa best men’s goalkeeper. A doff of the cap to lad” – Noble Francis.