Sweet FA Trophy.

It's easy to become disillusioned with the FA Cup. After the third round, only one non-league club still survives, and that club is Crawley Town, an obnoxious team that spent more this past off season than every League 2 team combined.  There's no more talk of Vauxhall Motors or Swindon Supermarine, instead all the hype goes to the big glamourous clubs like Stevenage or Burton Albion.

No, if you want the real heart warming stories, and proper football at proper clubs, then it's time to turn your attention to the FA Trophy, a competition for only Non-League clubs.  The 2nd round happened this weekend and there were plenty of upsets, with 4 Conference (Blue Square Premier, and in a rare example of me going along with sponsorship, for the sake of clarity, I'll call it the BSP) teams being knocked out by teams from further down the non-league pyramid. 

How that pyramid works is that the BSP has 2 feeder leagues, Conference South and Conference North, and the level below that has 3 divisions, the Non-League Premier North, South and Isthmian, which is very London based.  It goes further down that that, but thankfully that's as far as we need to go for today's article.

Two of the four BSP teams knocked out by lower league teams lost to teams from the Non League premier level.  Grimsby, a championship team as recently as 2003 were eliminated by Chasetown, and Wrexham, European Cup Winners Cup quarterfinalists back in 1976 lost to Salisbury.

Chasetown and Salisbury are the lowest teams still dreaming of a trip to Wembley, but out of the 13 teams who've already secured their way to the third round, another 7 are from the Conference North/South level, leaving only 4 conference teams left, though two more could advance from replays.

With AFC Wimbledon also losing this weekend, Luton Town will now be favourites, while Darlington have a tough away game at Conference North team AFC Telford.  The last time Darlington played Telford in a cup competition was back in 1985 in the FA Cup 4th round after Darlo had beaten local rivals Middlesbrough in the third round.

It went to a replay, and the 5th round draw pitted the winner against cup holders, and that years eventual 1st division champion Everton.  Typically enough Darlington lost that replay, and Telford went on to lose to Everton in the last 16.

Telford are another "phoenix" team, started up and run by supporters after their original team was run into the ground by incompetent owners, and working their way back up through the pyramid, so their current position is probably a false one, it will definitely be a tough game for Darlo, so we'll probably win, then lose to someone much worse than us in the next round.