During the first lockdown, I used to put on full re-runs of old cup finals on YouTube. I’d seen the goals from classic FA, League and European Cups countless times before but working in near isolation gave me the opportunity to re-live the brooding tension that comes from the whole game. There’s something slightly magical watching, say, the fifteen minutes before Keith Houchen’s diving header for Coventry in 1987 knowing that something iconic is about to explode into life.

I didn’t watch them as such, the games just bumbled along while I worked, providing an ambient background rather like the radio might. While grim uncertainty raged, there was a little part of me permanently stuck on a sunny day in May in the 1980s.

This week has been very similar; the World Cup has settled gently over my entire day like a thin veil. Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, it’s happening. The four conveniently timed kick-offs and extended injury time means it just seems to exist everywhere, always. There have been occasions where I’ve lost track of whether I’m watching the end of a 1pm game, or the start of the 4pm one.

The TV companies have wrestled with the morality of the whole thing, but the notoriously woke Roy Keane probably summed it up best by simply concluding that the tournament shouldn’t be in Qatar. You can pick apart the reasons why, but it seems rather pointless. There’s no logical reason for it to be there, and that’s that.

People have screamed hypocrisy at those working out there, but it’s not dissimilar to someone like Steve Rosenberg, the BBC Russian correspondent. He’s paid to report from Russia, but nobody accuses him of being a money-grabbing Russian shill – it’s a job that needs doing, one he’s good at, and presumably one he enjoys. In that sense it’s no different to Alex Scott or Gary Neville. Whether you like it or not, the World Cup is a major event and should be covered; both the good and the bad bits.

You can’t separate the politics from the sport, but it is possible for the two to co-exist in different spheres – hate the politics, love the sport. I do wonder how good these tournaments are for sportswashing, Argentina in 1978, South Africa in 2010, Brazil in 2014, Russia in 2018; none of those countries came out of them with their reputations cleansed. If anything, rather like Qatar, they simply exposed the problems. 

Things were always going to get a bit weird when the tournament came into contact with the rest of the football world. With a summer World Cup, everything is naturally paused, but here, the have-nots have to keep trucking on best they can even with fewer people watching. 

There’s probably no bigger contrast to the World Cup than the FA Cup, particularly the earlier rounds. Its simplicity means you can’t engineer the competition to your liking. There’s no seeding and if you’re drawn against a near-park team with a terrible pitch, that’s where you play. The beauty is in its ugliness, something that your average Qatari sportswasher is unlikely ever to understand. In that sense, it’s a reassuring counter-balance to a difficult World Cup.

After a week of strange, sanitised football, from somewhere in the background crawled our game against Exeter and its refreshingly cold, wet, clogging alternative. The score, ultimately, was a bit flattering, but we do seem to be digging our way out of the hole we created for ourselves at the start of the season. 

In some ways, the World Cup might help with that process; we can rebuild our form without the spotlight that would otherwise be on the club. The players and management can get on with training and recovering without having to explain where a player is with his injury, or whether the squad is motivated or not. We and the media are a bit less interested, and that may be no bad thing.

There’s still time to recover our league ambitions, though the opportunity has shrunk, but the third round in particular opens up the potential to find something we’ve desperately been searching for all season; a story. If the draw on Monday is favourable, then it might start to feel like this season has a purpose. For many reasons, we need things like the FA Cup more than ever.