The magic of the FA Cup sprawled over everything this weekend; everywhere, all the time, constantly. The preview shows came after the first game, the draw before the last; less a weekend, more an ethereal sense of omnipresence. 

You could sense each commentator was poised with their pre-prepared footballing bon mot ready to deploy it at any sign of magic happening. If they get it right, they’ll be etched into history, they all want their ‘they think it’s all over’ or ‘shouldn’t you be at work?’ moment. 

But the thing about magic is if you try to bottle it, it disappears. The Ronnie Radford ‘just look at his face’ moment was serendipitous, a chaotic combination of factors – the goal, the crowd’s reaction, Motson, a rookie commentator, and the decision to film the game at all. Now everything is filmed and spaced out to ensure nothing gets missed. It’s the difference between finding the last piece of a puzzle by putting a thousand random pieces in a bag and laying them all on a table. Picking the right one from the bag will feel like magic, but it’s easier to spot and more boring, to lay them out.

The Daily Mail and Guardian both opted for 80s nostalgia previews, all sloping pitches and tumbledown stadiums. Grounds aren’t like that now, pitches are well manicured, stadiums are comfortable and safe. There are no nooks and crannies into which The Magic can hide.

I’m not against progress, I like not dying at forty-five or catching rickets, but playing against a team like Arsenal is more a spectacle than a game of football, performance theatre that explains life and its curiosities. Or, if you like, that they are rich and we are not, and that’s life and we should just get used to it. 

You can’t force it, like those people who attend events to be a ‘part of history’. It happens to you, unexpectedly – like innocently sitting in a motorcade and being shot in the back of the head from a book repository, history is accidental.

I’ve long weaned myself off anticipating something magical in the hope that it’ll find me. When we played Arsenal in 2003, I was so excited I woke up too early, and when I got to Highbury I found myself exhausted and on the front row where I could see nothing more than Francis Jeffers overrunning the ball into touch. Against Swansea in 2016, I was beset with a sense of calm and we were treated to one of the highlights of the club’s modern era. So, I allow it to come to me. 

Inside, the atmosphere was good; for all its failings, the stadium experience is improving all the time. The new scoreboard complemented this; there was a stirring video of great FA Cup moments – beating Swansea and Newcastle, equalising at Middlesborough, taking the lead against Chelsea and an odd denouement that appeared to be a Wilder-era winner against Grimsby or Gateshead.

There was something unfamiliar, there were interlopers, History Hunters, a friend of a friend posted a bunch of photos on Facebook celebrating ‘his team’s win’, all taken from the East Stand. There were people who’d dipped into the club, but have since found other things to occupy their time. When you did bump into a season ticket holder, there were knowing furtive looks like we’re part of an underground resistance or that we’ve found a family of antelopes grazing in our living room. The people with smiles on their faces weren’t at Morecambe. 

The teams emerge, Arsenal, one of the most storied clubs in the country, are wearing white; shirts, shorts, socks, numbers, names, sponsors, and badges. It’s a demonstration for or against something, a message so powerful I’ve completely forgotten what it was. Kids, stop doing bad stuff. It feels a bit like your big sister ripping down her Bros posters and emerging from her bedroom a fully formed goth. It shouts, ‘I’m different, mysterious, I have texture, purpose and meaning.’

In fact it makes them look like a game of FIFA that’s glitched and not rendered a kit onto the players. It’s of no use to me, I don’t know one player from another anyway, now they’re just generic featureless Premier League automatons.

The game gets underway and it’s all very orthodox, with both teams playing neat two touch passing football. Sam Long screws a simple pass out of touch, which is a strange way to smash the system, but otherwise it’s all straight out of a Premier League Academy textbook. We’re happy to comply, lots of our players are from the same stock, as is our manager, we don’t want to give the impression that we doubt the accepted norms.

Cameron Brannagan finally puts in a block tackle which, had it been an inch higher might have been a foul or worse, a curtain twitches and we get a glimpse of a different world, there’s more industry and venom, Marcus McGuane gets in on the act, then Lewis Bate. It’s not quite a Gary Briggs elbow in the face but there’s a sign Arsenal might be rocking a little.

But, it’s momentary and things quickly snap back to where they were, we are Doing Well without Achieving Anything. We get to half-time and it’s 0-0, that’s a tick, we can’t be embarrassed now. The History Hunters are here for the win, we’re here to avoid humiliation.

Things are so organised and rational now, the difference between the two teams neatly arrives at the final act of the game. Most league games are a tussle, one team gains the upper hand, then the other and then there’s a kerfuffle somewhere in the middle. Not this, it’s all very polite, and then the finale reveals itself. Not so much a ding dong battle, more a lot of dings, completed with a big final dong.

Then, from an almost accidental through ball by Ciaron Brown, Taylor finds himself one-on-one with the keeper, it’s so unexpected the crowd’s response is delayed. You get a sense that this is the last thing Taylor needs, to use the pace that’s rapidly deserting him. As the noise rises, Taylor stretches to get a touch, but he can’t reach it. There’s an inch in it, in that inch is a man whose age is catching up on him.

The substitutions tell us everything; they replace players who played in the World Cup knockout stages with players who played in the World Cup group stages, our replacements are a series of progressively smaller and younger players, like Russian dolls. As a result, Arsenal maintain their pace while we run out of mental and physical steam. Even when we get close to their goal, the final eight to ten yards feels like it would cost £20 million to navigate.

They score goals, it’s all very effortless and stylish, like the mum at school pick-up with the immaculate hair and coordinating outfit while we turn up in jogging bottoms and mismatched Crocs.

The whistle goes and we file out, the History Hunters don’t have their history, we’ve got Fleetwood on Saturday. We descend from the South Stand Upper to find the exit has been closed by the stewards, there are perhaps 1000 people about to come down the stairs and we’re being kettled at the bottom. If it wasn’t full of geriatrics, it might be dangerous. It’s something to do with Arsenal’s coach and the crowds of people hanging around waiting for the players to ignore them. We’re not allowed to get in the way of the pantomime outside, our role is to needlessly be crushed to death against an iron door. Eventually, using the force of more than eight Werther’s Originals, someone overpowers the steward, the doors fling open and we’re allowed to escape.

There was never going to be any history here, no magic, that’s been squeezed out of the game. Yes, further down the Premier League table there are opportunities, misreadings of what lower league clubs can do, but the system has been corrupted to ensure the biggest teams are never troubled by the likes of us. 

I wouldn’t miss it if we never drew one of these teams again, they’re good for revenue, profile and to get the message across about the new stadium, but as something resembling a game of football, there’s little to be excited about, we are just too far apart for me to care much about them nor them about us. It’s a shame really, we’ll just have to go elsewhere to find our magic.