Que Sera, Sera

There is still an end-of-pier warmth to the FA Cup, a miracle survivor from yesteryear, something to mark the passage of the seasons by even as all those straining, hopeless, upset-craving teams from the parks fall away with the onset of spring. It’s hard to think of anything that starts and ends in such different places as the world’s oldest cup competition. The journey undertaken by Joseph Fox and Orlando Gili as they captured the images for this book began in a crowd of 58 other lonesome souls at the London Tigers’ Avenue Park Stadium, a field by the M4 motorway the team had to leave just months later due to gratuitous fly-tipping. The road ended at Wembley Stadium, the 90,000 all-seater monolith that claims to be the cradle of world football. The joy of the FA Cup, and the joy of this book, is in trying to weld these two parallel worlds together even as you awe at their profound sense of separation.

This collection of images tells you that the secret to doing so resides in the eyes of the fans, the hope that lives there no matter the level of pomp, pay or pageantry – the only true constant, really, beyond that loyal collection of semi-circles and oblongs marked on grass, ancient cave paintings guiding home a spectacle that only feels more loved the more we fear it lost.

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The images form a book published by Bluecoat Press and have been featured in Soccerbible, The FT and Vice.