Classifying County Cup Games

Whether or not a county cup game should be considered a first class game and therefore qualify a player to have made a first team appearance, is a matter of opinion and is a subject i have wrestled with for over a decade, and debated with many people. The problem is that there is no right or wrong answer and it varies from club to club, and often from person to person within a club.

The point of raising this post is that I have (some would say finally) concluded that they should not be included within statistics or considered “first class” games.

Former club statistician Geoff Wilde did not ever consider them anything other than second class games. Such was his view of the competitions that when statistics were compiled for the book he co-authored with Michael Braham, results were not included from those competitions. Nor either were player profiles of any players who didn’t also take part in League, FA Cup and FL Cup games.

For a long time I argued that the rules of the competitions stated that clubs had to play their “best available” team and that, by en-large, Southport had always fielded strong sides in all County Cup competitions throughout their history. For the avoidance of doubt Rob Urwin includes the games within statistics he compiles for the club’s website and match day programme, both of which he edits, however the focus of Rob’s statistics have only ever been on the period of 1978 to date where those competitions, for around a decade mid 80s-mid 90s, were some of the only “success” the club had. I have always argued that the clubs records don’t start in 1978 as that was not when the club was formed, and a more holistic view should be taken, starting in 1888.

Looking at the approaches taken by other clubs to the County Cups yields differing results. Liverpool Football Club, for example, have never considered Liverpool Senior Cup games as qualifying first team games, regardless of whether a recognised first team player takes part, often choosing to either withdraw from the competition entirely or enter a junior side.

Geoff’s argument not to include them for Southport, in latter years appears also to be backed up by the FA themselves. In their “important information for players” guidance that they issue each season they confirm that “The Senior County Cup Fixture will not be treated as a first team fixture and can not be used to serve suspensions for first team matches. Any misconduct for the Senior County Cup will be dealt with by the County FA as Non First Team misconduct”.

That seems pretty clear and therefore on the balance of evidence and opinion County Cup games are not considered first class games and therefore do not count towards Heritage statistics on this website. Records of all games a player has played in are still recorded but when viewing a players statistics you will see the default is those games considered “first class”.

At the time of writing there are just 8 “first class” games across our 136 year history for which complete line-ups haven’t been identified. This is an ongoing task that I hope one day to be able to resolve.

More information on the record keeping principles on this website can be found here.

DJH