The magic of the FA cup, embodied by Shortwood United

Calor League side Shortwood United play League One's Port Vale on Monday night in the first round of the FA Cup. The National's Adam Workman, a Gloucester native, shares his thoughts on the club's moment in the spotlight and a chance to watch a local side from more than 5,500 kilometres away.

Growing up in semi-rural Gloucestershire, England, in the 1980s, top-quality local football wasn't exactly in massive abundance. There wasn't a solitary professional club in the county that played in the Football League. Gloucester City, the closest club of any consequence to my childhood home, plied their trade, at best, in the sixth tier of the pyramid, in the second level of non-league football. Their arch rivals, Cheltenham Town, were similarly lowly. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the latter side escaped from what is now the Skrill Premier into the heady heights of League Two to give Gloucestershire a Football League club.

Prior to that, for Football League action, you had to travel 45 minutes to the north for Hereford United, an hour to the south for Bristol City or Bristol Rovers, or - dangerously for any Englishmen - an hour or so to the west into Wales for the unknown pastures of Cardiff City and the infamous Soul Crew hooligan gang. You picked a Premier League team to support based less on geography than random allegiance - an allegiance that, as in this writer's case, could haunt you well into adulthood (Tottenham Hotspur, since you didn't ask).

Lack of local success didn't stop the beautiful game from being the currency that Gloucestershire school friends traded in, though. Swapping Panini stickers; wolfing down our sausage and chips school dinners just so that we could squeeze in another few minutes of booting a ball around in our lunch hours, in the best jumpers-for-goalposts traditions.

On Monday evening, however, the football fans of Gloucestershire will, for once, have something very real to cheer - even including this displaced West Countryite, thanks to the match in question being televised live in the UAE on Al Jazeera Sport.

Shortwood United won't be familiar to all but the most ardent scourer of the lower leagues fixtures. The preeminent club in the tiny market town of Nailsworth (population approximately 6,000), which nestles in the picturesque Cotswold hills, are the Skrill Premier side Forest Green Rovers. Shortwood sit three rungs lower, towards the foot of the fabulously unglamorously titled Calor League Division One South & West. But an unprecedented run in the FA Cup, battling through five qualifying rounds of England's most famous and romantic knockout competition, has seen them qualify for the competition's first round proper for the first time in their 113-year history. On Monday, the lowest-ranked team left in this year's cup welcome the League One side Port Vale to the Meadowbank ground. Attempts to work out how many league places in the pyramid separate them require a calculator.

For once, allegiances will be 100 per cent based on geography. I couldn't claim to have previously heard of a single member of Shortwood's squad of part-timers - made up of teachers, scaffolders and plumbers, some of whom, incredibly, will even put in a full shift in their full-time jobs on the day of the match. But I will be cheering just as loudly at the television as I will be a little more than 24 hours earlier, when Tottenham take on Newcastle United in the EPL. A million metaphorical miles from the glamour of the English Premier League, it's the kind of football fairy-tale that keeps that cliched "magic" of the FA Cup sparkling blindingly bright.

Photo above courtesy Brian Rossiter / Shortwood United