My favourite Leicester City FA Cup game - Part 1: London calling
Ahead of Leicester City’s trip to Stamford Bridge this weekend in the FA Cup quarter-finals, we asked our writers for their favourite Foxes games in the competition.
To add a bit of variety, nobody was allowed to choose the 2021 final…
Here’s part 1, featuring three games against London clubs.
He ain’t heavy…
Adam Hodges
My favourite FA Cup match is a bit of a personal one as this match was the closest my brother, John Hodges, came to starting for Leicester.
In the 1999/2000 season, John was third choice goalkeeper behind Tim Flowers and Pegguy Arphexad.
After being taken to a replay by Hereford in the third round, Leicester were drawn away to Arsenal in the fourth.
Flowers was out injured and it was touch and go whether Pegguy would start. The game was being televised on ITV and John rang my parents to say that he might play. My 19 year-old brother would be facing an Arsenal team including Thierry Henry, Davor Suker, Patrick Vieira, Freddie Ljungberg, Emmanuel Petit and David Seaman in front of 35,000 fans at Highbury.
As a 12-year-old, I was tasked to be in charge of the recording and I made sure the tape was set up.
I pressed record and saw the Hodges name on the team sheet. Pegguy got last-minute painkiller injections which meant John was the substitute goalkeeper.
From what I remember, it was a tense game with a nervy finish as City clung on with 10 men after Darren Eadie got sent off. As a family watching at home we were on the lookout for John and would often say "there he is" when the camera switched to the touchline and John was visible on the bench.
The game went to a replay at Filbert Street which saw Flowers return between the sticks and Pegguy back on the bench. The Frenchman would come on in extra time and make crucial saves in the penalty shootout, which City won.
City would go out in the next round to Chelsea and John would play in the FA Cup the following season - but for Plymouth Argyle.
A boy can dream…
Iain Wright
With the governors of the site prohibiting choosing the 2021 final, I'm also going to avoid other games in that run too.
The way things ended under Brendan Rodgers has ruined a lot of great work that came before, including the FA Cup win. I'm certain though he'd have had more credit in the bank had those games leading to us finally winning the cup not been behind closed doors.
The 4-0 at Stoke would have been a great away day (as proven by the 5-0 in January) and the 3-1 quarter final win against Manchester United would have been right up there in the top five games at the King Power.
The reality is, though, beyond that glorious run in 2021, there haven’t been that many great FA Cup games. Therefore, I'm going to pick my very first one: Crystal Palace in the third round in 1992.
I'd been to a number of games in the seasons prior to that, but for the most part, it involved losing (other than the great Tony James game).
However, as an 8 year old at the time, I can remember the huge increase in optimism during Brian Little's first season. We were doing well in the Second Division as it was then and had given Arsenal a hard time over two legs in the League Cup. We'd also started to progress in the Zenith Data Systems Cup, if memory serves me right.
This led to a third round day playing a top flight Crystal Palace team, just 18 months after they narrowly lost a replay following one of the great FA Cup finals against Manchester United in 1990.
We were mentioned on Grandstand at lunchtime (unheard of before by 8 year old me) and Filbert Street had a near capacity crowd of 19,613 (also pretty unheard of in those days).
A Foxes team featuring a number of players who would become heroes over the next few seasons, such as Steve Walsh, Steve Thompson, Gary Mills and Ohhh Tommy Wright, played out a tight encounter that was won by the underdog right at the death thanks to local boy Richard Smith.
A first FA Cup win for a number of seasons added to the feelgood factor around the team at that time. After years in the doldrums, we finally had a team we could believe in, with some incredible days on the horizon for that little schoolboy.
Earning our Spurs
Helen Thompson
If we ignore the FA Cup run that saw us lift the trophy in 2021, then three games stick out as my favourites. Charlton in 2005, one of my favourite every away days, Manchester City in 2011, largely due to my soft spot for Balkan footballers and that being one of the seasons where I went to every single game. But I have to pick the 2006 game against Tottenham Hotspur in the third round.
How many games do you look back on really fondly after suffering a blowout on the M1 on the drive home from them? Just this one really. I feel like it pairs nicely with how weird the Craig Levein era was between my journey back and the game itself. There weren’t a huge amount of highlights during Levein’s time, but this stands out.
This game had the fan (un)friendly kick-off time of 6.30pm on a Sunday. We would have been lucky to be home by 11pm already, still living in Grimsby then, and work and college awaited us on Monday morning.
The best thing, as my Dad and I waited by the side of the road was how little we cared about the cold and the delay. We were still bouncing off the walls having come back from a 2-0 deficit to Tottenham Hotspur. I always loved getting one over Tottenham, they’d provided my first real football heartbreak beating us in the League Cup final in 1999 so I had a dislike even at a tender age.
As I remember it, it was a cold January night and on paper, our team looked pretty underpowered. This was the Levein era, so our team had a lot of pretty average players and a very Scottish feel to the team (has any starting Leicester eleven had more Scots in it than this? We had four).
Rab Douglas in goal didn’t exactly inspire, and up front we had the very patchy Mark De Vries, who’d be one of Levein’s pet transfers. We had Elvis Hammond on hand to deploy to change the formation and give us two strikers.
By contrast, Tottenham had some very household and promising names in their ranks; Aaron Lennon (cornrows and all), Robbie Keane, Michael Carrick and a young Jermaine Jenas. Not forgetting they could bring Jermain Defoe off the bench.
So perhaps it wasn’t surprising when Jenas slotted in to open the visitors’ lead. They were 2-0 up after forty minutes from a screamer of a goal courtesy of Paul Stalteri. Hammond pulled one back and we trailed 2-1 at half-time, despite the tap-in nature, he still pulled off his trademark acrobatics celebration.
A replay was on the cards after Stephen Hughes levelled it to 2-2 in the second half, trying to match Stalteri’s effort. It was a fairly low crowd of 19,000 who turned out for the game but we all got our reward. This is one of the comebacks I can think of given our status at the time.
The only thing better than a last minute equaliser is a last minute winner. I don’t remember how I celebrated, but I know it took me hours to come down from the highs of it. Mark De Vries was picked out and had a perfect ball delivered to him by Joey Gudjónsson.
De Vries showed composure, control and coolly fired home to put us into the fourth round. Not quite giant killers, but we’d delivered a shock to the Premier League side. Plus, it was Spurs, so who didn’t enjoy that?
