This book, written by Daily Mail journalist Brian James, was based on a simple but very intriguing idea: Pick a team at random who are playing in the first qualifying round of the FA Cup back in September and watch them until they are knocked out. Then follow the team that beat them until they too are knocked out and so on and so on until you reach Wembley.

It was a good idea, but there was, in those days, always one possible hitch - you could hit Liverpool early on and in season 1976-77, when this book was written, Liverpool were comfortably the best team in the country. As a result, when Liverpool were hit early on (the fourth round) the whole book turned into a virtual story of their dramatic season. The mighty Reds were chasing what was then an unprecedented treble of League championship, FA Cup and European Cup. In the end they just missed out, but it was a gripping tale of what might have been. Ironically, the team that denied them the treble went on to do it themselves 22 years later: Manchester United.

So where do Carlisle United fit into all this? Well, as luck would have it, they drew little Matlock Town of the Northern Premier League in Round 3 of the competition and James had picked up Matlock as early as the 4th qualifying round, when they knocked out Geoff Hurst and Telford United. James brought his reporters' notepad up to Brunton Park to watch Bobby Moncur's Second Division United take on the Derbyshire minnows. The book records the minutiae of the match, from the Matlock view mainly, as they were the team he was covering at that stage, and details United's fine 5-1 victory. However James is not too complimentary about the Cumbrians. From the word go, you get the feeling he is entering hostile territory:

That four-day postponement of the Mansfield tie had already robbed Matlock of the traditional weekend dream of going to Old Trafford, Anfield or Highbury. Even before they went out to record the result of their historic win they knew the prize - Carlisle, away. The booby prize of the third round draw. Death without glory.

And if that wasn't enough, James then descends into pure media stereotype as he describes Brunton Park on a cold January afternoon:

...nothing moves out there. It is a football frontier post guarded by sheep; the notion that a ball kicked over the fence would go on bouncing until it dropped off the end of the world is hard to shake off...

Hard perhaps for a London-based journalist on his first trip to Cumbria, but not for most other hardy fans who often regard their trip to Brunton Park as an event to look forward to. We have always been seen by most as a friendly club.

After the demolition of battling Matlock, Moncur's men are followed to Anfield. This is where Liverpool enter the equation for the first time, and it was no real surprise to find James describing a comfortable home win for the Merseysiders. Three years earlier Carlisle had travelled to Liverpool in the same round and pulled off a great 0-0 draw, this time they lost 3-0. Even this result is pretty respectable when you consider the build-up to the game, as the book recalls:

Carlisle, already facing an increasingly serious threat of relegation, are left to contemplate the hardest task of the round. Their morale is not helped when the FA Cup-holders Southampton go to Brunton Park on January 23, a week before the Liverpool tie, and win 6-0. No Carlisle side in living memory has ever met with a defeat of such proportions on their own ground. Not surprisingly Cup week for them starts with a painful analysis of the debris of defeat.

None of the players who file into the dressing room for the weekly post-mortem needs reminding that the defeat left them twentieth in the Second Division, all of 42 places beneath Liverpool. Fullback Peter Carr manages to walk in with a noisy show of bravado; a 'Cagney' strutting to the chair. He wants to leave the club and is kept here only by the size of his transfer fee, which a tribunal periodically reduces. It is currently down to £80,000.

Kevin Keegan, John Toshack and the spring-heeled Steve Heighway complete the job in an orderly fashion. Carlisle go out of the Cup, and as is the way with this book, they leave the company of Brian James. He follows Liverpool to Wembley, where they lose to Manchester United, and then on to Rome and their European Cup triumph over Borussia Munchengladbach. He returns to Carlisle only at the end of his story to cover their end of season relegation struggle - which ends in failure and the drop to Division Three. The appendix lists every result in that season's FA Cup competition, complete with attendances, goalscorers and team line-ups. The first match covered by the book is Tividale, of the West Midlands League away to Hinckley Athletic, watched by 180 people. By the finale, there are 100,000 at Wembley for Liverpool versus Manchester United. The idea was so good, that The Guardian did something very similar over 20 years later. But they, unlike James, didn't encounter Carlisle United along the way.

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