Recreation of FA Cup final a reminder of how competition started football's ascent to becoming the global game But the FA Cup, a brainwave based on the inter-house competitions that took place in the leading public schools, was about to transform popular culture. By the late 1870s something that had started as a contest for the elite had become a meeting place for groups of men who otherwise would have no dealings with each other. As Tony Collins, Professor of History at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, says: "The FA Cup during the Victorian era was an unprecedented social leveller - you would get blokes from the local factory kicking the daylights out of peers of the realm. Unsurprisingly, this became an increasingly popular spectator sport. As it spread to the Midlands and the North, the power of the blue-bloods began to dwindle. After dominating the FA Cup for the first decade, no public school team played in a final after 1883. And the crowds, once dominated by those who regarded the FA Cup as a society event akin to the Boat Race, began to have a different, less wealthy, face. They grew in number and became increasingly tribal. For Collins, this is the moment of football's ascent towards becoming the national and world game. And rugby? It sniffed at the prevailing wind, turned up its collar and walked the other way. The RFU, dominated as the FA was by the upper classes, was disdainful at the idea of the burly docker kicking at the shins of the educated gentleman in the name of sport. When, in 1878, the Calcutta Club of India offered the RFU a silver cup to become rugby's version of the FA Cup, it politely declined. So the Calcutta Cup, a battered and fragile trophy today, became the prize for the annual shindig between England and Scotland. And the oval ball lost its chance to dominate. So though we now romanticise the FA Cup as the gentler, less commercial, more soulful version of football - the pie and chips and poster stuck up with bits of blue tack, not the prawn sandwich and million-pound Nike advertisement - it is far more important than that. It is both the father of the bloated Colossus that is with us today and one of the great pushes behind the democratisation of sport. So those who tonight make it to the Oval, that rickety old lady of a ground forever playing second fiddle to Lord's and Wembley, should raise a toast to those 22 men in knicker-bockers who were there at the start of something big.