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Plymouth showed the world’s oldest football competition still has life but Arne Slot won’t be too worried despite his team winning just five of their last 11 games

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It was, it has to be acknowledged, a much-changed Liverpool lineup. Of the 11 players who began Sunday’s FA Cup fourth-round match at Plymouth Argyle, only Luis Díaz had made more than 10 league starts this season and only three others had made more than five. Even allowing for that, Plymouth’s victory registers as one of the great shocks of recent times, only the fourth time the leader of the Premier League has ever gone out of the competition to lower-division opposition.

As their quietly charismatic 42-year-old Bosnian coach Miron Muslić pointed out afterward, it was a day that will go down in Plymouth’s history, that will be recalled for generations, as a one-off result more impressive than anything they achieved in reaching the semi-final in 1983-84. It was Liverpool’s ninth defeat to lower-league opposition this century but, in terms of the scale of the shock, it felt perhaps most akin to their exit against non-league Worcester City in 1959 when they were a second-flight club, a defeat that precipitated the decline that led to Phil Taylor making way for the great Bill Shankly.

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While ecstatic Plymouth Argyle fans almost certainly cared not one whit that they couldn’t recognise some of the faces in the Liverpool side their basement-dwelling Championship side knocked out of the FA Cup on Sunday, there were no end of media buzz-kills on hand to talk down their achievement. The fact that Arne Slot had spared almost all of his big-name heavy artillery the long trip to Devon was immediately raised, although we can only guess if the presence of Alisson, Mo Salah, Cody Gakpo, Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Ryan Gravenberch, Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister and Ibrahima Konaté in their side might have led to a more impressive Liverpool performance. You can only beat what’s in front of you and while it’s true that Liverpool’s line-up certainly had an early pre-season friendly feel about it, the atmosphere at Home Park did not and could only have been more febrile if a visiting Scouser had been caught putting jam on their half-time scone before the clotted cream.

How KCTV gets the footage is a mystery … there is no studio. It’s straight into the game, which carries Korean commentary from KCTV over the crowd noise. Most homes appear to have TV these days and KCTV is the most widely received national network, so most homes are able to watch” – a report by US website 38 North reveals that a heavily censored version of the Premier League is now being beamed into North Korea though we doubt Richard Masters will be paying the country a visit to discuss any possible copyright breach.

Perhaps Big Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s inspiration can come from the owners of Football Manager and officially bin MU25 for similar ‘delays and technical hitches’ (Friday’s Football Daily, full email edition), although I doubt a refund would create a ‘huge disappointment’ among its fanbase. Aiming for a MU26 launch date of around November sounds about right as well” – Ian Potter.

Rich Goldthorpe’s twin-fandom combination of Manchester United and St Albans City tore at my heartstrings (Football Daily letters passim), but sadly I can go one better (worse). United, my team since childhood more than 50 years ago, and St Albans City – now my home – are accompanied by my original home team, Grantham Town. The Gingerbreads are currently hurtling out of the Northern Premier League Midlands division in the wrong direction for a second successive relegation. Fourteen points from 28 games with only Walsall Wood below them and that’s because Walsall have no points at all after folding earlier this year. I don’t even know what division lies below the NPLM. This has been a year to look away from the results and hope for better things next year. Still, once you’ve got your team(s) you’ve got them for good … or in this case bad” – David Fryer.

If Arne Slot wanted an option on the bench, he should have picked Djimi Traoré. He could always pull out an unforgettable goal playing against lower league opposition, that lad. What? Well, John Aldridge then, surely to be relied on to put it away in a clutch FA cup situation. Yes, I’m still so bitter” – Jon Millard

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