Stoke's gamble on Matthew Etherington gifted FA Cup to Manchester City

 
Some might say that Tony Pulis lost the FA Cup when he decided to take a gamble on Matthew Etherington's fitness. Needing width, pace and dynamism, he believed that the left-sided midfield player had made sufficient recovery from a hamstring injury suffered in the Premier League game with Wolves on 26 April. He was wrong.
Etherington lasted 62 minutes, but made no measurable contribution to Stoke City's effort during his time on the pitch. Worse, he represented a black hole into which energy was sucked, and from which nothing emerged. The match was still scoreless when Pulis took him off, but the damage had already been done. The Potters were never really on level terms.
Managers sometimes do that sort of thing, and it seldom pays off. One thinks of Bobby Robson, his namesake Bryan, and the 1986 World Cup, when England lost their captain to an old shoulder injury. Pulis is not Roberto Mancini, with infinite resources upon which to call. Where, among the seven substitutes on Stoke's bench, was a player who might have achieved more?
And, to Pulis's credit, he is the manager who took a chance on Jermaine Pennant, the right-winger who seemed to have run out of second chances. Discarded by Real Zaragoza at the end of last season, Pennant arrived at the Britannia Stadium on a four-month loan that turned into a permanent contract when the January transfer window opened, with a £1.75m fee attached. Playing in Stanley Matthews's old position, he was Stoke's most effective outfield player by a mile, the only one whose presence would have improved Mancini's side.
Who knows how Pennant has experienced life while growing from a child into a 28-year-old man, from material and cultural poverty to a world of Ferraris and glamour models?
You are born in a part of Nottingham notorious for drug-related violence. Your mother dies of cancer when you are three years old. You help your father, a former semi-pro footballer, bring up your younger siblings, but you never learn to read or write. You leave home at 14 and a year later you become Britain's most expensive teenage footballer when Notts County accept £2m from Arsène Wenger. You never really settle anywhere, at Arsenal or Birmingham City or Liverpool or Portsmouth or Zaragoza.