The magic of the FA Cup. Alive, just, after being kicked to death on ITV

It's also got the current crop of England internationals too. But here's the thing. The better the football team plays, the greater the event, the more woeful ITV's coverage appears. England are doing better than they have done for several years, but ITV's lacklustre pundits, dull graphics and uninspired commentary almost make the case for switching off altogether and reading it in print the next day, instead.

As it happens, I thought ITV's coverage was getting better. The first round of the FA Cup was a bit of a treat. It took the lower- and non-league games seriously and gave them the sort of treatment you'd normally associate with "bigger" clashes.

Yet when you put that treatment in the mix for the "bigger" clashes it feels decidedly limp, when compared to brash, flash Sky or generally slick and always well-informed BBC coverage.

And Saturday night's "highlights" show was an instant reminder of just how bad The Premiership was when the Premier League dabbled with the terrestrial dark side.

Everton fans will always tell you they never get a fair crack of the whip on Match of the Day, that they always end up at the back end of the show. That tends to be because their games are often of less interest than another one of the day's matches.

Match of the Day also appears to make its call on which matches to give prominence to AFTER the game has been played. So you do sometimes end up with a "star" commentator doing a smaller bit of the show because the expected highlight match he went to ended up being outshone by a surprise game down the road.

Not on ITV's FA Cup round-up show. They went big on Liverpool v Preston, Hull v Newcastle and Macclesfield v Everton. They obviously expected Preston to win, for Everton to, as usual, get dumped out of the tournament and for, well, who knows what out of Hull v Newcastle. Perhaps the excitement of getting a clash of two Premier League clubs was just too much for them. Oh yes, and then there was non-league Forest Green v Derby to kick things off. Derby won, but had to battle for it.

Now, in recent years, that's been about as much of a shock as you'd get in some rounds of the FA Cup - a non-league team almost winning. But on Saturday, Nottingham Forest beat Manchester City, the richest club in the world, Stoke lost to Hartlepool, Blackpool were beaten by non-league Torquay and Chelsea were held by Southend. If there is to be magic in the FA Cup, it could be found at these games rather than the ones ITV went big on.

In a nutshell, ITV's football coverage once again felt cheap. Whereas with the Champions League, the TV coverage often seems suited just for lots of ad breaks, with the FA Cup it just felt as though they couldn't be bothered. They'd made their minds up and that was that. Those were the games they'd covered with their star turns, so those were the games getting big coverage.

Even on Sunday, when the FA Cup fourth-round draw was made, ITV bungled it. Their presenter managed to cut across the two football celebrities drawing out the all-important balls so that those watching tended to hear the mad wittering of stats which only Jeff Stelling can deliver without sounding like a gibbering statto on acid, rather than the numbers being drawn.

This weekend proved two things to me. One is that there may be magic in the FA Cup, but that it's going to take more than a magic wand to give the competition a bit more sparkle when on telly. And don't get me started with Setanta and their flat-pack Des Lynam.