Why the FA Cup, and not the Premier League, is English football's prized jewel - and how it's refusing to die thanks to underdogs like Plymouth, writes OLIVER HOLT

I felt lucky to be at Home Park on Sunday. For all sorts of reasons. Lucky to witness the drama of an FA Cup giant-killing. Lucky to feel the passion of a crowd at a club that still values its own fans more highly than tourists and day-trippers. Lucky to be at a club that nurses pride in its own regional identity. Lucky to be sitting in the beautiful Mayflower Grandstand with its echoes of club history. Lucky to see what a result such as Plymouth Argyle's victory over Liverpool means to a local community.

Lucky to experience a day that illuminated the best of our game. Lucky to feel the kind of emotions that are an integral part of a football competition which, despite the best efforts of the elite, simply refuses to die. Sometimes, it can feel as if the FA Cup represents a disappearing world, a last vestige of tradition in a sport whose broadcasters pretend it began in 1992 and whose money-makers see more lucrative opportunities elsewhere.

Sometimes, it feels as if the competition is being constantly devalued and disrespected. Managers pay lip-service to its magic because they know it will not play well if they do not but their actions speak louder than their words. Arne Slot gave his first team the day off on Sunday. He didn't even include any of them in the squad that travelled to the West Country. He picked a second team for the FA Cup because Liverpool have five matches in the next 15 days and they have bigger priorities.

Home Park had the passion of a crowd at a club that still values its own fans more highly than tourists and day-trippers. It was a day that illuminated the best of our game as Plymouth Argyle knocked out Liverpool. Arne Slot picked a second-string Liverpool side - their priorities are currently elsewhere. So when I listened to BBC Radio 5 live on the drive home from Plymouth, I tuned in to the phone-in that Robbie Savage and Chris Sutton host and heard Savage talking to a Plymouth fan. 'Congratulations on beating Liverpool's reserves,' he was saying.

And he was right. Plymouth had beaten mighty Liverpool but it wasn't the best Liverpool available. And that is not Slot's fault. His priorities are the Premier League and the Champions League. His players have a crazy schedule and something has to give. And something, more often than not, is the FA Cup. Some felt, in fact, that Liverpool's defeat at Home Park might actually be a blessing in disguise for Slot and his team. Liverpool have bigger fish to fry and fighting on one less front will give tired players the chance to recuperate as they chase shinier prizes.

It fits a context where the traditions of the tournament are being eroded. Uefa has established a European Super League by stealth in the form of the ever-expanding Champions League and our elite clubs are committed to a calendar that tries to squeeze the life out of everything else. The FA Cup is still a showcase for the best that our game has to offer and yet the FA itself is betraying it by degrees and the Premier League, which sees threats to its greed everywhere, is trying to kill it. When Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish spoke about a battle between supermarkets and corner shops, it was the voice of the elite.

Both the FA and the Premier League will deny that, of course, but the facts tell a different story. The FA's abolition of replays, its spreading of matches in the fourth round over five days and its moving of the FA Cup Final to the penultimate weekend of the season are all betrayals. And yet despite all this, despite the betrayals and the weakness and the compromises and the cowardice of the people who run the game, the FA Cup continues to defy them because it continues to thrive.

That was the other thing that was so beautiful about being at Home Park on Sunday. It was to realise that whatever those who have grown out of touch with the English game do, however blinded they have become, English football fans love the FA Cup too much to let it wither. Arne Slot's players have a crazy schedule and something has to give - he was right to change his side. Sure, Liverpool played a second team at Plymouth so the giant-killing wasn't quite the same as it was in the days when Hereford beat Newcastle United and Wimbledon held a Leeds United team that featured Peter Lorimer, Billy Bremner, Jonny Giles, Paul Madeley and the rest of Don Revie's first choice selection.

And maybe some of the fans at Home Park were disappointed not to see Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk running out in Liverpool colours. But that disappointment went when the final whistle blew and when it was written in the record books that their team had beaten Liverpool. The result still played to our love of the underdog. It was still a black eye for the giants. There was still something about the occasion that got to the kernel of the appeal of the cup: that ordinary players from lower league clubs with uplifting stories and lives that seem almost like yours and mine can fight with the gilded elite and sometimes, they can come out on top.