Why the real story of the FA Cup fourth round is at Fratton Park

Never mind Manchester United struggling to get a shot on target at Pride Park. Never mind Chelsea for once finding themselves up against a football club with a history even more pock-marked with controversy than their own in the shape of Milton Keynes. Never mind Oxford United once more being gifted the opportunity to showcase the most gifted football team in the lower leagues. There is no question where the most intriguing FA Cup fourth round tie will take place. At Fratton Park on Saturday Portsmouth will play Bournemouth in a game that represents the starkest reversal of fortune ever seen in football.

Back in 2008, when Premier League Pompey won this competition, beating Cardiff in the final, Bournemouth were marooned in the bottom half of League Two, facing the very real possibility of financial meltdown. The very next season, they were within a point of being demoted to the Conference.

Now, just eight years on, the roles have been completely reversed. Eddie Howe’s side will arrive at Fratton Park as proper Premier League contenders, their finances more buoyant than a beach ball. Bouncing on an updraft of sustained success. Portsmouth, meanwhile, after years of directorial mismanagement which included two crippling periods of administration, have sunk to League Two, where they sit seven points off automatic promotion in fifth place. This is less a south coast derby, then, than the Swapsies Cup Final.

Yet for Portsmouth this game offers a real opportunity to advertise to the wider world that things have changed around the club. No longer is this a basket case operation, no longer is it the epitome of financial irresponsibility. Far from it. From being the very worst example of how to run a football club, Portsmouth is now a model of how these things should be done.

Things really began to unravel for Pompey after that FA Cup win. Harry Redknapp, by coincidence a former Bournemouth boss, had built a side on pricey imports, the club offering absurdly high wages to recruit proven winners like David James, Sol Campbell, Peter Crouch and Sylvain Distin (who, by an intriguing coincidence, these days finds himself in the Bournemouth squad). Unbeknownst to Redknapp, the money he was gifted to buff up his playing personnel did not belong to the club owner, the Russian Israeli Alexandre Gaydamak. It was all borrowed against future earnings. When the worldwide banking crisis hit the autumn after the cup win, the banks wanted their money back. There was none forthcoming and a panicked firesale of playing assets ensued.

Over the next five years Portsmouth were plunged into a perfect storm of misery. A succession of owners wrought havoc with the club accounts. Twice they were placed in administration, docking them of points they could not afford to lose.

As so often has been the case in the past, there was only one group of people prepared to step in as the club teetered on the brink of destitution: the fans. As happened at Bournemouth at the precise moment Pompey were flying high, the fan rescue went way beyond merely rattling buckets outside home games. The Portsmouth Supporters Trust raised £2.5million through individual pledges of £1000 each, to stave off imminent disaster. Then, after a lengthy court battle with the previous owner Bairam Chainrai and his Portpin Group, they took over the club in April 2013.

It was not an easy first few months in charge. They had been left a legacy of debt, including £8m owed to football creditors, money which, under the League rules, had to be paid in full. But the Trust did it. By September 2014, the club was declared debt free.

And now, after the years of mismanagement by the unscrupulous and the uncaring, of property developers eyeing the acres of scrub land around Fratton Park and thinking they could become rich by moving the stadium elsewhere and building something, anything, in its stead, the place is at last being run properly. The Trust owns 51 per cent of the shares, the other 49 per cent are in the hand of 11 wealthy supporter directors. It is a balance that ensures never again can the club be subject to the same brutal ownership as before.

There is a hint of the place’s recent history in the plaque on the wall of Fratton Park’s renowned black and white gabled entrance. “On this site once more stands a mighty football club,” it reads. “Dedicated to those fans who took a stand and refused to allow Portsmouth FC to die.”

And in case the Bournemouth fans miss that, there is a much larger sign affixed to the main stand: “Fratton Park owned by Pompey fans.”

On the pitch, those fans will on Saturday get a hint of where they now stand. Their opponents have accrued the rewards of stability. Howe has been able in the time since Pompey’s Cup win, to build a proper, sustainable squad. The Portsmouth manager Paul Cook – the third boss to have worked under the Trust ownership, which, if nothing else suggests they can be ruthless in the application of expectations – will take comfort from how many of Howe’s squad began, like him, in League Two.

Indeed in the manner of their rise, built on a foundation of sound administration and attractive passing football, showing that promotion does not have to be financed by fantasy borrowings, Bournemouth are providing a role model for how Portsmouth could return to former glories. How things have changed. Bournemouth showing Pompey that the future is bright: no-one could have foreseen that eight years ago.