Who will lift the trophy?

Finally we have an FA Cup Final to savour and one which proves there is still a place for romance and the underdog in football's oldest domestic cup competition.

This Saturday night's (Australian time) showdown between Portsmouth and Cardiff might lack the star quality normally associated with English football's showpiece event but it will more than make up for it with an atmosphere and magic so missing from recent FA Cup finals.

It's hard to believe that even up until 1994, the English FA Cup final was the only game Australian viewers got to see live on television each year before the advent of pay-television and the huge growth of football as a sport in this country.

Back then it was the most eagerly awaited match of the season but since then has been overshadowed by the weekly dramas of the English Premier League - where fans are now able to watch their team play each week on pay television - and the European Champions' League, which is broadcast live on SBS.

As a result the FA Cup Final has become something of an also-ran in recent years - just another game at the end of a marathon season of late nights and early mornings watching England's best slug it out on a weekly basis.

But it hasn't helped that over the same period, since Everton's victory in 1995, the FA Cup has been won by just four clubs - Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea.

And even worse is the fact that for these four clubs winning the FA Cup is very much a consolation prize behind winning the EPL and the Champions League, in which only England's top four clubs each season participate and that is always United, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea due to their financial advantage over other teams which comes from participating in the Champions League in the first place.

If you need any further proof of the big four's dominance of English football then consider this stat - over the course of this decade they have combined to win 22 domestic trophies - the EPL title, FA Cup and the League Cup - leaving the other 88 clubs in English football to share just four trophies.

And all of these have been League Cup successes, the least regarded of England's three annual competitions.

But that number will rise to five on Saturday night - thanks to a remarkable season of upsets in the FA Cup which has ensured that for the first time since 1991 none of the big four will feature in the final.

Instead this year's FA Cup Final will be played out in a frenzied atmosphere between two clubs and two sets of fans that have been waiting a lifetime for a trophy with Portsmouth last winning the FA Cup in 1939 and Cardiff in 1927.

Cardiff - the only non-English team ever to lift the trophy - will also be aiming to become the first team since West Ham in 1980 to win the cup while playing outside England's top division.

But the Bluebirds', whose best-known players are ageing former EPL stars in Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Trevor Sinclair and Robbie Fowler, face a tough task.

Not only did they finish 12th of 24 teams in the Championship - England's second tier competition - this year but they beat just one EPL team en-route to the final in Middlesbrough in the quarter-finals.

In the semi-finals they were fortunate to come up against an even lower-ranked Championship side in Barnsley - which more than any other club contributed to this year's fairytale run of FA Cup results by knocking out both Liverpool and Chelsea.

Portsmouth, in contrast, reached the final the hard way beating Manchester United at Old Trafford in the quarter-finals before beating Championship winners West Brom in the semis.

And after finishing eighth in the EPL this season, they are ranked some 24 places above Cardiff in the English football structure, and with keeper David James and central defender Sol Campbell have some of the game's most experienced and reliable players in their ranks.

But Pompey are vulnerable on Saturday night considering they lost their last four EPL matches and have scored just one goal in their past five matches - the worst form of any cup finalist in 45 years - while top-scorer Jermaine Defoe is unavailable because he is cup-tied having represented Spurs earlier in the competition.

So a Cardiff boilover is not out of the question but it says everything about this year's cup final match-up that even a victory by hot favourites Portsmouth will still be considered a fairytale success and one which will warm the hearts of football fans the world over.