Not for Sports Interactive the makers of 'Football Manager 2008', any talk of the 'romance' of the Cup. <\/p>\n
The PC version of the game was given two weeks to go through all the data regarding the four semi-finalists – Portsmouth, West Bromwich Albion, Barnsley and Cardiff.<\/p>\n
And its conclusion: West Brom beat Cardiff 2-1 in extra-time in the final to take the Cup back to The Hawthorns for the first time since 1968.<\/p>\n
However, the Baggies first have to overcome a penalty shoot-out against Portsmouth, the only Premier League side left in this season's competition, in Saturday's first semi-final.<\/p>\n
According to the computer game, Robert Koren opens the scoring for West Brom from a first-half penalty before Nwankwo Kanu, a former West Brom player, draws Pompey level.<\/p>\n
Extra-time is "pretty much a non-event" and when the game goes to penalties Sulley Muntari, Pompey's spot-kick hero in their 1-0 quarter-final win over Manchester United at Old Trafford, shoots straight at the keeper.<\/p>\n
Portsmouth defender Glen Johnson then misses the decisive penalty and the Baggies go through.<\/p>\n
Sunday's second semi-final between Cardiff and Barnsley is set to feature an "incredibly dire" first-half. <\/p>\n
The second period sees the Welsh side get on top and when Rob Kozluk gives away a penalty in extra-time, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink scores from the spot to take Cardiff through.<\/p>\n
And so to the final where West Brom's Roman Bednar scores in the 10th minute before Cardiff's Stephen McPhail equalises 21 minutes from time.<\/p>\n
But Slovenia midfielder Koren, who in reality has scored nine goals this season, proves the Baggies hero once again to seal victory with just a few minutes of normal time remaining.<\/p>\n
Betting enthusiasts and bookmakers alike, you can't say you weren't warned.<\/p>\n
But for others on Saturday, their only punt is likely to come from the rather less exhaustive method of sticking a pin in the list of runners for Britain's Grand National horse race.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fans attending this weekend’s FA Cup semi-finals at Wembley scarcely need to bother to turn up if the predictions of a football computer game are to be believed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3391"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}