With Leeds rolling back the years to beat Manchester United in the FA Cup on Sunday, the general feeling is that cup magic is firmly back on the agenda. Not if you're Stan Collymore in the Daily Mirror. Stan reckons the War of the Roses was the exception rather than the rule and thinks it's all over for the world-famous domestic cup.

"Sadly, I fear we witnessed the death knell of the FA Cup at the weekend.

I grew up idolising the competition and fulfilled a lifetime’s ambition when I first played in it for non-League Stafford Rangers.

But the FA Cup’s decline, which started in 1999-2000 when Manchester United dropped out of the Cup to play in the World Club Championship, appears to have reached the point of no return.

At the weekend we had precious few shocks - with the obvious exception of Leeds' epic win at Old Trafford - and so many emphatic wins which made you wonder if the underdogs had actually bothered trying that hard.

Nowadays you even have lower division clubs putting out weakened teams as their League programme is more important to them.

It is a disgrace that something akin to bribery should be necessary to revive the competition.

But sadly people seem to think they can disrespect the FA Cup all too easily."

That can't be right, though, can it? Surely James Lawton in the Independent thinks Leeds' win put the shine back on the old trophy?

"However you want to debate the enduring appeal of the FA Cup – 10 years after it was sold out when the holders, Manchester United, were urged by the FA and Fifa to compete instead in some wretched, money-grabbing World Club tournament fiasco in South America – we have to accept that some time ago it became a matter of convenience.

It is something to be used when deemed necessary.

However, it is important to take the stupendous performance of Leeds United at Old Trafford yesterday out of the equation.

You should do this because, strictly speaking, it wasn't so much about the magic of the oldest and most romantic club competition in football, the one that could hardly draw flies in places like Wigan and Middlesbrough and Milton Keynes.

It was mostly to do with the unbreakable allure of football, the one which will always carry the hope that the next match will be the one when everything changes.

The appeal, this was, of a game which sooner or later has a tendency to return to classic values.

Whether Leeds continue to perform heroics in the competition that has been betrayed so many times by the sheer weight of pressure to chase the rising financial rewards that can be so precisely measured league by league, TV contract by TV contract, was certainly something left in the margins of a brilliant victory.

What Leeds were exemplifying was not any inordinate love of competing for the old silver – indeed, the star of the show, Jermaine Beckford, may well be dressing himself in new colours long before the end of this month's transfer window – but the ability of players, with the right handling and proper leadership, to respond to the greatest challenge of their lives."