Is football right to ditch 133 years of tradition?

Ask Alan Curbishley if his men are overworked. The most anyone at Charlton has played this season is 29 first-team games.

Ah! But that's not Arsenal you say. But Arsenal's England men have been no busier - - Ashley Cole (29) and Sol Campbell (19). The busiest England player has been Chelsea's John Terry with 35 games.

Compare that with Liverpool in 1983-84 when players such as Phil Neal, Alan Hansen, Ian Rush, Sammy Lee and Mark Lawrenson who by season's end all played nearly 70 games, which wasn't that unusual.

Today the big clubs have twice as many men, playing half the number of games. No wonder they have the energy to go on as lucrative club tours and, as with England this summer, go on a meaningless trip to the United States.

Do we want to abandon the traditional afternoon FA Cup Final - which has been on a Saturday since March 1872 - for these reasons? I think not. Better, surely, to cut club tours and start the season a week earlier.

YES - writes Raoul Simons

So next year's FA Cup Final could be staged on a Wednesday rather than a Saturday. As they used to say in my school playground, "big wow".

It is not as if the pomp and circumstance of Cup final Saturday is being lost forever, the game is merely being switched for practical reasons in a World Cup year.

Reactionaries cry sacrilege and accuse the Football Association of meekly pandering to the Premiership fat cats who will not move one of their weekend fixtures.

But is a Wednesday game really so bad? No Tottenham, Arsenal or Manchester United fans would suggest that their respective replay successes in 1981, 1993 and 1990 were in any way diminished by the darkness of a night game, as opposed to Saturday sunshine.

If anything, the atmosphere is better at night matches and, with Wembley's new illuminated arch and supporters enjoying their first taste of the new stadium, a floodlit 2006 Cup final could be an awesome spectacle.

Pity the poor Manchester or Liverpool fans that will have to trek down to London for a midweek game, say the critics. For that kind of Cup final, hey, they can just take the day off. The European Cup Final has always been held in midweek and that in no way damages it. Most neutral fans can recall the "balmy night in Barcelona" - when Manchester United beat Bayern Munich - far better than any recent FA Cup showpiece.

But what about the day-long build-up, the sense of occasion, families coming together to watch the last bastion of the one-off match?

That is an argument for misty-eyed romantics harking back to a bygone era which was never that good anyway. Will anyone really miss three hours of space-filling BBC schmaltz?

Cup final TV audiences have been on the decline for years and have hardly been helped by some dull games. Perhaps, as with the Monday Wimbledon Final and the Monday Grand National, a change will be as good as a holiday.