MILLWALL columnist MATT LITTLE admits he would probably take relegation to League One now if you offered him that as the price for an FA Cup final victory over Chelsea.

ANOTHER midweek home defeat, although a very unlucky one, still has Millwall fans who remember 1995-96 looking over their shoulders at the Championship relegation trap door.

That season we went down with a record 52 points, having topped the table as late as 9 December 1995 and having signed two Russian internationals in January.

Thankfully Leicester City now share the burden of that unwanted honour, after getting relegated with the exact same number of points in 2008, but we certainly don't want to wrestle sole ownership of it away from them again with a new record points tally for a relegated side.

So, not the most ideal build-up to a FA Cup semi-final, but I firmly believe we will do enough in our last seven games to reach enough points, in this strangest of Championship seasons, to survive.

I'm especially confident because we have the Eagles of Crystal Palace still to come to SE16 for our last home game of the season on a Tuesday night.

Fans of the Croydon club have always complained they've never been witness to the kind of Den atmosphere that we reserve for the likes of West Ham, Leeds United or Birmingham City, but now they might get a slight taste of it if we're still in desperate need of points by then.

And given the fact they usually roll over even in the most mild of Den atmospheres, then I'm pinning all my hopes on us beating them, if no one else, in the run-in.

Sadly I'm not as confident for our meeting with Wigan Athletic on Saturday, but who knows when the magic of the cup will strike and as long as we don't let a football match break out, we might have a chance.

Remarkably we have a lot more cup pedigree than our Premier League opponents, this being the Latics' debut at this stage of the competition, whereas Saturday is our fifth appearance in the FA Cup semi-finals.

To be fair to Wigan, we did have a 47-year headstart on them, but that shouldn't distract from our history in the world's oldest football knockout competition.

Afterall, it was our heroics in the cup that earned us the proud nickname of Lions, replacing our original nickname of 'Dockers'.

Unlike our south London neighbours, who have had to grapple with picking one that sounds good out of Robins, Glaziers, Valliants, Eagles and Addicks, we gained ours through footballing brilliance, not fickle fashion.

Our Eastend forefathers were christened the 'Lions of the South' by a newspaper article after knocking out the First Division leaders Aston Villa on the way to the club's first FA Cup semi-final appearance in 1900.

We repeated the feat three years later, knocking out northern giants Preston North End and Everton before falling to a very good Derby County side.

Millwall fans had to wait 34 years to exact revenge on the midlanders, and they did so in style and in front our record attendance of 48,762 at The Den in 1937 for a fifth round tie.

The Lions had already knocked out First Division Chelsea in front of 41,503 Londoners at Cold Blow Blow in the fourth round, and were on their way to becoming the first club from the Third Division to grace the FA Cup semi-finals.

It was the win over soon to be First Division Champions Manchester City, in front of another big Den crowd, in the quarter-finals which clinched our place in the record books forever.

Sadly we were beaten by the current First Division champions Sunderland at Huddersfield’s Leeds Road ground in a controversial match.

But, as most Millwall fans reading this will know, we did get our revenge at Old Trafford, albeit 67 years later in 2004, to reach our first ever FA Cup final and to become the only south London club to play European football.

The prize of European football is up for grabs again should we win and whoever we play out of Manchester City and Chelsea in the final finish in the top four, as looks likely.

I said earlier in this blog I didn't hold out much hope of us achieving that remarkable feat again.

However, a theme of revenge has certainly cropped up and we certainly owe Wigan Athletic one.

That's because the last time we faced them at Wembley, for the 1999 AWS Cup Final, they reverted to type and used their hands to control the ball in the build-up to their last minute winner in our 1-0 defeat, thus ruining the day for the vast majority of the crowd.

Once again we will out number them in north-west London, but hopefully this time most of Wembley will be celebrating what would be considered our biggest cup upset since we dumped Arsenal and Chelsea out in 1995 at Highbury and Stamford Bridge.

And I tell you what, if the football gods offered me a miracle cup final victory over Chelsea with relegation being the price, I'd snap their hands off.

But don't tell the players that .....

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