Chippa United have spent most seasons since 2014 in the top flight, and the cup record from those years reads like the same line copied out again and again. Round of 32. Round of 16. Round of 32 again. People who started coming to games after the move to Port Elizabeth, which is most of the crowd at the bay, mainly remember the league and the long fight to stay up every May. Ask ten people at Buffalo City which round the club reached in the cup last season and maybe two will know the answer. The cups get forgotten, and that is a pity, because there is a small story in them.

The Nedbank Cup is the big one, the cup with the amateur sides and the long bus trips. Chippa's first go at it as a PSL club was 2012–13, and they went out in the round of 32. In 2011–12 and 2013–14, the two National First Division years, they did not even reach the main draw, they fell in the qualifying round the NFD clubs play first. That is a hard place to go out, away at small grounds against sides who treat the tie like their own final. Then 2014–15 and 2015–16, both round of 32 again. Five seasons and never past the first proper round. Not a disaster, more like a habit.

The one exception everybody quotes is the MTN 8 in 2016, when the club reached the semi-final. That semi-final was against Mamelodi Sundowns over two legs, and it ended there. The 2016 team was a good one, and people who watched it at the bay still say so. That run still gets talked about, and it should, but it sits a bit alone. Around it the pattern is the one above, and the Telkom Knockout looked much the same.

Three Telkom Knockouts, three first-round exits

The Telkom Knockout was the cup before Christmas, with the final in December when everyone was already thinking about the holidays. Only the sixteen PSL clubs played in it, so the round of 16 was simply the first round. Chippa went out at that stage in 2012, in 2014 and in 2015. In plain words, three times in four editions they lost their opening tie and that was the cup done for the year. Older supporters in the Western Cape might remember the 2012 one, from the first PSL season, when the team was still playing in Cape Town.

Looking back from now it is easy to read those years kindly. The club was changing cities, moving training between Gelvandale Stadium, the university fields on Second Avenue and the outside pitches at Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, and changing coaches often, five of them in 2012–13 alone. A cup run needs a settled side for a month or two and Chippa almost never had a settled month in that period. The league was the priority and everybody knew it, so the cup ties were where the squad players got their ninety minutes. Nobody in the stands complained much, as long as the team stayed up in May.

The under-17s brought home the Engen cup twice

The trophies from those years came from the young ones. Chippa's under-17 side won the Engen Knockout Challenge in 2015 and again in 2016. Two in a row in a national youth cup is a proper achievement, and for a club that was only five or six years old at the time it said something about the work going on with the juniors in Port Elizabeth, where the youth teams play in the local football association leagues under the Chippa name. Those were the same seasons when the first team was struggling to fill the stadium, so the youth wins did not get much attention outside the club.

There is an older youth trophy too, from before the move east. In 2012 the Metropolitan Under-19 Premier Cup went to a side playing as Philippi United, from the Cape Town years when Philippi Stadium was still home. So the cup story of Chippa is a bit upside down. The first team keeps falling in the early rounds, and the kids keep winning things. One of these seasons maybe the two will meet in the middle, and a Nedbank Cup quarter-final at Buffalo City would be a good place to start.