Welcome back then the FA Cup, which came clanking out of its cupboard once again on Saturday afternoon, boots dubbined, socks tied, moustache discreetly waxed. A total of 40 first-round ties will have been played by the end of the weekend, among the most notable Preston North End versus Yeovil Town, Hereford versus Shrewsbury – the A49 derby – and Crawley Town's trip to Metropolitan Police, who come complete with full-size policeman-style mascot and pre-match blast of I Fought the Law by the Clash.

If it is the FA Cup's destiny to arrive every year a little bit like a visit from the grandparents, a favoured dignitary prone to referring constantly to its own much-digested history, this is perhaps understandable. The Cup is routinely described as the oldest cup competition in the world, but even this sells it short. The FA Cup is the fountain-head of the modern game, its birth in 1872 providing the first occasion the FA rules of football were accepted as standard across the board, a take-it-or-leave-it rejection of the violent practice of "hacking" and of the public school habit – Peter Crouch take note – of propelling the ball towards goal with the hand.

Further testimony to this remarkably vivid history will come on Wednesday evening at The Oval, home of Surrey County Cricket Club and also, as it happens, the original home of the FA Cup final. For all its understated urban charm, The Oval is that kind of place, a ground with a tendency to be there on the big occasion: the first cricket Test match in England, the first rugby union international, the first unofficial football international, a 1-1 draw between England and Scotland in 1870 and the venue for the first Cup final in March 1872.

It is this occasion that is being commemorated next week, with teams from the two finalists, Wanderers and Royal Engineers – both of whom still exist in more or less the same form – staging a rematch. The match will be played in traditional kit but under modern rules, which is good news for those who see some progress in the introduction of the crossbar, goals with nets, the abolition of the need to change ends after each goal scored, and – something of a shame to lose this one – the rule stating that the team that gets hold of the ball first gets to take a throw-in.

The match is a charity affair organised by Surrey, with profits to the British Royal Legion, Haig Housing Trust and Lambeth Tigers FC. It promises a certain amount of pageantry, with the Band of the Corps of Royal Engineers playing, a rendition of Abide With Me before kick-off and the first ever FA Cup trophy to be presented at the end (it's owned, oddly enough, by David Gold, the West ham co-owner, who will presumably want it back afterwards).

Wanderers, victors in that first Cup final, are an interesting story in themselves, a grand old amateur team reanimated five years ago by the club secretary, Mark Wilson, with the intention of reviving a great footballing name for occasions such as these. Trained for the occasion by Bobby Gould, one of the select few to have won the Cup as player and manager, Wanderers will be the underdogs.

Royal Engineers do not play in a league as so many of their players are unavailable for long stretches of time due to real life distractions (tours of duty in Afghanistan, that kind of thing) but they play to a decent non-league standard: it seems likely 140 years of hurt may be about to come to an end for the FA Cup's first beaten finalists. Not that Wanderers will go down without a fight, judging by Saturday's training session at Southwark Park, which was punctuated by Gould's motivational barks. "Go to the corners! Go to the corners!" he yelled at the man with the ball, before, at one stage stopping practice in order to gather everyone together and shout: "Why has English football gone soft?"

The game is one thing; for those who luxuriate in the Cup's seductive historical currents, it is also an opportunity to remember the original 1872 competition, for which 15 teams entered, including Hampstead Heathens, a Harrow school old boys' XI and Scotland's champion club of the time, Queen's Park.

The competition had its oddities: Wanderers reached the final after winning just a single match in the preceding four rounds. Queen's Park reached the semis without playing at all after a series of walkovers, at which point they exited the competition after a 0-0 draw against Wanderers because they could not afford a second trip to London for the replay.

The final was decided by a single goal scored 15 minutes from the end by Morten Betts of Wanderers, playing, for reasons that remain obscure, under the pseudonym AH Chequer. Edmund Creswell of Royal Engineers suffered a broken collarbone but played on regardless for most of the match, a forerunner perhaps of the notorious Wembley Curse that led to players suffer terrible Cup final injuries in the 1950s and 1960s, among them Roy Dwight, Elton John's uncle, who broke his leg at Wembley playing for Nottingham Forest in 1959.

The final, for all its lack of goals, was reported as a triumph: a superbly athletic, supremely organised exhibition of what football might yet hope to be. Wanderers were presented with the trophy three weeks later at the Pall Mall restaurant in Charing Cross. After which the Cup began its own journey down the years through the vast crowds that flocked in later years to Crystal Palace, that first Wembley final in 1923, when a policeman on a grey horse helped clear the pitch of spectators and the crowd still thronged the touchline as the match was played, right through the peak years of the 1970s and 1980s when the Cup stood on its own as a competition of unsurpassed prestige.

Wednesday's Oval rematch is a chance to remember not just glories past but a little of this story too, football's own progress from the amateur fringes to its current position, noisily centre stage.