First there was Tuesday night's FFA Cup match between our Tuggeranong United FC (a shy but plucky, slightly-built David) and the A-League's Melbourne Victory (a swaggering, hulking Goliath).

Then on Saturday night there is the Canberra Choral Society's production of Handel's Alexander Balus, never staged in Australia before, let alone in this effervescent metropolis. In our picture we see the CCS rehearsing this week as the Chorus of Asiatics (hence the headscarves) getting in the mood for Saturday night's triumphant opening chorus "Flush'd with conquest." Our chorister/reporter embedded with the choir explains that as they yodel this the Asiatics are rejoicing at Alexander's victory over the fiendish Syrians so that the mood of the chorus "is a bit like happy football fans going 'Woohooo! We beat the bastards!' "

Staying with football and with competing with bastards, the Tuggeranong versus Melbourne Victory match was the first Canberra fruit of this first ever season of the FFA Cup. It is a competition that imitates Britain's famous FA Cup in which, when the planets and the draws align properly, unfashionable, battling, sometimes even amateur sides can find themselves pitted against filthy-rich giants of the game. Everybody loves a David versus Goliath contest, in sport, in politics, in love, in growing prize-winning dahlias, in everything.

That a version of the FA Cup should at last have followed me to these dominions, and to my Canberra, feels wondrous. A highlight of this columnist's football-packed English childhood was the 1959 occasion when the FA Cup pitted my lowly (but adored) third-division Norwich City FC against the might of Manchester United, at Norwich, in front of 35,000 thrilled East Anglian yokels. Imagine our simple yokel ecstasy when we not only beat the glamorous millionaires but a local, Norfolk boy scored all of our goals, or "ghouls" as we called them in our musical local dialect.

Your columnist is a long-time supporter of battling Tuggeranong FC in our local Premier League. I chose them long ago because their green and white hoops make them the prettiest side of all in our local Premier League (aesthetics is an important part of fandom and has always made support of the lime-green Raiders problematic); because their usual home pitch Kambah 2 is in a scenic spot (with mountain views) where flocks of galahs wheel through the clean, clear air just above the players' heads, where the intimacy of the ground enables you to hear every word the players sing out and because the hot kransky rolls served there on cold Sunday winter afternoons from a primitive volunteer-staffed canteen are one of the great culinary delights of the city.

When they are not being the Chorus of Asiatics in Alexander Balus the Canberra Choral Society choristers are the Chorus of Israelites. This column's reporter embedded with the choir advises how, on Saturday, we will hear moving closing choruses in which a military victory is marked but this time darkly, mournfully, (without any woohooing), with a kind of search for hope underway after the horrors of war. The CCS's artistic director Tobias Cole felt that this helped make Alexander Balus an appropriate work to tackle as we commemorate the centenary of the awfulness of the Great War.

Alexander Balus is at the Canberra Playhouse this Saturday at 7.30. Ticketing information is at the Canberra Theatre Centre website.