Had another thought (if it's not too late) --- Suspend all pre-match injury and suspension events for major cups?
Or maybe just for semi-finals and finals.
Rationale? Over a season the match engine can (and does) influence certain results (in ways nobody? could ever understand) but, over a season, those results probably even out (and managers have a chance to make their whole-season performance negate them). In cups, matches are one-off. No coming back from defeat (and especially bad if the squad is at the end of its best-before life). So make the cups "fair" contests and not geared towards the luckier of two managers on the day (or the managers with the all-round stronger squads).
No doubt some will say the supposed "unpredictability" of the cups makes for more enjoyment (though I'd guess many of them would be managers who win lots of cups
) so why not just one cup to try the idea out? Public opinion and all that?
PS It's pretty unlikely, IMO, that I will have any semi-finals to worry about in the near future so I make this suggestion totally altruistically and for the benefit of SL1 managers generally.