The Road To Wembley Starts Here

It is one of those stages of the competition where the interest has not yet taken off for the fans but each and every one of us will remember clearly the campaign from two years ago that saw us triumph in the final and lift our first ever piece of major silverware. That campaign started against Barnsley at the Liberty in from of just over 9000 people.

Playing that night were the likes of Mark Gower, Stephen Dobbie and Kemy Agustien – all of which should give you some idea as to how seriously we were taking the competition at that stage. I suspect that Garry Monk will have a similar viewpoint tonight with the likes of Jazz Richards, Josh Sheehan and Kyle Bartley coming into the team for valuable match practice but none expected to be near the thoughts of a start on Saturday against West Brom.

We are likely though in my view to see first starts for Federico Fernandez, Jefferson Montero and Bafetimbi Gomis which in itself I think makes the trip to the Liberty tonight worthwhile and suggests that the Swans should have too much for Rotherham in this particular game.

All three will be looking to make a good impression and stake their own claim for a start on Saturday and all three I think will be enough to make sure that Rotherham go back to South Yorkshire having exited the competition. Also in is likely to be Tom Carroll who signed for the Swans at the end of last week on a season long loan from Spurs. This is making for a strong looking Swans line up which suggests that the squad is looking in good shape with less than a week left of the transfer window.

Crowd wise I can see us going over the five figure mark this evening which for this stage of the competition is a good one and remember the views of the fans in that more than 75% of them believe that we are heading towards a quarter final at worse – with 1 in 3 believing that we could recover the trophy we surrendered so easily last season to Birmingham.

Garry Monk will just be hopeful that we maintain our good start to the season and head towards Saturday’s game with our winning streak continued which I think we will with a couple of goals to spare.

Swans 3 Rotherham 1 (I’m just going for the comparisons of our trophy winning year!)

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What would be your team selection for this fixture if you were Garry? You can use the Planet Swans selector feature to make your own selections for the game and post them in the comments boxes below and also on our forums.Click Here to make your selections

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