The Carabao Cup provides one of two chances for Championship clubs to end with a cup final at Wembley but it will always start with a quiet night in August where the larger number of fans elect to stay away and watch what is often two second string sides battle it out.
You can contrast that to a cup final in February where more than 80,000 fans will watch the final at Wembley knowing that for the victors a European place beckons, something that of course we know all to well from the not too distant past.
It’s a competition where those sides playing in European competition don’t appear until the Third Round and the first round stage is just for EFL sides but it is a competition that we won back in 2013 and gave us many memories that we will never forget.
It is Northampton Town at the Swansea.com Stadium tomorrow which presents some interesting chances for Michael Duff as he looks at how he can build on an opening day point on Saturday against Birmingham. Duff has the chance to use some of the players who didn’t get any, or certainly much, game time on Saturday and that is certainly something that surely he will do.
When you look at the bench from Saturday it is very easy to see the likes of Fisher Allen, Ginnelly and Kuharevich all getting a start. Add to that Cullen and Abdulai who both came on on Saturday and you start thinking that these players are likely to certainly play a part as the Swans look to advance to Round Two. The Coopers – Brandon and Ollie – are also surely both in with a chance as would be Kyle Naughton which is now starting to suggest to us that maybe the squad isn’t as thin as it has been made out to be.
I don’t see this as a competition that Duff will want to exit quietly and therefore I do expect to see almost the reverse of Saturday with many of the players we saw playing this weekend lining the bench to ensure that we progress – Duff knows more than anyone that winning can create habits and he will want to win this one.
Northampton opened their season with a 1-0 home defeat to Stevenage and they will clearly want to put that behind them and try and cause some level of upset at the Swansea.com Stadium before they travel to Wigan on Saturday.
Jon Brady had mixed views after that weekend defeat where he felt his side should have had the game wrapped up at half time. “We hit the woodwork twice and we had some really good entries into their box,” he told the official Northampton website.
“In the second half we weren’t great on the ball and we needed to make better decisions and show a lot more composure.”
Michael Duff: “This is a transitional phase we are in, there are new ideas and new players and it takes time for everything to slot into place and, as I’ve already said, I thought there were plenty of positives to take (from Birmingham).
“We’ve had a couple of days to recover, to assess the players on the back of Saturday, and whatever team takes the field tonight, we will be going out there looking to win and work our way through the rounds in this competition.
“We will face a Northampton side who will relish the opportunity to take us on in our backyard, and we need to approach this game with a real good attitude and energy.”
These games are vital for lifting confidence and they provide an opportunity for fringe players to get a game .Without a reserve league and a huge firdt team bench lots of players will get st most 10 or 15 minutes gametime a week