FAN’S VIEW: 24/25 – No.3: CARABAO CUP ROUND ONE

How important is this cup to us as a Championship club?

It is difficult to gauge how much prestige this competition carries in 2024. More or less than when we had that scarcely believable day at Wembley 38 years ago? Without giving it much thought I would go for a lot less but in the last ten years Manchester City have won it five times, Manchester United and Liverpool both twice and Chelsea once. What does that say about the biggest clubs’ attitude to this trophy? Okay, I get that they often put out their second strings and give youth a chance but they still very much want to win it and Liverpool achieved that last season with quite a few kids involved. Nice to see Klopp get some silverware in his final season for the Reds.

Truthfully for those at the very pinnacle of English football it’s all about trying to win the Premier League and Champions League. Nothing else comes close. The FA Cup is way down the list and the Carabao Cup is behind that.  Those fighting for survival at the top table in particular will look on it as a major distraction.

Promotion to the Premier League for many Championship clubs will also be what it is all about. Forget the Carabao. If I was offered another day that panned out like 20 April 1986 with Elliott Moore lifting the trophy as Malcolm Shotton had done or guaranteed Championship football again in 25/26 I’d take the latter every time.

Another telling factor is the very reasonable prices to attend and the fact that much of the stadium will not be opened. There’s a lot of legitimate complaining to be done when it comes to tickets but not for this one. Season ticket holders £10. Senior season ticket holders £5.

This season we don’t have to play in the EFL Micky Mouse Trophy. Good riddance to it and the U21s of Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea and West Ham etc.  The downside is that we lose that option to give first team (that’s what the Papa John’s is for EFL clubs apparently) game time to squad players, youngsters coming through and those trying to get back to fitness for the real thing.

So I was expecting the tie against Peterborough to be used along these lines with many changes from Saturday. We now have a squad of significant depth and quality and there must be many players who didn’t start against Norwich who will be itching to get out there. We could field a completely different team.  Matt Ingram. Peter Kioso. Josh McEachran. Matt Phillips. Malcolm Ebiowei. Louie Sibley. Idris El Mizouni. Marcus McGuane. Greg Leigh. Jack Currie. Jordan Thorniley. Gatlin O’Donkor. And we’ve just signed Dane Scarlett on a year’s loan from Spurs. Plus there’s the guys who are injured: Will Goodwin. Kyle Edwards. Owen Dale?

Our opponents

I would quite like to have drawn a team from L2 that we have not faced recently. Colchester or Bromley away would have allowed me to tick off one of two new grounds. But Peterborough it was. A side we are very familiar with. We’ve played them 18 times in the last eight years. Could have done without this one but there will be an edge to the game which will elevate it above the norm for round one. It was fine margins when we got past them in the play-off semi-finals. Unlike the final, the outcome of those two matches could quite easily have gone the other way. They’ll be out for revenge. Out to prove a point.

The Posh were beaten 2-0 at home by Huddersfield in their opening game on Saturday.

Colin covered their finances and ownership in excellent detail back in April. Nothing much has noticeably changed since although some charges have been registered at Companies House which means they’ve been doing some borrowing. Don’t know why or what for.

OXFORD UNITED 2 PETERBOROUGH UNITED 0

I was expecting Peterborough to give us a harder game than we’d had on Saturday but I don’t think that was the case even if they did cut us open more than Norwich did and Ingram had to make more saves than Jamie Cumming did.

There was never the intensity about this one and on reflection there probably was never going to be, even if Posh had been 110% determined to turn us over, given that it was played in front of just 3693 spectators.

We ran out worthy winners with the two goal margin being about right. The most pleasing thing for me though was that we did this with eight changes to the starting eleven we’d fielded three days earlier. Our visitors only made three.

This bodes well for the months ahead as it shows we’ve got real depth within our squad now. Some players on show we already knew a lot about; others just about nothing. On what I saw there were some who looked like they could fit into the first team quite nicely indeed and others I wasn’t so sure about.  

In the first 10 minutes or so we looked very much like what we were – a team that hadn’t played together other than in training sessions – and we were a bit all over the place. Mistakes were being made.

We soon settled down though and whilst we never hit the cohesive heights we achieved against Norwich with our unrelenting harrying we still did enough to get on top.

On 20 minutes Peterborough had a throw-in from which they went backwards and with the ball on its way to Australian keeper Nicholas Bilokapic, Tyler Goodrham thought I’m having that. He half tackled Bilokapic who didn’t know what was going on and ended up with a tap in from a yard out. A chance that it really was impossible to miss. This wasn’t the first time Posh have put on such a defensive display at the Kassam.

We began to keep the ball better and a second goal arrived in the 41^st minute. We won possession in the centre of the park and the impressive Goodrham, who’d nearly scored with a curler before he put us into the lead, drove forward and pushed the ball on to Ruben Rodrigues our centre-forward for the evening. RR managed to take it on and retain possession despite Oscar Wallin’s challenge. He found Louie Sibley who burst between flat footed defenders and in the blink of an eye had squared the ball to Matt Phillips for another tap in from close range.

These two impressed me a lot. Sibley a hardworking midfielder with no little skill and it was clear to see what a fit Phillips will offer. There were a couple of times when he looked a level above what was going on. He was quick and made things look so simple and easy.  

What about the others?

Very early on Ingram didn’t look comfortable saving with his chest and in the second half gave the ball away playing out but other than that I was well satisfied with him. He looked confident and made some good saves. I particularly liked the one that he got down to and then shot an arm out to gather before a Peterborough player could get on to it. He should be challenging Cumming for the number one slot.

Our full backs were Kioso and Leigh. I didn’t think the former looked better than Long had previously and he appeared to have a bit of a problem staying on his feet at times. There’s a lot to like about Leigh but he is not as good a defender as Joe Bennett who was sitting just behind us with a few of the other Oxford players not involved. Scarlett was with them.

We had a new centre-half pairing, Long and Thorniley. If either of the first choice are not available Long may well be the go to man with Kioso coming in at RB. This demonstrates the Bicester lad’s value to the squad and he is so much more assured on the ball now. Thorniley is something of a forgotten man. He played more in the half season we had him on loan than in the year since we signed him permanently. Early on I thought he looked a bit lost but he grew into the game and must have been doing something right. When a defender powered the ball away with his head my “well done Elliott” (because it looked like the action of our no.5 and Moore had come on in the 61^st minute) got this response from my son: “that was Thorniley”.

At times El Mizouni looked to be a big presence but there were large spells of the game when I hardly noticed him.

Josh McEachran we know about. He was the same as ever. Never gives the ball away. Always finds a team mate. Probably the best at the club at this. He wasn’t a starter last season and certainly won’t be this, but when retaining the ball is vital, he’s your man. Whenever I see him play I wonder how it would have turned out if he’d been a bit pacier and had a bit of the Cameron Brannagan aggression about him.

Ebiowei replaced Phillips at half time. He’s tricky and can work in tight spaces but I’ve got a feeling he might be too flash for me. I will keep an open mind of course.

Gatlin O’Donkor had half an hour. He nearly scored and was only thwarted by a very good save but I can’t envisage him breaking through in a Championship squad. He’s still only 19 though.

I’m not sure the second half was much worth bothering with, not a lot happened in it and I even wonder if deep down both managers wouldn’t have minded if we’d all gone home after the first 45 minutes. Peterborough, at 2-0 down, didn’t really come out all guns blazing. There was one attack in the second half when they really went for it with half a dozen players sprinting forward with real purpose but nothing came of it and they never did it again. Thoughts were probably on their game at Shrewsbury this coming weekend.

Having lost in the play-off semi-finals to us their ambition no doubt is to go one better. Having lost their first league game and then getting knocked out of this competition at the first time of asking shouldn’t be too worrying if they were to look at our record last season. We were awful at Cambridge and then got annihilated at Bristol City.

A couple of comments on the BBC website from Peterborough fans make interesting reading.

“I now begin to understand that your play-off win against us was no fluke and feel better about it.”

“Oxford are our bogey team, so that defeat was expected. We’ll have to seek our revenge for that unlucky play-off result next season in League One or The Championship.”

And this from an Oxford supporter: “Maybe four months ago beating Peterborough would have seemed a really big deal.  Now we do it with a reserve 11. Incredible progress from Des and recruitment. Yellows, yellows, yellows etc.”

And the draw, the bloody draw. I don’t normally do much moaning about who we get because it is what it is and we can’t do anything about it. But FFS, Coventry. We had them in the FA Cup last year and we go there on Friday night for our first away game back in the Championship. Then after Blackburn back we go. A bit of variety would have been nice.