On Monday morning, Brian Barry-Murphy spoke to the press ahead of Tuesday night's Carabao Cup Quarter-Final.
With City hosting Chelsea in the Welsh capital this week, Brian discussed the Bluebirds' approach to a highly-anticipated fixture off the back of five consecutive victories in League One.
“The anticipation for the game ever since the draw was made has been evident everywhere we’ve been,” Brian began. “Luckily we’ve tried to detach ourselves from that as much as possible whilst focusing on the league campaign, but now that it’s here, I think that the game is going to be incredibly exciting for everyone.
“For myself and the players we still want to show ourselves in the best light and give a good account of ourselves when competing against a side who are the Club World Cup champions. We want to do our best and prepare properly for this game.
“It’s everything you want. We all have aspirations of testing ourselves against those at the highest level of the game.
"Whether we get there or not is unpredictable and not always clear, so this is a chance for us to see what it looks like and to give it absolutely everything, understand the level of opponent we’re facing and respecting it completely, but not being intimidated by that, and to give it a go as much as we can and see where it takes us.”
Discussing the excitement around the Club for the fixture, the City Head Coach reflected on our Carabao Cup campaign so far, with notable victories coming away from home against opposition in higher divisions. With a bumper crowd expected at CCS on Tuesday night, he called on that form to shine through against the Blues.
“We understand for ourselves that we’re a very big club with a huge supporter base," Brian continued. "We’ll have to try to give those fans something to feel exhilarated by tomorrow night.
“Every game that we’ve played in the competition we’ve tried to be on the front foot as much as possible, and to show ourselves in the most positive light. It’s what the supporters want to see both away and at home.
“Obviously the level of competition you face means how often that occurs in the game is different. For example against Burnley we were very proactive and very aggressive, but there were still spells in the second half where we had to defend deep."
He concluded: “In every game each team poses different challenges and a team of this calibre is clearly going to have the ball for spells of the game, and we have to show the different facets of our game to be in the right shape to compete with them.
“That’s something we can do; we have good players ourselves and tomorrow night is about trying to show that as much as possible.”