Town boss Paul Cook says he will play strong sides in cup competitions but not perhaps his strongest team with League One success “unbelievably” the number one priority.
The Blues have rarely made much progress in any cup competition in recent seasons with the various previous managers usually making wholesale changes.
"It’s always a very, very interesting one,” Cook said when asked how he will approach cup games. "I think if you look at the league campaigns now, we’re going to go into a 46-game campaign.
"Even when I took over at Portsmouth it was very interesting, we go into great detail about the travelling away from home, the journeys on a coach, the recovery time for games, the in-depth analysis into performances is huge.
"So from a manager’s point of view, this year we want to be promoted. There’s nothing else on our radar other than promotion.
"That’s top of the list. The FA Cup then is very much second in the list. Historically it’s a great competition to be in. As someone asked before, if we do get Liverpool [the club Cook supports], we will field a weakened team unfortunately, that’s life! But that’s just a one-off.
"I think as you fall, the Carabao Cup and the Papa John’s Trophy, I think you will see us make changes in those competitions due to the fact that we will prioritise the other competitions.
"If you look at the Newport game, for example, we will have a very strong team out against Newport, but it mightn’t be the strongest team.
"If we could get three points against Morecambe, three points at Burton and win at Cheltenham, for example, we’ll be top of the league, and we want to stay top of the league.
"The reality is league unbelievably number one, FA Cup number two, Carabao Cup and then Papa John’s Trophy.”
Reflecting on that competition, in which former boss Paul Lambert largely fielded U23s and U18s players last season, he added: "It’s just a really good debate. We got to the final when I was at Chesterfield, we lost to Peterborough 3-1 and we went on to go up that year.
"But we felt it really hindered our promotion push. We were postponing games to play games, we were fielding players.
"The reality is that if you could actually go and compete, then what a good day out at Wembley it is to win a football game. It was a great day at Wembley for me, but we lost. It actually felt with the squad it probably hindered us.
"The reality is that in those competitions we’ll probably see as we go, if we’re truthful. If there’s an opportunity to win games, we want to win football games. There’s no better habit in football than winning.
"I said to Mark [Ashton] after the game the other night that I was so pleased that we equalised at Colchester. We don’t want to be getting beat at Colchester under any circumstances, so as you say, there are opportunities for players through the academy and the U23s.
"A lot of our younger lads have been [promoted] to the first team too quickly. The reason for that is because the first team aren’t very good. Hopefully going forward those days will end.
"Our younger lads will aspire to be like the players in the first team. They’ll have role models they’re looking up to, not players that they’re better than. We’ve just got that balance wrong, but we’re in the process of correcting that now.”