Saints travel up to the Potteries knowing if they can overcome Stoke City then they have a great chance of having a shot at a trip to Wembley in the Capital One Cup.
Saints arrive at the Britannia Stadium with the psychological advantage after a fairly comprehensive league victory over Stoke a few days ago, however it will be a different ballgame with Stoke being very strong at home over the past season or so.
In most Cup games these days the big question will be what sort of team will each club put out, whilst Im not to sure about how seriously Mark Hughes will take this game and whether the defeat on Saturday will have made him look over his shoulder in the League and prefer to concentrate on making sure Stoke with a tough home game against in form West ham on Saturday don't get sucked into the relegation battle, Ronald Koeman has already set out his stall for this competition.
That stall means making a couple of changes either tactically or to give someone a rest and in the main putting out a side almost as strong as would have been his first choice side in the league.
That could mean another chance for the highly rated Matt Targett who has featured in the previous two rounds at left back but has not as of yet made a Premier League start, a minute off the bench against QPR being his only action for the club in anger, there are a couple of reasons why Koeman might want to play Targett, not last that with Ryan Bertrand only on loan from Chelsea he might need to play Targett on New years day when Bertrand will not be able to play against his parent club.
But it won't just be that, Koeman knows he needs to blood a few promising youngsters, but with taking the cup competitions seriously he won't get too much chance to do that as with previous managers who have played the youngsters en masse in the past.
Other changes may be Shane Long in for Mane who is carrying an ankle knock as well as a run out for Florin Gardos who has not had much chance for time on the pitch this term due to the good form of Fonte and Alderweireld, however Gardos is a quality player amnd needs game time to keep him sharp and fresh.
Make on bones about it, this is an important game for Saints, its the chance to make a real statement of intent in a Cup competition, we need to be challenging in the cups to build on the foundations we now have, otherwise we just become another run of the mill Premier league side concerned only with avoiding the drop, do that and eventually the good players leave and relegation follows, we need these sort of challenges in a season, put bluntly a lot of players in our squad will again be the focus of attention both in January and in the summer, if we can offer them a shot at glory both in the domestic cup competitions but also in the Europa League it will be a lot easier to hang on to our quality players.
Key to the game will be as on Saturday getting forward and attacking them at pace, hopefully they will have to come out at us more tonight than they did on Saturday when they were content to sit back and not give us room to get in behind them, if we can get a goal or two then we can control the game.
If things go to form Saints should win tonight, we have the firepower and we have the squad, if Mark Hughes plays a real weakened side then it would make things easier, but indications are that like Koeman he will make subtle changes rather than mass ones, so it will be a case of doing what we usually do well, well !
In years gone by Stoke has been a happy hunting ground for us, but not recently and our last two visits have ended in draws, both shrouded in poor defending from Saints , cut that out of our game tonight and there is no reason why we should not be in the hat for the draw for the next round