Matt Maher: The FA Cup offers opportunity to Wolves, West Brom and Aston Villa

Which is all well and good, except come the end of the season all Villa fans really want is to party like it’s 1996.

That, of course, is the last time their club won a major trophy. Ending a drought which will next month tick beyond the three-decade mark is among the primary targets of Unai Emery’s team this year, with Saturday’s FA Cup fourth round tie against Newcastle potentially another step along the road.

All the more surprising, then, to find a decent-sized portion of the fanbase suggesting their manager, to borrow a modern football phrase, “play the kids” and effectively write-off this year’s competition.

The argument is, with Villa still fighting for a top-four Premier League finish and also targeting glory in the Europa League, a Cup-run might risk stretching too far a squad hit hard by injuries since last month’s third round victory at Tottenham.

There’s undoubtedly some logic involved. It’s true the Cup, with no Champions League place to offer its winners, is by some distance the least lucrative of Villa’s goals. That’s why Emery has always been honest in ranking it third on his list of priorities.

But this is also a competition which carries substantial historical weight at a club for whom no supporter under the age of 75 will have any memory of the most recent of their seven triumphs.

The draw, admittedly, might have been kinder. For the second round running Villa have been paired against an opponent Emery ranks as greater “contenders” for silverware at the start of each season.

Yet they are also playing at Villa Park, a venue where despite some recent (in some cases freakish) wobbles, they rarely lose. Experience tells you the luck of the draw can also change. Last season Villa played Championship opponents in the fifth and sixth rounds on route to the semi-finals.

There is another way, too, to look at the subject of team selection.

While resting key players might ease the nerves of supporters who fear further bad luck with injuries, it is also true Villa are currently something of a new-look team, with January arrivals Douglas Luiz, Leon Bailey and Tammy Abraham still getting to grips with the manager’s system and their new/old team-mates.

Emery places a high value on “practice” in live matches. It’s why he’s happy to be in Europe every season, playing three times a week. It’s also why you suspect he’ll go strong as possible with the line-up on Saturday. 

There is a solid case to be made for Eric Ramsay doing the same, albeit the Albion boss has already stated he plans large-scale changes for his team’s tie at Norwich.

It’s certainly not unreasonable. After all, it is not as though the Baggies are aiming at winning the Cup. Their season has only one true battle, against relegation from the Championship. In that light, it is perfectly reasonable for Ramsay to rest certain key players, while giving some match practice to those who will still need to contribute during the campaign’s crucial run-in.

Yet it is also a fact that, despite improved performances in the past two matches which moved his team out of the relegation zone, the new head coach is still to win a match since taking charge last month. 

As a team, Albion have won only two of their last 12 in all competitions, one of those being last month’s shoot-out victory at Swansea in the Cup’s third round. 

There’s certainly something in the argument winning breeds winning. Villa, to use just one obvious example, sparked their season belatedly into life with early victories in the Europa League and having finally built just a little momentum - and lifted the immediate pressure - with those draws against Stoke and Blues, a win on Saturday would send Albion and their head coach into a trio of key Championship fixtures against Coventry, Charlton and Oxford with greater momentum.

The debates around Villa and Albion’s team selections centres around just how much the clubs have distractions elsewhere.

There is no such issue at Wolves, where the competition represents the last beacon of hope in an otherwise awful season.

After a five-match unbeaten run through the first half of January briefly lifted spirits, recent weeks have brought them back down to earth. True, Rob Edwards’ team might have avoided a fourth straight defeat thanks to Wednesday’s 0-0 draw at Nottingham Forest but other than the performance of goalkeeper Jose Sa, there were few positives to take from a match which, were it not for the abject finishing of the home side, would have resulted in a heavy defeat.

This FA Cup fourth round weekend and trip to Grimsby offers the chance to forget any morbid calculations of just when, precisely, relegation will be confirmed. It also represents just the second time in the entire campaign Wolves will go into a match as favourites.

There’s no excuse for Edwards not to name his strongest possible line-up. Emery and Ramsay, his West Midlands’ counterparts, may well point to other priorities but this feels a weekend they should take just as seriously too.