[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

If there's a silver lining to last week's disappointing late defeat at Burnley, it's that the slightly-more-diminished chance of automatic promotion gives us licence to put the league to one side and take our budding cup run seriously this weekend, as the tides of fourth-round fortune sweep us fittingly down to Ashton Gate for our fourth ever FA Cup tie against Bristol City.

Encouragingly, our three previous encounters in this competition - in 1910, 1926 and 2016 - all saw Albion progress, and having already triumphed in Bristol on Boxing Day, we're in with a shout of winning two away games against one opponent in a single season for the first time since doing it to both Coventry and Peterborough in the course of our 2007-08 cup run; the one which took us to a Wembley semi-final. But while Albion have scored in all but one of our last nineteen FA Cup matches (Brighton in January 2019 being the last side to shut us out in the competition), the Robins haven't conceded more than once in their last eleven (since Watford beat them 3-0 in January 2018), and having reached the fifth round in 2019 and 2021, it could be argued that they're more of a cup side lately than we've been for many a moon. Certainly, if the kind of makeshift team that appeared at Chesterfield puts in another indifferent showing, getting out of jail might prove a harder task this time.

All the same, I'll take an optimistic view and back us to at least take this one to a replay if we can't snatch a win on the day. Bouncing back after last week's setback is the number one priority, and there's no better time to start than now.