Blackburn preview

The fourth game of the Mancini era was meant to be the League Cup semi-final against United. But it wasn't. Which is fortunate: the learning process can continue with a fourth easy game, as Mancini continues to assess which team he can put out will be best suited to getting us to Wembley. I know that if we win tonight we go fourth, but with this semi-final coming up I barely care about our progress in the league.

That doesn't mean that a win isn't important. Failure to take three points against a very limited Blackburn Rovers side would be a set back to our momentum and confidence with the first leg against United only eight days away. But wins can be important in different ways, and there are more important things at stake tonight than just three points. Primarily, tonight should provide answers to a few questions that remain unanswered.

Do we need a target man up front? Will Roque Santa Cruz come back into the side, or will Mancini stick with the Molineux combination of Craig Bellamy and Carlos Tévez? Will the arrival of Patrick Vieira lead to a change to 4-3-3? This seems to be best way of including him with both Nigel de Jong and Gareth Barry, but it doesn't seem like the best way of arranging the team in a home game against Blackburn. And what of Shaun Wright-Phillips? His injury has come at the worst possible time, interrupting his good spell of form and preventing him from being involved in Mancini's first three games. Mancini clearly rates both Bellamy and Martin Petrov, and while Hughes could fit all three players in his 4-2-4 system I imagine that his successor will be less willing to do so. I don't mean all these questions as criticisms of Mancini, in a 'he still doesn't know his best team' sense, but it is certainly true that much remains unknown - even to Mancini himself - about which players and which systems will be most deployed in the era.

We are fortunate that this learning process has taken place so far through an easy run of fixtures. Goodison Park on Saturday will provide a different intensity of challenge, but this evening should not. Blackburn have taken five points from a possible 33 on the road to date: winning in Bolton and drawing in Wigan and Hull. They lost 6-2 at the Emirates, 5-0 at Stamford Bridge, and 3-0 at Craven Cottage and Goodison Park. That said, we failed to beat Hull City or Burnley at CoMS under Mark Hughes, and neither of those sides have won a single away game thus far this season. So tonight will test our post-Hughes ruthlesness.

As I said above, we can't yet predict the team. But we can predict the result: I'm going for a comfortable, if not especially compelling, 2-0 win.