Where Have All The Carling Cup Shocks Gone?

This week's round of Carling Cup matches recount a sorry tale for anybody looking for tale of cup romance or an upset.

With depressing predictability, the Premier League heavyweights bulldozed their way through to the quarter-finals draw that will include six of the current top eight together with Blackburn and Portsmouth.

So now we know what to expect in the later rounds. More of the same, with the odds on the trophy returning to a familiar home shortening with every round.

Not that there had been much in the way of shocks earlier in the competition. The last 16 was hardly peppered with lower league clubs who had battled their way through on the back of heroic victories against the odds.

Trace back through this year's competition and Burnley's exit at Barnsley, together with Wigan's defeat at Blackpool, stand out as the only occasions Premier League sides fell to teams outside the top-flight.

So what has happened to the competition? The League Cup, in all its many guises, used to be the one competition that was almost guaranteed to throw up a surprise, especially when the bigger clubs followed Manchester United's lead and began using it as a testing ground for youngsters and reserves.

Non-Premier League sides often featured in the later rounds while the roll-call of winners from 1997-2004 includes Leicester City, Middlesbrough, Blackburn, pre-Abramovich Chelsea, Spurs and Liverpool; all top-flight teams but none of them champions-to-be. Since then though, the trophy has swapped between Chelsea and Manchester United in a pattern interrupted only by Tottenham's defeat of Chelsea in 2008.

Not much has changed in terms of the approach of the bigger teams who routinely field line-ups that would look out of place in a regular Premier League fixture. The difference now is that the most successful clubs possess squads that are bigger and stronger than ever before and their second-string is often more than a match for opponents from the bottom half of the table, never mind a challenger from the Championship.

But there is another factor at play. The dominance of Manchester United and Chelsea over the last five years means there are effectively fewer trophies to go round the chasing pack that has been swollen by success-hungry newcomers such as Manchester City.

Silverware is a manager's most effective defence when he is seeking to prove himself so it's no wonder that City's Mark Hughes, Liverpool's Rafael Benitez and, increasingly after four seasons without a trophy, Arsenal's Arsene Wenger have placed a greater priority on the competition.

Arsenal's victory over Liverpool this week means Benitez will have to look elsewhere this season if he is to add another line on his CV but for most of the other Premier League managers still involved, the competition undeniably offers them their best hope of success.

For Hughes' City, of course, the 1976 League Cup Final was their last taste of silverware - a phenomenal 34-year run of futility which means that the Blues, in their desperation to end that depressing record, would appear to offer the best hope of an "upset" in this year's competition. That is assuming you can describe a team assembled at a cost of well over £200 million winning the third most important domestic trophy can be described as an "upset."

It's just a shame there aren't more unfamiliar names still in with a shout.