After losing at home to Bristol City 10 days ago, Coventry would have been hoping to get back on track at Ipswich on Saturday. Instead they slipped to a 4-1 defeat, making in manager Iain Dowie’s words “far, far too many defensive mistakes to ever win a football game”.

Not surprisingly the former Charlton boss is looking for a much tighter performance from his players at Old Trafford as they bid to succeed where Chelsea failed, but his ambitions stretch beyond simply trying to keep the Reds at bay.

“We'll have a system and a plan to work hard but we’ll go there and play, with attacking intent,” said Dowie. “We’ll commit players forward when we’re in possession: you cannot afford to sit behind the ball with Man United because eventually they’ll rip you apart – [Michael] Carrick or [Paul] Scholes will pick a pass to open you up.”

Just a few hundred fans made the trip to East Anglia at the weekend but vast numbers of Coventry supporters are expected to head up the M6 and Dowie is determined to make their trip worthwhile. “We have got 11-and-a-half thousand fans going. They deserve a glimmer of hope and we want to make sure they have something to cheer about.”

Nigel Eccles, editor of the Coventry fanzine Gary Mabbutt’s Knee, is no doubt hoping that the Championship side will at least make a contest of Wednesday night’s game, but admits on GMKonline.com that his mindset ahead of the OT clash is one of “wide-eyed innocence”, adding that, like most of those 11,000 Sky Blues fans making the trip, he’ll be travelling “mainly in hope rather than optimism.”