“It doesn’t matter if we won it last year. We know playing for this club means you challenge for every competition.

“It helped us in terms of our progress as a team because the start of the year was very challenging and doing well in the cup and winning it accelerated some of our progress and belief in what we were doing.

“In terms of this year, we’re expected to challenge and that’s what we will be doing.

'Our form has been consistent and when we play well home or away we know we’re hard to stop, and that’s our aim on Wednesday.'

“Sometimes for clubs, the league has a lot of pressure because you’re always fighting for something and cups give you the chance to free yourself up a little bit, which gives teams a bit more licence to be aggressive in their approach.

“It shouldn’t affect us or our players because our approach is the same all the time but for the opposition,one-off game can lift their levels because they know they can progress into the next round and I’m looking forward to it.”

With so much football between now and the break for the World Cup, the manager says it’s important that the whole squad is used to ensure intensity levels are at their maximum.

For the game against Motherwell, Ange Postecoglou confirmed he will still be without Jota and David Turnbull through injury, but admits this period was all part of the planning during the summer months.

He added: “Jota’s progressing and is out training but won’t be right for tomorrow. The ones closest to coming back are Jota and Turnbull but they will miss tomorrow and we will see about the weekend.

“It’s challenging in respect of making sure the whole squad is primed to go and we’ve planned for this since pre-season.

'We knew the schedule and that’s why we’ve put a squad together that we have and made sure we got the extra bodies in because I knew we would need them in this period.'

“For me and the staff, it’s making sure the ones that are healthy, we are getting the sufficient work into them and they’re ready to go.”

The team head into the League Cup quarter-final on the back of an impressive 6-1 win over Hibernian on Saturday, the most goals the side had scored in a match since the 4-0 derby win in early September.

While the goals flooded back on Saturday, the manager explained that his side has been performing consistently in matches during the last six weeks.

“From my perspective we need to keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “The worst thing we can do when the goals aren’t going in is change our approach because we know we are still creating our chances.

“The answer doesn’t lie in doing anything differently. t lies in believing in our approach and eventually we take them and that’s what happened at the weekend.

“We believe in how we play our football and if we weren’t getting chances then that would be a different discussion for me, but our football has still been good in that final third.”

Manager: The nature of this club means we need to bring success