Let me begin by shocking you.

Before we played Cardiff City in the EFL Cup last season, I had a horrible feeling we’d lose, and a shocking thought occurred to me.

I’d be more upset if we did than if we lost to Chester.

It’s true; I’m not just angling for an impact.

Part of it was the knowledge that victory would match our best run in the competition.

Part of it was knowing we’d rotate for the match, and fearing they wouldn’t, with momentum already on their side after a scintillating start to a season which ended in promotion.

Most of it, though, was the chip on my shoulder about the Welsh capital which made me fear defeat to them in our first clash since 2004, and our first meaningful match against them since 2002, as we’d been facing them in the weird and marginal Welsh Premier Cup rather than the league or a knock-out competition with a bit more heft.

So when the fixtures were released and it was revealed out opening match would be in Cardiff, it wasn’t possible to offer a tastier clash to kick off the campaign.

Last season was the first time we’ve been in a higher division than Cardiff since 2001, and that was one of my favourite things about our sudden elevation through the leagues.

People suggested to me that they hoped The Bluebirds would bounce straight back up so there would be three Welsh teams in the Championship. It was a completely alien concept to me.

Quite apart from the desire to do Welsh football a proper favour by being in the Premier League this season, I didn’t want Cardiff to achieve parity any time soon: if we had to stay down, my preferred scenario was for Swansea to be relegated and Cardiff to remain where they were so we could look down imperiously on both of them!

While we were in the National League, there was a patronising tone to Cardiff supporters’ view of us: if they acknowledged us at all, it was to consider us as their cute, harmless little cousins, who they vaguely wished well because we could never be a threat to them.

Little did they know that we were coming to get them!

The Bluebirds are fresh from promotion and will be eager to keep the momentum going. The atmosphere will be crackling. What an opening test for a side who will want to go further than we did last season.

Constant South Walian media bias, a feisty rivalry as we tussled to be Welsh top dogs during my teenage years and a terrifying memory of their fans in those days all play into my view, which is admittedly uncommon, that there is more animus between us and Cardiff than there is with our mock-Tudor neighbours.

I’ll never understand how the South Walian media managed to romanticise City’s “Ayatollah” gesture into a fun thing. When it first appeared on the terraces in the early 1990s, a morally questionable mockery of hysterical funeral scenes in Iran at the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini.

It was a head-tapping prelude to a head-cracking experience, made by The Bluebirds’ hooligan contingent before they ran amok.

Similar affection was transmitted for a group of City fans who were always prominent at the front of their support, dressed in surgical scrubs and known as “The Surgeons”.

Again, it was a misplaced attempt to frame hooligans as “characters”: these were the top boys of the Soul Crew, who used the irony of their outfits and convenient face masks that came along with them to terrorise anyone they came across.

I don’t feel the same about the Cardiff women’s team, despite them being our main rivals in the Adran Premier. That’s not because we turned the tables on them last season in a glorious campaign which was hopefully the launch pad for even greater journeys into the furthest realms of glory.

They’ve offered me the opposite of my experience with their men’s team over the years. They are classy, led by their founder and club secretary Mike Thomas, who radiates his love of football constantly.

His example spreads through the club and they’re a class act, despite my odd experience at a game last season when some of their fans enjoyed gloating over Chelsea beating us than their own cup triumph at The Racecourse a month or two earlier.

Nearly defeating the Club World Champions with ten men isn’t a stick anybody else tries to beat us with!

Ignore my soft spot for our Adran Premier rivals though. Monday will be fierce. We have an experienced side with real quality running through it, but it will be tested to the extreme when we head south.

We need to maintain the structure which underpinned our pre-season and stick to our principles of play, passing quickly to feet under pressure in our own half as Cardiff tear at us.

Crucially, we also have to shed our recent habit of not carving out clearcut chances from promising situations.

If we can, we could put last season’s loss behind us and cement our new status as Wales’ top team.