Having three or four great players is a boost to any football club but having a squad of 20 good ones can be just as beneficial.

That's the feeling of Stevenage manager Alex Revell anyway and as if to prove his point, he named a side at Norwich that had seven changes to the one that beat Shrewsbury Town on Saturday - and it was anything but a weakened line-up.

That development of the playing staff, he explained, is a process that has been building for a few years, but it is one he and the club's board believe in.

Revell said: "One thing I will say is when Steve was here, he spoke about this a lot with Leon Hunter and the chairman and obviously I was involved with that. 

"He said it was learning that as a club you have to have competition to be successful, you have to. 

"It breeds spirit and a willingness to win and it brings [a high] level of performance every week. 

"I felt we had that when we got promoted so I wanted to replicate that. 

"It's really important that we have competition and now we’ve got Luther Wildin and Kane Smith at right-back. Left-back there’s Lewis Freestone and Dan Butler.  

"We've got Charlie Goode, Dan Sweeney, Carl Piergianni.  

"We’ve got Nathan Thompson. playing in the middle of the pitch and we've seen it all pre-season, he just takes to it like a duck to water. He was stepping in and showing real bits of quality [against Norwich]. 

"We want people to push and we want people to know that there's competition. 

"We've got a lot of games and everyone says it's a really tough league this year. 

"But it is an exciting league and we're going to need everyone to keep pushing." 

Next up is a trip to Huddersfield Town on Saturday, the relegated side entering the season as one of the title favourites.

And picking a side and tweaking the tactics will partly come from the evidence seen in the 4-3 loss at Carrow Road.

"We’ll look at the goals," said Revell, "because ultimately goals win games, so we need to look at them and how we defend them better. 

"Then we’ll look how we improve our overall shape. 

"We'll look at it like everything we do. We want to improve every day, we train and we want to improve what we deliver. 

"That helps us and it helps the players. 

"We'll prepare the team we feel is the best to go up there and put in a top performance against Huddersfield. 

"That’s how we’ll pick it, we'll pick it fairly and we'll pick it on who we think, and what shape, is best for us to go up there and get a result."

Boro will go up to Kirklees Stadium with a good amount of confidence. Not many teams will go to Carrow Road this season, score three, and yet come away on the losing side.

The Boro boss had one last thought on his side's performance in the Carabao Cup and the contest as a whole.

He said: "When you have moments of quality from certain individuals, they can turn up and they can score [at any time]. 

"I think that probably describes the third goal more so than others, a bit of quality on the edge of the box, we don't quite get there and it falls to the boy who smashes it in. 

"Ultimately, we wanted to come here and put on a good performance for the many people that travelled, because it was a fantastic support. 

"Hopefully they've gone home happy with what they've seen.  

"I think they’ll have seen some individual performances that they'll look at think ‘yeah, he really committed to what we're doing’. 

"[Carrow Road] is a great place to play football so we wanted to enjoy it. 

"And you don't enjoy losing, no one does and especially us, we're used to winning. 

"But there's a way to lose and you know what, we gave absolutely everything."