The current group of Swindon Town under-18s are in rarefied air when it comes to their achievements this season.

Only five teams in the club’s history have managed to make it to the FA Youth Cup quarterfinals before (2006/07, 2003/04, 1972/73, 1963/64, and 1960/61) and only Don Rogers and his team of 1963/64 have managed to go further.

Tonight, they will face local rivals Bristol City at Ashton Gate to see if they can join the man who has a stand named after him and a statue on the way and surpass the achievements of Lukas Jutkiewicz, Nathan Thompson, Callum Kennedy, Mustapha Carayol, Michael Pook, Dave Syrett, John Trollope, Ernie Hunt, Mike Summerbee, and Roger Smart.

“First and foremost we changed a lot of the off-field culture,” said manager Sean Wood about how he had gone about creating a side capable of this, “I speak about that quite a lot and make sure all of the boys understand what a boy in our environment looks like, the academy values that are now club values, and make sure everything off the pitch is set-up for the boys to be able to thrive within that.

“Those changes were quite big to start with, some of the boys took to them straight away and for some, it took a little bit longer. Now you can see that real togetherness and character as a group of players who are working hard for each other.

“Within youth development, we are looking to produce individuals, and with the training methods we use, there is individual time for the boys to work towards their individual development plans.

“We knew what group we had, we knew the ability within the group, but we knew that to achieve what we have done so far this season there had to be a real togetherness. We needed to improve the characteristics of a lot of the players to achieve what we have done.”

George Alston joined the academy at the age of eight and has been at the club ever since alongside many of his teammates.

“We are really close," Alston said, "In our team, a lot of them have come through the academy. I know the club has really focused on this age group to bring us together and we have become good friends.

“It built a good bond between us, and we have worked well as a team through the whole season. Woody [Sean Wood] has been my coach since I was really young and so we have a really good connection with him as a team and that has helped build our success.

“[All the experiences] have helped me develop as a person as well. I don’t live with my parents during the week, I am with a host family, so I have learned to be more of an individual and mature a bit. You are preparing on your own, you don’t have someone telling you to do things, so these things build you as a person as well as a footballer.”

The culture has served Swindon very well, dispatching an otherwise undefeated Manchester United side without any real problems and displaying a somewhat unnerving grit at this level to come through with a win at the Stadium of Light in the last round.

Wood explained the culture he had tried to build: “We have some set areas of development that we go after with the boys. We talk about being a proficient performer, athletic versatility, being continuously curious, and then being able to learn.

“Within that they have an individual development plan, and you are still within a team sport, so you are working game to game. In the four competitions that we play in, we try and be competitive in all of them. This year we got to the semi-final of the Youth Alliance League Cup and lost on penalties, we finished second in the Youth Alliance League by one minute, we are still in the FA Youth Cup, and we went out of the Under-17 Floodlit Cup in the group stage.

“We try and be as competitive as we can, but everything is a learning experience, and we try and reflect on everything that we do with the players and staff. That involves some player ownership, watching their games back, feeding back to the group, and every Monday morning we meet and discuss the previous game and then move on to the next. Reflect, evaluate, and then what do we need to do next?”

So, should we be expecting this level of success every year? Wood explained that it was not quite that simple, but the building blocks were in place.

He said: “Longer term you will be judged on how many players from an academy environment play in your first team. We all aspire to get as many young players as possible capable of playing in League Two, League One football, and hopefully above. We have to make sure we are doing everything right on and off the pitch.

“This process starts at seven, eight, nine when players join our academy and all of the coaches and staff that work with our academy in an eight-to-ten-year period. If we can get everything right, the players can learn from the experiences, and they have that parental support along the journey then it gives them the best possible chance. Then it is over to us to make sure that we work with and set our youth team up to be hard to beat and hopefully attacking and exciting going forward.

“That longer term could look completely different year on year, this year we have done really well and next year we would aspire to do something similar, but it may look slightly different due to many variables.”