Crystal Palace v Cardiff City: live 19.35 Freedman on the virus and his team selection: "I've looked a few guys in the eye at five o'clock and decided to play them. It's such a big game. One or two do miss it but for the rest a couple of tablets will get them right. Fantastic old school management from one of the bright young things in the game there. Lifts the heart. 19.30 Only half an hour to go now until what Sky are billing as the chance of a lifetime. As if getting to a cup final only to be beaten by a Premier League club is something that never happens to either of these teams, eh? Anyway, hyperbol aside, a trip to Wembley is not to be sniffed at. I've got Cardiff winning by the odd goal in five tonight - yeah, that's right, five. 19.25 ...ews team news team news team n... Crystal Palace: Speroni; Ramage, McCarthy, Gardner, Parr; Zaha, Jedinak, Dikgacoi, Ambrose; Martin; Murray. Cardiff City: Heaton; McNaughton, Hudson, Turner, Taylor; Whittingham; Cowie, Gunnarsson, Ralls; Mason; Miller. 19.10 Henry Winter has had more than the normal amount of trouble getting to Palace's home (which is a lot). But is he down hearted? He tweets that he is not... Worth the traffic & the tyre blow-out to get to Selhurst Park: #cpfc v #cardiffcity + 2 of the best young managers around, Freedman & Mackay 18.50 So how did it come to this? Well, Cardiff needed extra time to see off Oxford United and Huddersfield in earlier rounds, as well as a penalty shoot-out to get past Leicester City, before pretty straightforward wins over Burnley and Blackburn. Palace, meanwhile got the better of Crawley, Wigan, Boro and Southampton. And one other, that you can relive through Darren Ambrose's Old Trafford screamer below. Or, if you don't like your pictures moving, via this slideshow of the win over United. 18.20 While we're waiting for news of which of Palace's Under 16 side will be asked to do a job tonight beyond cleaning boots (if they still do that, which they probably don't), you could do a lot worse than read today's 'Trending'. For no other reason than it contains Martin Keown being hit on the head with a ball when he wasn't looking... 18.00 Matt Damon and Dougie Freedman, on the face of it at least, have very little in common. Yet today Freedman has been having a fair tilt at reprising Damon's role of Mitch in the Steven Soderbergh pandemic alarm-fest Contagion, looking increasingly fraught and twitchy while desperately looking for a cure to a sudden and unexplained outbreak of the poorlies at, erm, Selhurst Park. No fewer than half a dozen of the Palace first team have this week made croaky-voiced phone calls to their boss to explain they won't be coming in to work today, what with them feeling a bit, you know, blruuuggh. The cause of the illness that has swept through Freedman's squad has not yet been identified (though man flu is, worryingly, the most likely explanation so far put forward) but it's playing merry heck with the Crystal Palace manager's team selection. "Hopefully it's not going to get any worse; we've just got to get on with it," the Palace manager stoically and correctly reasoned yesterday, of the news that Julián Speroni, Paddy McCarthy, Anthony Gardner, Nathaniel Clyne, Mile Jedinak and Sean Scannell have all been struck down. The players have been coming in throughout the day and have trained in different units. At the moment I am just dreading a phone call in the morning from the doctor. I will not know my team until 5pm. Speroni is expected to be a brave soldier and turn out - though probably wrapped up warm in something like loosely fitting tracky bottoms. And it now being after Freedman's own self imposed deadline for sick notes to call in, he should have a team in mind. Just probably not the one he would have liked for a Carling Cup semi-final. Cardiff City, meanwhile, couldn't be in ruder health if they were all simultaneously doing 100 squat thrusts while chugging down pint after pint of those fizzy vitamin c drinks and giving the collective bird out of the team bus window at a group of passing nuns. Kevin McNaughton and Rudy Gestede, both recently exiled from the treatment room for tonight's game, have both been declared fit to play after recovering from cases of calf and ankle ouch respectively. No one would reason that this tie is the glamour one of the pair, but with two Championship sides, and fairly decent ones at that, bidding for the right to meet either Manchester City or Liverpool at Wembley, it shouldn't be any the less compelling for that. Assuming Palace can get 11 bodies on the pitch.