Peter Withe

Now, this isn't confirmed by the club, but they seem more interested in denying rumours at the minute, although I suspect it's more a case of having something to publish on the web, but Sky Sports seem certain it's happened.

If reports are to be believed we've offered West Ham £11mn. for 29 year old defender Matthew Upson.

Now, while this points to Martin Laursen having a much more serious injury then we're led to believe and Martin O'Neill fears he won't be coming back, okay maybe it doesn't but it could, £11mn. for a little above average defender is madness.

On Sunday Tony Cascarino made a statement that must have sent shock waves through any Villa fan over the age of thirty; 'The Villa just need a 20 goal a season man to make them real contenders'. Well, the words were something like that.

This was the man who nearly twenty years ago when Villa were top of the league was signed for a club record fee to score the goals to win us the league. We all know how that ended.

It wasn't the most convincing of performances and while you have to factor in that it was the FA Cup and it was their game of the season, I put it down to a simple error; change of formation.

A spirited display from Gillingham wasn't enough and while they may feel a little hard done by we never really seemed to move into top gear today and if we had have done, you'd fancy we would have done better.

Still, two goals from James Milner saw us do just enough to get our hat into the fourth round draw, which is going to get drawn in a minute so I'll probably let you know by the end of this post who we've got and in the title.

Morning all. Not long until the game so I'm making this a quick one as I've got a lot on before kick off and while it's mostly rumours, they're quite interesting ones.

After the start of the football season, today is the other day I look forward to. The magic of the FA Cup is something special and as football fans, one thing we all have in common is hope, so it sort of brings us all together, if only for a brief moment.

The window has only jut opened, which means Martin O'Neill has looked at his kitchen calender and started to panic. Nobody told him that he could start speaking to agents or other clubs about players and now he has to rush, which means we'll get a player or two in the last week of the window and they'd have wasted three weeks of playing for us.

Back in June last year there was a rumour doing the rounds that we were interested in Michael Kightly from Wolves and low and behold, it's reappeared today.

Now, back then I couldn't really comment on his footballing abilities as I'd not recalled ever seeing him play but today, I can comment; I think he's an excellent player in the Championship.

I like looking at numbers and things that are black and white, sometimes because after all the debate it's the only thing we've got in football that is certain but mostly because after performances like last night, it's nice to have the league position to fall back on.