Peter Withe

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.

It would be too easy for me to say that Ashley Young did on the right wing exactly what we want to see James Milner do in creating the goal, but I won't, because I hope that one day James Milner will do that week in week out.

The rumours today are very much focused on one position; goal scorer and we do need one. We don't need one because we're not scoring goals, we need one because I fancy Harewood and maybe even Carew are off in January or at the end of the season.

This is a surprisingly difficult game to predict because Hull are not where you would have thought them to be and they're actually doing better than most expected.