Peter Withe

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.

First out of the hat this weekend is ex Tottenham and current Pompey striker Jermain Defoe and while I'd love it to be true and there is every possibility that it could happen, I just can't see it happening, even though I fancy he'd help us get top four.

Arsene Wenger was probably that kid at primary school that would piss himself at his table because he was too scared to put his hand up and ask to go to the toilet. You know, a mummy's boy.

Arsenal were lucky today and we should have won. We should have won by two goals and because of that I have amessage for Mr Wenger.

If, before today, Aston Villa had no chance of winning the league Mr Wenger, neither does your team, so you have to take your head out of cloud cuckoo land and take a bite of the cherry that is reality.