I’m not sure there’s much point me writing this page this week when most of Oxfordshire will be far too busy travelling up to Newcastle to read it!

We are taking a huge away following to today’s FA Cup tie and I hope that everyone making the journey has a fantastic weekend.

We are taking on a great club in an unbelievable stadium, with 50,000 people watching us.

Our task is to make sure that all of those people leave St James’ Park talking about what a good team Oxford United are and how well we have played.

If we can do that then we can certainly cause an upset.

The squad travelled up on Thursday morning, 24 hours earlier than normal.

In between a couple of training sessions this has given us the opportunity to have a few meetings among the staff.

It is a chance to assess one or two things and work out our plan for the second half of the season.

Ask any club in our division if they would like to be in the play-off places and still in the FA Cup and they would all happily swap places with us, but we have only done half the job so far.

Can we make history and get through today? Can we work even harder and get Oxford United back into the Championship?

The groundwork has been done for both those things and it has been good to talk through our plans for the next few months.

We have a young playing squad, but the same can be said for our staff, so it is even more important that we can call on the experience that Derek Fazackerley brings to the group.

Faz had a very distinguished spell coaching at Newcastle, so he knows all about the scale of our task today.

He will often chip in with a word of wisdom that stops me in my tracks and makes me think ‘yep, that’s absolutely right and exactly what we should do’.

We are so fortunate to have his input, especially for an occasion like today.

It’s not going to be easy and we are going to have to play at the top of our game.

But someone has to be a hero in this round of the cup.

Why shouldn’t it be someone from Oxford United…?

There’s another big game today when our Under 18s play the semi-final of the League Cup at home to Wimbledon.

I’d love them to get through, because they were so hurt by their 2-0 defeat at Preston on Monday night in the FA Youth Cup.

I went into the dressing room after the game and told them how proud we all are of them, not just as players but also people.

You could have heard a pin drop and there was real hurt in their eyes.

But over the last few days the leaders will have emerged and they will all have had time to recover and build themselves up for another big game.

The eyes of Oxfordshire may well be on Newcastle, but wouldn’t it be great to have two teams in yellow celebrating tonight?