WELL, after an early rise to get up for the Brighton game, it’s certainly going to be a case of surfacing well before first light on Saturday in order to watch us take on our next opponents down in deepest Wales.

Extensive engineering work in the Shrewsbury area means my journey to Cardiff is already delayed by an hour even before I board the train.

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It is another place where I will gladly take a point, because if Brighton are one of the division’s draw specialists with eight stalemates, Cardiff are close behind on seven.

The Bluebirds are now back to their traditional home blue strip after an enforced red kit rebrand to satisfy club owner Vincent Tan’s good luck superstition was reversed.

As their record shows they are a particularly hard team to break down. For even after breaching their formidable defensive outfield there’s the small matter of getting past Scottish international goalkeeper David Marshall to negotiate.

So with two tight defences out there I certainly won’t be expecting a goalfest.

Even if you were just five minutes late getting on to The Turf last Sunday you would have completely missed all of the goal action, and probably the most controversial incident of the match.

The Clarets were caught as cold as the weather within a minute when they failed to prevent Bobby Zamora opening the scoring.

Three minutes later Burnley were level after what visiting manager Chris Hughton protested shouldn’t have been a penalty.

He claimed that although defender Lewis Dunk may have been pulling Michael Keane’s shirt halfway up his torso, he was disappointed with the decision as he reckoned it is now a regular occurrence in most games.

There were two moments of highly significant reflection on the day that were almost half a century apart, each triggering vastly differing emotions – the first taking place before the match showed footballing solidarity with a perfectly observed minute’s silence for the victims of the shocking Paris massacres; the second being the half-time presentation to Willie Irvine in commemoration of his post-war record of 29 league goals for the club 50 years ago. A well deserved tribute to a top striker and a top bloke.