BELIEVE it or not, January isn’t all about transfer speculation and an endless stream of ‘Sky Sports understands...’ headlines.

Take the FA Cup.

That’ll be the much-maligned, undervalued, relic of a competition.

There are those who would quite happily see football’s Old Lady consigned to some kind of sporting Room 101 – a pointless competition, supposedly interfering with the Premier League and the elitist Champions League – you know the one, where non-champions get to qualify.

Next week doesn’t help matters.

Both Albion and Norwich have midweek league games to think about. And then there are the final throes of the transfer window.

Not only has the scheduling of Premier League and Football League fixtures next Tuesday and Wednesday given managers an extra headache ahead of this Saturday’s FA Cup fourth round, but they threaten to play havoc with the transfer window.

Will club secretaries, chairman and administrators be taking along a portable fax for those all-important transfer bids on deadline day next Tuesday? I doubt it somehow.

But Albion need to take tomorrow’s game seriously, despite pressures from elsewhere to not worry about it.