IT’S now just 10 sleeps for Newport County AFC fans until their club’s mouth-watering FA Cup showdown with Spurs.

But while supporters are eagerly anticipating the visit of Mauricio Pochettino’s men to Rodney Parade, Exiles striker Frank Nouble is keen to keep everyone’s feet firmly on the ground.

County have a brace of crucial League Two games before the Londoners arrive in South Wales on January 27, starting this Friday against Crawley Town.

That clash is the first of three home matches in succession, with Morecambe facing Michael Flynn’s troops next Tuesday night.

Being an ex-West Ham player, London-born Nouble would love to get one over on Premier League giants Spurs in their fourth round encounter with County.

However, he is well aware that the upcoming double-header presents the Exiles with a golden opportunity to continue their play-off push.

“There’s teams in there at the moment that we know we are better than so we just need to prove it,” he said.

“Promotion is everything to us.

“I think some people will say we are over-achieving but let them think that.

“We know we have a good, solid group here.

“We’re always going to score a goal. I don’t think there’s been many games where we haven’t scored so as long as we can keep it to them not scoring or maybe the odd one then we’ll most likely win the game.

“We’ve got 19 games left and we need to prove ourselves every week, just like we did against Leeds in the FA Cup.

“But we can’t just do it against the big teams, we have to prove it against the Grimsbys, Morecambes and Crawleys of this league.

“Every week we need to prove ourselves.

“We know we are the underdogs and nobody wants to come to Newport, so we’ll give it to them when they come to Rodney Parade.”

On the Spurs tie, he added: “Everyone will probably want to play that game.

“They will probably want to bring their families and stuff like that so it’s a big game.

“But we’ve got two games before that which I think are bigger for us right now.

“If we win those two then it puts us right in the mix.

“It could be us challenging for promotion and that’s more important than the Tottenham game.”

Looking ahead to Crawley, he continued: “We beat them last time, didn’t we? Yeah, so hopefully it’ll be a repeat.

“I saw their result (on Saturday), they won (2-0 against Barnet), so they will probably come a bit more confident. But I think we have a few tickets sold for that game and it will be a great atmosphere.

“Even that game against Leeds, I had never before experienced Rodney Parade that busy.

“I think the boys did last year in the last game but that will be brilliant again.

“They will spur us on and hopefully we can do that again. We just have to beat them, that’s all we can do.

“Just think about beating them and concentrate on that, no Tottenham or nothing like that, focus on Crawley and hopefully we can get the result we want.”

* County's league trip to Lincoln City originally scheduled for Saturday, January 27 has been switched to Tuesday, January 30 (kick-off 7.45pm).