Peter Atherton is looking forward to doing battle with Alan Shearer in tonight's Worthington Cup third round.

The 30-year-old defender has played against Shearer several times in his career, but he missed the former England captain in his most rampant form last season.

Atherton's former club Sheffield Wednesday crashed 8-0 at St James' Park that day and Shearer scored five times.

"He is an excellent striker," said Atherton. "He scores lots of goals.

"He is always a handful, but it is the sort of challenge you relish as a defender.

"He works extremely hard and sometimes he only needs one chance and the ball is in the net."

Ironically, Shearer hasn't scored at home this season and City will be hoping he doesn't break that particular sequence tonight.

Atherton, who is an ever present in the City side since he joined them during the summer on a Bosman free transfer from Wednesday, said: "It's a big game for us.

"I just hope we can build on Sunday's performance against Leeds United and head in the right direction. It's a question of achieving consistency.

"We would have liked three points instead of one, but the overall performance was more like the standard we should be achieving.

"It was a good overall team performance and now we have got to build on it. We have done well against the top teams and failed against the lesser teams and that's no disrespect to Southampton, Ipswich and Manchester City.

"These are the teams you want to beat, especially at home, and it is a major disappointment that we haven't done that against these two of these teams - Southampton and Ipswich, who have beaten us at Valley Parade."

Like the other City players, Atherton has welcomed the signing of controversial striker Stan Collymore.

He said: "There was a lot of press coverage about him coming to us last week, but he responded in the right way, scoring a wonder goal and performing well in all aspects of his play.

"We haven't been scoring goals and he scored a good goal. He has settled in fine.

"The league is our priority, but we want to do well in the cups.

"People knock the Worthington Cup, but there is a massive carrot at the end of it with a showpiece final and a place in Europe."