Football: Ostenstad is Saints' saviour

FA CUPS have been won and lost on the sort of eccentricity which cost Fulham their second cup victory at the Dell this season. Having weathered most of the pressure 10-man Southampton threw at them through a frantic finale, Fulham were just contemplating a minor act of giant-killing when one final hopeful cross reached Egil Ostenstad.

Two of the three minutes of injury time had gone when the Norwegian slipped as he tried to control the ball. Paul Trollope, who had only just come on as a substitute, thumped the clearance off the back of his team-mate Alan Neilson and the ball fell invitingly into the path of the grounded Ostenstad. A sweep of the right foot and Southampton had survived an otherwise depressing afternoon, which had ricocheted from bad - Steve Hayward's carefully crafted ninth minute goal - to worse - the red card unluckily handed out to Ken Monkou by Dermot Gallagher, a referee familiar with controversy.

The first person to congratulate Ostenstad was Kevin Keegan, a former Dell hero, but the smile on the faces of both men spoke of Southampton's lucky escape. "What can you do? Someone had to tell him he'd scored," Keegan, the Fulham manager, said.

Monkou's lunge at Rufus Brevett in the 70th minute, while certainly mistimed, hardly qualified for an immediate sending off and as it came just moments after Gallagher had turned down clear appeals for a penalty when Neil Smith appeared to trip Mark Hughes, the reaction of the Southampton crowd was predictably robust. Gallagher's confidence has already been dented by his sending off Michael Oakes, the Aston Villa goalkeeper, for deliberate handball against Blackburn over Christmas, a decision he later reversed on video evidence. Gallagher judged Monkou's tackle to be "serious foul play", but David Jones, the Southampton manager, predictably saw it differently.

"The referee said it was a two-footed tackle, but when he looks at the video and sees it was one-footed, will he reverse his decision? He must have been the only person in the ground who thought it warranted a red card, but I can't see him changing his mind." Last season, Gallagher was suspended for one match for not sending off Steve Bould for a deliberate trip on Gianluca Vialli. Now, he could rightly point out, he is being criticised for being too harsh. "I don't know what the answer is," added Jones. "I really don't. The trouble is that you can get a yellow card for anything these days."

Monkou's dismissal seemed to cap another depressing afternoon for the Premiership strugglers, who had been outplayed for the first 30 minutes by the upwardly mobile leaders of the Nationwide Second Division. Southampton were still struggling to sort out their formation when Fulham took advantage of the chaos to score a neat opener.

Fulham's goal, sweetly struck by Hayward in the ninth minute, was worthy of a chorus line from Pygmalion. Hayles down the left, round Hiley, through Horsfield to Hayward, who sidestepped Oakley's despairing lunge and merely passed the ball into the bottom left corner of the unfortunate Jones' net. The goal summed up Southampton's incoherence as neatly as it advertised Fulham's eloquence. Without Matthew Le Tissier to orchestrate a riposte or Stuart Ripley to provide some width, the Premiership side looked desperately short of guile. Fulham, in contrast, defended in depth and, with Hayles' power and pace a constant threat to Monkou, broke quickly. The lead was hardly a surprise. Indeed, such was the imbalance of power for much of the first half, it was debatable whether victory for the Premiership urchins or the Nationwide aristocrats would be the greater shock. Fulham had already ousted Southampton from the Worthington Cup earlier in the season and a matching of bank balances would hardly benefit struggling Southampton.

A screaming shot, palmed over by Maik Taylor on the stroke of half-time, brought Southampton some belated hope, but they still headed for the dressing- room and a tongue-lashing by Jones with the jeers of the crowd ringing in their ears. "I thought we played superbly for half an hour," Keegan said. "I was just saying to them `go on now and keep playing' and then they stopped passing the ball. We spent the last 45 minutes trying to hold on to something." Jones's language was altogether bluer a few yards down the corridor in the home dressing room. "In the first half we couldn't string two passes together, but when you're not playing particularly well at home, everyone is on edge and it makes life difficult."

The arrival of Mark Hughes, four times a cup winner (coincidentally, Paul Bracewell, Fulham's player-coach, a four-time loser at Wembley, hauled his 36-year-old frame off at the same time) prompted a change of pace if not style from the home team. Instead of trying to play the ball through the midfield, Ostenstad and the lively James Beattie became the focal point of high, early crosses. Fulham were thrust onto the back foot and Taylor was subjected to sustained pressure.

Yet, until Ostenstad's fallen heroics, Southampton only had a long range drive by Jason Dodd just after half-time to show for their growing ascendancy. The Fulham defence coped comfortably with most of the bombardment and the New Year was looking as barren as the old when Ostenstad slid home the equaliser on his 27th birthday. "It was a fair result," Keegan said. But little in the afternoon suggested that Fulham will fail to finish off the modern footballing morality tale of rich and poor at Craven Cottage on 12 January.