report v Sheffield Utd 09/09/00

EVERY win counts and Birmingham City's strangled performance will be long forgotten come the First Division shake-up next May.

The points were all-important on a day when Sheffield United contrived to drag Blues down to their level.

The means to this end was about as ugly as it gets but hey, who cares when Blues are sitting pretty in the top six with three wins out of five?

The downside was that David Burrows lasted only 14 minutes of his rushed comeback before limping off with his dodgy hamstring and midfielder Danny Sonner was also withdrawn because of a groin problem.

Otherwise, justice was served to the team who at least tried to play adventurous football, only to have their finest efforts negated by a Sheffield United side displaying all the attacking zest of a set of traffic cones.

One goal in the eighth minute was enough to decide the spoils and with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, the 21,493 crowd would have opted to spend the other 82 minutes at Sainsburys or the garden centre.

Still, the better team won and referee Rob Styles saw to that by keeping his eyes open and his mind alert.

Peter Ndlovu managed to negotiate a way through the defensive road-works with his first sortie, only to have his arm yanked crudely and unnecessarily by Georges Santos.

Styles pointed sternly to the spot and Martin O'Connor, who never put a foot wrong all afternoon in his distribution from midfield, stroked the penalty in off Simon Tracey's right-hand post.

That's football for you, as fickle as ever.

Ndlovu must have been in two minds whether to laugh or cry, for this was the same referee who sent off the Zimbabwean international for diving on the same ground two years ago.

Just as well you stayed on your feet this time, Nuddy.

Talking of feet, Blues goalkeeper Ian Bennett crucially used both to block a goal-bound effort by midfielder Jon Newby in the 75th minute after Shaun Murphy had headed on Gus Uhlenbeek's long throw-in.

Thanks be to Bennett, for that could easily have been an equaliser the visitors would not have deserved.

That and a couple of other near-misses apart, Sheffield United's most notable achievement was to finish with ten men after the 86th-minute dismissal of Michael Brown for a second yellow card.

Not content with running 30 yards to clatter Bryan Hughes in the first instance, the midfielder unleashed his frustration with a wild lunge on substitute Jacques Williams and rightly paid for it with a red card.

Clear-cut chances on either side were few and far between and only a few inches separated Geoff Horsfield from his first goal for Birmingham.

The Ł2 million striker came on as a 58th-minute substitute for Marcelo, who had one of those "can't pass, can't head, can't score" sort of days.

Horsfield had been on the pitch for a matter of seconds when he climbed highest in a crowded six-yard box to plant an angled header so close to the target that the fans, with a mighty roar, saw the optical illusion as a goal.

Blues came close to a second goal in the second minute of extra time, when Martin Grainger struck a free-kick with such power that Tracey could only save it at the second attempt.

The home side had some defending to do in the dying moments, but it was a routine rearguard action against a United side devoid of wit or enterprise.

"The way Sheffield United played, they made it very difficult for us," said Blues manager Trevor Francis, who has switched his transfer-target sights from West Ham United's Paul Kitson to Derby County striker Dean Sturridge.

"We had to reorganise because of injuries and that also affected our performance.

"But we got three points out of it and there will be other games like it this season when we will just have to dig deep and try to grind out a result."

West Bromwich Albion fans might be interested to know that their former defenders, Santos and Shaun Murphy, are alive and well at Bramall Lane, if not exactly pulling up trees.

Santos was not thanked for giving away the decisive penalty and Murphy spent the entire 90 minutes booting the ball to different spectators in the stand.

Mind you, Murphy and Sheffield United are made for each other.