The Ginger Reaction : Fulham

Last updated : 31 March 2002 By Christian Kelly
Gordon was his usual philosophical self concerning yesterday's game and was pretty honest about his team's performance. Strachan said: "They were the better team than us. We had an off day and a lucky day. The only good thing about the day is that we collected another point.

"There were a lot of mistakes and I'm not going to say Paul Jones was to blame."

However, Saints, despite their comfortable run in are still not safe from the threat of relegation. With an important away fixture tomorrow against Blackburn they really need to finally secure the necessary points. How does Gordon think the team can achieve this ?

"You can never tell what you need," said Gordon. " Joe Royle was an expert at it because he was involved a few times - but I don't know."

Strachan added: "We have drawn games recently that we should have won and had we done so we would be in a lot healthier position.

"If you look at the table even now we are closer to seventh than we are to third bottom."

Gordon went on to tell the official website: "There were individual errors all over the park. We could be here all day talking about them. The goal was self-explanatory. I don't need to talk about that. The players know they were not at their best - I was not at my best. I picked the wrong team."

"I made wrong decisions but I don't have to go into that. I just need to tell the players and hopefully they will keep it to themselves. The fact is they were the better team and had better chances and we were lucky to get a point.

"We scored a good goal but that was about my only decent decision playing Rory Delap through the middle. If we had passed the ball better we might have made more chances for him. But the good thing is we did not lose. That is just two league defeats this year now.

"We are a hard side to beat. The self-belief has built up and now when we go behind we don't worry but kick on."

From the Fulham camp , assistant manager Christian Damiano said: "It was important to stop the run of six defeats and I think we need to win two more games.

"I think we are safe when we have 41 points because many teams are very close at the bottom.

"We have played well this year and we have tried hard every time we have gone out but we have always taken the minimum rather than maximum points.

"It's a reflection of our season when we should win we have drawn and when we should draw we have lost.

"That is what has happened to us virtually all season."