Lest we forget

I was viewing the Southampton website last week to see how they handled the ten points deduction issue and discovered a feature on their past great escapes including this item from 1997:

At 4 p.m. Sunday 11 May, as the final games of the Premiership season kicked-off, the bottom of the table looked like this.

		P	W	D	L	F	A	Pts
16	SAINTS	37	10	11	16	50	55	41
17	Sunderland	37	10	10	17	35	52	40
18	Middlesbrough	37	10	11	16	50	59	38
19	Coventry City	37	8	14	15	36	53	38
20	Nottm Forest	37	6	16	15	31	54	34

In the previous evening's Pink Graham Hiley fiendishly plotted many of the more plausible and implausible relegation variations (including the possibility of Saints and Middlesbrough playing-off) but, basically, provided Saints avoided a drubbing at Villa Park they should be safe. Middlesbrough - who had been deducted three points for failing to honour a fixture - needed a handsome win at Leeds to overhaul them as well as Sunderland, while Coventry's survival necessitated the failure of both Sunderland and Middlesbrough. Forest's fate was immutable.

Souness took no chances, deploying his two cleverest players, Matthew Le Tissier and Eyal Berkovic, on the subs' bench - a tactic that paid off, until the 12th minute when Dryden stabbed the ball past Maik Taylor into his own goal!

Thereafter, Souness decided to hang on for a narrow defeat as, only slightly daunted, the 3,000 travelling faithful kicked up an encouraging racket throughout. Elsewhere the scores went Saints' way - Sunderland lost at Wimbledon, to a Jason Euell goal, Middlesbrough drew at Leeds and, amazingly, both north-eastern clubs were relegated as Gordon Strachan's Coventry snatched an unlikely one-nil win at Spurs.

Two comments - how the hell did we not go down that season? and I am fairly confident I saw us beat Spurs 2-1.