Middlesbrough - 3 Fulham - 2: One-nil down after nine minutes, 2-1 down after 70, Middlesbrough were entitled to be thinking Sunday, bloody Sunday again yesterday. Not until St Stephen's Day will they have hosted a Saturday 3pm kick-off here this season and yet the familiarity with Sundays has not brought Boro contentment: before yesterday, of 32 matches on a Sunday under Steve McClaren, Middlesbrough had won just four. Now, quite remarkably given the sloppiness of some their football, that victory figure has risen to five.

Michael Walker

at the Riverside Stadium

Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, who had endured rather than enjoyed the game until this moment, struck the winner in the 84th minute, collecting Szilard Nemeth's cross, cutting inside Moritz Volz and drilling a low shot beyond Tony Warner, who dived the wrong way.

If the scorer was unexpected, so was the result. McClaren has been at Boro just under four seasons but this was only the fourth Premiership occasion when Boro have turned a deficit into a win. At half-time, with Fulham the tidier and more dangerous side, Boro's half-baked efforts brought half-hearted boos from their fans.

But victory was neither straightforward nor foreseeable. After Brian McBride hit the post on the hour, teenager James Morrison scored his first Boro league goal but six minutes after that Pape Bouba Diop climbed above Franck Queudrue to power Fulham back in front.

There were 20 minutes left and while Boro's heads were close to dropping, McClaren had offered a reminder at half-time that the last 20 is when Fulham are most vulnerable. This must have impressed Middlesbrough because, with 3-5-2 becoming 4-4-2, they kept searching for an equaliser, then for a winner.

Boro face AZ Alkmaar in Holland in the Uefa Cup on Thursday and then on Sunday, again, they host Bryan Robson's West Bromwich. "Hopefully this is a defining moment in our season," said McClaren.

He admitted "at times we were inconsistent" but he said repeatedly that his players deserved credit for "sticking at it".

Coleman, who has seen Fulham win only once away since January, was distraught by the seeming inevitability of his side playing well and losing. "We must learn to shut up shop," he said, ruefully. Coleman also disputed the legality of Middlesbrough's second equaliser. In the 76th minute Fabio Rochemback slid a nice pass to Queudrue in the Fulham area. Queudrue curled a fast, low cross past Warner's dive and both Hasselbaink and Aiyegbeni Yakubu were waiting at the far post.

Typifying Hasselbaink's afternoon, he scuffed an open-goal tap-in. The ball hit Aiyegbeni instead and dribbled over the line. Fulham protested that Aiyegbeni was offside when the ball hit him. "He gave it, didn't he?" McClaren said of the referee Uriah Rennie.

Guardian Service