LOUIS Saha fired Newcastle through to the FA Cup quarter finals at Ewood last night and could have clinched himself a permanent move to Tyneside.

The young French striker, on extended loan from Metz, took his one real chance brilliantly to settle a scrappy fifth round replay and crush Rovers' dreams of a home tie against Everton in the next round.

And Newcastle boss Ruud Gullit hinted that he might well be looking to keep his matchwinner when the loan runs out at the end of the season.

"He's a young player and very strong for the size that he has. He works very hard and has a very good vision of the game.

"You could see his technique is very good and he can only become better.

"I think that playing here suits him, especially the way we want to play with the passing game.

"He is trying to impress everybody so that we keep him here. "I have been very impressed with his performance and the good thing is that he is with players that know him like Didier Domi, who played with him at under-21 for France.

"So they can keep an eye on each other. That's good.

"We do that on purpose so that somebody doesn't just come in and you throw them into the deep end."

Gullit also felt his side should have scored more goals.

"It should have been more and the game would have been finished," he said.

"They still had a chance in the last minute to equalise and I think the way we played we deserved to score more goals.

"The overall performance was right. Sometimes you need to have the right killer instinct.

"But we had control of the game and you never had the feeling that we were really in trouble.

"That's why I am very happy and so are the players."

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