RYAN Nelsen reckons Blackburn Rovers turned in their best performance yet in their three meetings with Manchester United this season.

Although it was their first defeat to the Red Devils following a win at Old Trafford in the Premiership and the 1-1 draw at Ewood in the first leg of the semi-final, the New Zealand defender felt the result was a harsh reflecftion of his team's performance.

"We are diappointed with the result but the performance was very good," said Nelsen.

"Not too many teams come to Old Trafford and have the possession we had so we've go to take the positives out of it.

"It's very hard to take though because we played well and I think people saw out there that we can play a bit of football as well. I think it was the best we played out of all three games against them.

"Obviously we missed Craig Bellamy and his pace up front but we can't be too disappointed when we lose to a fortunate first goal and a slice of luck for the second."

Nelsen revealed that Rovers went out to win in the 90 minutes and tried to take the game to United, rather than force extra time or penalties, But he did admit that a similarly less cautious approach in the first leg draw at Ewood might have given Blackburn a better chance of booking a Millennium Stadium meeting with Wigan on February 26.

Nelsen added: "We came out to win it and we knew we could score, it was just whether we could hold them at the back.

"Unfortunately we gave up two soft goals which was very frustrating.

"We went out to attack and never sat back, but maybe we did sit back a bit at home in the first leg.

"They didn't cause us many problems but we didn't get out of our own half and we wanted to attack a bit more.

"But it's easy to look back and there's always a lot of 'what ifs'.

"We've been on an unbeaten run of eight games unbeaten and I think we played realy well tonight."

As for the half-time bust-up in the tunnel, which was sparked off when Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Savage clashed, Nelsen said: "I didn't see what happened but it was all handbags by the time I got there."