Nervous Blackburn ride their luck

Blackburn Rovers - 3 Cardiff City - 2: In the end, Blackburn could congratulate themselves on navigating a safe passage to the fourth round. With a home tie to come against Colchester they will be confident of journeying even further but this was a nervous, largely fortuitous victory that Mark Hughes and his players will want to put behind them.

Cardiff had begun as the more enterprising team and it was against the run of play when David Thompson fired Rovers into a ninth-minute lead with a powerful shot from the edge of the area.

But Cardiff continued to play with a sense of adventure and merited their equaliser 15 minutes later when Jobi McAnuff worked a neat one-two with Alan Lee before drilling a low, diagonal shot to the left of Brad Friedel.

The game was level for only seven minutes before Thompson restored Blackburn's lead with a freakish goal that will weigh heavily on the mind of goalkeeper Tony Warner. Thompson's only intention had been to chip a cross into a congested penalty area, but when the ball evaded everyone it bounced off the slippery turf, wrong-footing Warner to end up in the net.

Once Morten Pedersen turned in Lucas Neill's cross two minutes after the interval the possibility of an upset should have been snuffed out. But James Collins hooked in Cardiff's second goal seven minutes later and ensure a nervous finale for Rovers.

BLACKBURN: Friedel, Neill, Todd, Mokoena, Matteo, Emerton, Tugay (Johansson 60), Thompson, Pedersen, Dickov, Gallagher (Reid 61). Subs Not Used: Enckelman, Stead, Johnson. Booked: Dickov, Neill. Goals: Thompson 9, 32, Pedersen 47.

CARDIFF: Warner, Weston (Vidmar 51), Collins, Gabbidon, Barker, Langley, Kavanagh, Inamoto (Ledley 76), McAnuff, Lee, Thorne (Campbell 62). Subs Not Used: Alexander, Bullock. Booked: Gabbidon. Goals: McAnuff 24, Collins 54.

Referee: S Dunn (Gloucestershire).