BY OLIVER HOLT ( The Times )

THROUGH gritted teeth and laboured smiles, Alex Ferguson and Gianluca Vialli paid lip-service to the importance of living to fight another day in the FA Cup. When they could hide their disappointment no longer, though, their thoughts wandered to the only team who can still deprive them of a title that they hold more dear.

By their scowls yesterday, it was clear that they were thinking about Arsène Wenger cracking open a bottle of fizzy water and toasting his old sparring partner, fixture congestion. This was the day when the FA Cup exacted its revenge on Manchester United and Chelsea.

In the past, they have managed to get away with their callous treatment of the famous old competition, riding along on their pragmatism and their shadow sides, grabbing late winners or losing gallantly, but always, always, avoiding that worst of all fates, the Scylla and Charybdis of modern football: the replay.

Ferguson, in particular, has often joked about his horror of not deciding a cup-tie at the first attempt, of wild plans to send Peter Schmeichel up with the forwards for the last five minutes if the match was in the icy grip of deadlock. The Manchester United manager stopped short of that yesterday, but, in desperation, he did bring some of the heroes of the win against Internazionale off the bench for the last 20 minutes of this quarter-final.

By then, it was too late. The replay will take place at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday, which means that United have to sacrifice their scheduled FA Carling Premiership match against Liverpool at Anfield and Chelsea their game against Middlesbrough at the Riverside Stadium.

Worse, both sides had a player sent off for two rather innocuous offences, which means that Roberto Di Matteo and Paul Scholes will miss a game in the championship run-in.

"We have got fewer games to play than Chelsea and Arsenal," Ferguson said. "If anything, it is worse for Chelsea than us, because they will find that their games start to come thick and fast now. Arsenal are the ones who will really benefit from what happened today. They are probably the favourites to win the league now."

Vialli agreed. "Both teams could have done without another match and the winner at the end of the day is probably Arsenal, because now is a very decisive moment of the season and the fewer matches you play, the better," the Chelsea manager said.

That the FA Cup has become something of a frippery was evident when Ferguson left out Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole, the forwards who have been terrifying defences from Filbert Street to the Nou Camp, and played Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as the focal point of an unfamiliar formation that was as close as United have come to dispensing with their trusted 4-4-2. Somehow, it all seemed rather half-hearted and conservative. The match itself was untidy and devoid of fluency.

Phil Neville was used, to good effect, to man-mark Gianfranco Zola and stifle what remained of Chelsea's creativity, deprived as they were of Frank Leboeuf, Celestine Babayaro, Dennis Wise and Vialli himself. The result was a rather tetchy impasse, a game smothered by caution when it should have been liberated by the abandon of its lowly place in the scheme of things.

It was typical of the occasion that just when it seemed it might be cut loose from its bonds shortly before half-time, when Gary Neville had glanced a fine diving header against the face of Ed de Goey's right-hand post, it was killed stone dead by the sending-off of Di Matteo for an ill-judged tackle on Scholes that compounded his earlier mistimed challenge on Beckham.

It is hard to criticise Paul Durkin, the referee, because, taken individually, both were bookable offences. There was no malice in either challenge and common sense should have allowed the Italian to stay on the pitch. In a refereeing culture where the officials are punished for such diversions into sentiment, though, Durkin had little option but to administer the letter of the law.

The same applied to the dismissal of Scholes four minutes from the end for a similarly innocuous tackle on Goldbaek. By then, the game was all but over anyway. Chelsea, who managed just one shot on target in the game, a first-half curler from Morris that was saved easily by Schmeichel, had decided that a draw was the best they could achieve with ten men and defended so well that they earned it.

In its pursuit, De Goey and Marcel Desailly were outstanding. The Dutch goalkeeper made his first important save in the fifth minute, hurling himself to his right to parry a stinging drive by Keane and then doing just enough to distract Scholes as he ran on to Beckham's delightful lob over the Chelsea defence six minutes later. Beckham should have scored himself five minutes after half-time, but he lifted his shot high over the bar from ten yards after Scholes pulled the ball back from the byline.

De Goey came to the rescue again in the 58th minute, when Solskjaer's first-time ball freed Scholes. De Goey managed to block his shot and Beckham snatched at the rebound and pulled it wide.

Midway through the half, Scholes, whom Ferguson singled out for his profligacy, put a shot into the side-netting at full stretch and, 13 minutes from the end, De Goey frustrated United one last time, turning Scholes's touch over the bar after Yorke's attempt at an overhead kick had cannoned off Le Saux.

Le Saux, by the way, behaved impeccably in the face of the all too predictable baiting from the crowd. Spare a thought, too, for Beckham, who was also taunted. He did not fling out his elbows or lose his temper, but who among the outraged chat-show and phone-in hosts and the new football intelligentsia will take up his cause?

Manchester United (3-4-3): P Schmeichel - H Berg, P Neville (sub: D Yorke, 72min), W Brown - G Neville, R Keane, P Scholes, D Irwin - D Beckham, O G Solskjaer (sub: E Sheringham, 82), J Blomqvist (sub: A Cole, 82).

Chelsea (4-4-2): E de Goey - A Ferrer, M Desailly, B Lambourde, G Le Saux - D Petrescu (sub: E Newton, 46), J Morris, R Di Matteo, B Goldbaek - T A Flo (sub: M Forssell, 60), G Zola (sub: A Myers, 79).

Referee: P Durkin.