ONLY 29,453 turned up for the match dubbed the War on the Shore - but a peak BBC television audience of 4.2 m saw Saints beat Pompey at St Mary's for the fourth time in two seasons.

A week after a season's best crowd of 32,017 saw Liverpool well beaten in the Premiership, there were plenty of spare red seats for a match that many preferred to watch from the comfort of their armchairs.

The most eagerly anticipated of the five Hampshire derbies to have been played in the last 13 months attracted the lowest crowd of the last three games played between the sides at St Mary's - but at least the parochial bragging rights on the south coast are now more widely appreciated.

During his brief history of the south coast derby in Saturday's build up, the BBC's Ray Stubbs highlighted the coin throwing incident that felled former Saints hard man Mark Dennis at Fratton Park in 1984.

But since then the Hampshire divide has become a chasm.

The Carling Cup match between the sides on December 2 2003 - the first derby for eight years - will be remembered for Pompey fans booing the minute's silence for the late Ted Bates.

Three weeks later Harry Redknapp took defeat at St Mary's as Pompey boss so badly he cancelled Christmas at the family home in Poole.

And when the sides met at Fratton Park for the first time in 16 years last March, running battles between police and ticketless Pompey fans overshadowed a winning goal for Yakubu.

But after Saints' second 2-1 win against Pompey in two months, the rest of the country can be in no doubt as to the extent of the rivalry.

With the help of the two locals on the Match of the Day team - editor Mark DeMuth and pundit Gordon Strachan both live in between the two cities - there was no escaping the importance of this game to both sets of fans.

Match of the Day presenter Stubbs watched the action from the BBC's studio overlooking the corner flag of the Chapel and Kingsland stands, alongside Strachan and former Pompey striker Micky Quinn at the end of one of St Mary's labyrinthine corridors.

He spent Friday night writing his script in Southampton's Hilton Hotel before leaving for St Mary's to see what Redknapp had said in the build-up

"I got to the ground earlier than usual to read the papers, which we did for this match even more so than usual," he said.

"When the draw was made there was a little nervous laugh from the people who made the draw but behind the nervous laugh everyone thought - hang on a minute, this is Billy Big Time.

"The excitement was flooding under the doors when I arrived, it's the most intense tie of the competition so far.

"I come from Merseyside so I know a little about Everton and Liverpool, I've been to Old Firm games and I've got colleagues who are Burnley fans who will say that Burnley v Blackburn is the equal of Portsmouth v Southampton.

"And there are people in our office who support both Bristol clubs, but it's pretty clear from being down here, that this derby is absolutely the real deal."

Quinn, the expert summariser for Portsmouth radio station Quay FM, knows more than anyone how the Harry Redknapp factor has taken the Saints-Pompey divide to a new level - and established it on the nation's consciousness.

Quinn, who played in two Hampshire derbies for Pompey, said: "Hatred is a horrible word but that's what it came to when Harry, Jim and Kevin all came here two weeks after Harry said he was going to take a bit of time out.

"Harry did a tremendous job at Portsmouth, he turned them into a decent Premiership team and then just went 20 miles up the road.

"He knew what the reaction would be like, he's been in the game long enough to know that this is one of the hottest derbies in Europe - but these jobs don't come along very often. He had to take it.

"There's no way he was going to go to the Midlands, his roots are here, this is the only real club he was going to go to - but I don't think the Portsmouth fans understand that side of it."