Southampton fans were probably treated to the best days of Egil Østenstad – outside of his native Norway, at least – and were especially blessed during his first season, when Eyal Berkovic was Egil’s intuitive supply-line. In his second start – and Berkovic’s first – Østenstad looked worth every penny of the £800,000 that manager Graeme Souness had paid to bring him from Viking. This was the memorable day when the Saints beat Manchester United 6-3, with Eyal threading impeccably-weighted balls into Egil’s stride. The icing on the cake was a hat-trick for Egil – or so we thought until the Dubious Goals panel deemed his third to be an own-goal by Gary Neville. So that’s official – although Matt Le Tissier takes the pragmatic view that

“Egil’s still got the match-ball, so I still think it’s a hat-trick.”

Either way, it was a hard act to follow. There would be more Berkovic-to-Østenstad moments to savour, but there would be few goals to show for it, although  it was Egil’s ninth and Premiership goal of the season – when he was put in, at Roker Park, by Alan Neilson – that kept the Saints up and sent Sunderland down. One way or another, Egil had done enough to be voted the fans’ Player-of-the-Year.

Come the summer, Souness bought Kevin Davies and then left. And Berkovic went too. Egil soon had to compete for his place, not only with Davies but with David Hirst, who arrived in October and started more games than either of them. It was all-change in 1998-99, however, as front-men came and went and Egil top-scored with seven goals. But the writing was on the wall, as a new scoring duo of James Beattie and Marian Pahars pulled the team from the drop-zone in the last three games. So it was that Egil departed for newly-relegated Blackburn before August was out, in a deal that brought back Davies. After a reasonable first season in the second tier, during which Souness arrived to manage him again, Egil became a spasmodic presence at Blackburn, as they returned to the Premier League. And when he moved on to Rangers, they prematurely released him from his contract. He returned to Viking, where he surprisingly won his 18th cap for Norway, after a break of more than six years. Soon after that, he stopped playing and became the club’s director of football until 2011 since then he has been working for a recruitment company and has a position on the Norwegian FA committee.