Young Survives a Sloppy Game : NFC: The 49ers hold off Redskins in the fourth quarter, 20-13, and quarterback gets through it without help.

On what was probably the most nervous day of his life, Steve Young won the game the hard way Saturday--with Joe Montana warming up on the sideline and eager to move out to his rescue.

As a quarterback, Young is no Montana, maybe, but he didn’t need rescuing.

He took charge in the fourth quarter and, as the San Francisco 49ers advanced to next week’s NFC championship game, Young sent Montana back to the bench, and sent the Redskins back to Washington a 20-13 loser.

Asked to explain it, Washington Coach Joe Gibbs said: “The 49ers are a team without a weakness.”

It was a game of bad plays on a bad field, with eight turnovers, four for each side. And Young made his share of the bad ones, fumbling a few times and throwing one atrocious interception.

That didn’t surprise Gibbs. “With the mud and all, those were the worst field conditions I’ve ever seen,” he said.

The 49er turnovers would have unnerved some quarterbacks. They seemingly only encouraged Young, who had delivered two touchdown passes to push the 49ers into a 17-3 halftime lead, which they held until the end of the third quarter.

But the Redskins then seized the momentum, taking possession on 49er misplays to close to 17-13.

All of a sudden it appeared to be the Redskins’ game if they could complete one touchdown drive.

On two good passes by quarterback Mark Rypien, they moved 45 yards, prompting 49er Coach George Seifert to say: “When Rypien got going, he was a thorn in our side.”

But there, at the 49er 23-yard line, the Redskins came up with the turning-point play, a fumbled exchange that gave possession back to the 49ers when Rypien didn’t quite get the handoff to tailback Brian Mitchell.

“I think there was mud on the ball,” Gibbs said.

Said Rypien: “The ball just came out. Mistakes killed us.”

There seemed to be a lot of daylight ahead of Mitchell if he had been able to grasp the football.

“I don’t know if I would have scored, but I’d have gotten a first down,” he said.

More than 10 minutes remained after the Rypien-Mitchell mishap--time enough for the Redskins if they could force another 49er fumble or interception, and drive again. They couldn’t.

Young coolly used up more than seven minutes, moving the 49ers 59 yards to their final field goal, and when Rypien got the ball one last time, with 2:15 to play, he could advance the Redskins only a few yards.

Fittingly, the last two plays of the game and the season for the Redskins were dropped passes. They have had that kind of season.

His first-half touchdown passes--to wide receiver John Taylor for five yards and to tight end Brent Jones for 16--set up the fourth-quarter field-goal drive that was probably the most dramatic of Young’s life.

As Montana loosened up on the sideline, Young began it with a 12-yard gain on a called running play.

Moments earlier, Young’s fumble had put Washington into position to score an easy touchdown. Seifert and offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan gave Young a chance to make a positive play immediately, on first down--and when he made it, going 12 yards, the most significant drive of the 49er season was under way.

In the next few minutes, Young faced two other nerve-racking situations--a third and 10 and, later, a fourth and one. But he made both, the first on a throw to Jerry Rice and the second on a sneak.

Later, Young came close to acknowledging that, for him, in his first playoff start, it wasnervous time during the second half.

Montana has not only made a few playoff starts, he has won four Super Bowls. And to hear Bay Area football fans talk, most of them, ignoring Young’s performance this season as well as the team’s 14-2 record, wanted Montana in there.

Young said of his playoff debut: “In the second half, you realize, ‘This is it.’ ”

Given the circumstances, anyone could be pardoned for dropping the ball.

Still, the truth is that most of Young’s blunders weren’t blunders of execution. He seemed, rather, to be snakebit.

For example, on one fumble, he was running a bootleg when a linebacker got around one of his teammates and reached him the moment Young turned to throw. Surprised, he let it go straight up. If the 49ers had picked up the blitzer, that wouldn’t have happened.

On another Young fumble, a teammate, center Jesse Sapolu, ran into him. On another, he was blindsided.

But in this instance, for Young, the potential was for more than a turnover. After a brilliant season, he could have fallen apart, he could have folded, he could have lost to Rypien.

As it happened, Rypien was having his own troubles. On his best long pass of the game, the first-half bomb that would have kept the Redskins in it, the ball fell incomplete when Gary Clark jumped for it instead of running under it.

The game was a rainy-day matchup between the passers, Young and Rypien, because the field was basically unplayable for running backs.

San Francisco tailback Ricky Watters, who churned for a net of 83 yards in the mud, said: “The footing was terrible. I knew I couldn’t make my usual moves, so I had to just try to hit the holes.”

When the game was over, three other things could be said about it:

The 49ers were the better team. They will play today’s Philadelphia-Dallas winner in the conference championship game here a week from today.

And Montana will be ready again.

So will his fans.