"Raiders coach Tom Cable challenged his players to take the fight to the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday.

Take your best shot, go down swinging, see what happens.

What transpired defied logic. The on-the-ropes Raiders - losers of three in a row by a combined 80 points - delivered a technical knockout of the 3-1 and seemingly rising Eagles with a 13-9 victory at the half-empty Oakland Coliseum.

"We went out and threw a fight on somebody and said, 'Enough, let's play,' " Cable said. "That's all you can say. There are no magic words or anything like that."

More impressively, the game wasn't nearly as competitive as the score indicated. The Raiders came out swinging, kept up the pressure and forced the Eagles into submission with a balanced offense and a new-look defense.

The Raiders turned the tables on an Eagles team that blitzed more often than any other through the first five weeks. They blitzed quarterback Donovan McNabb time and again, with outstanding results.

Defensive end Trevor Scott and defensive lineman Richard Seymour contributed two sacks each to Oakland's six-sack total and spearheaded a defensive attack that confounded McNabb and the Eagles for most of the game.

"New Raiders, baby," Oakland defensive tackle Gerard Warren said. "Fido: Forget it, drive on. It's called Fido. You saw Raiders defensive philosophy: control the run and pressure the quarterback. That's what we've been preaching all year."

The preaching fell on deaf ears, by all accounts. Defensive coordinator John Marshall implemented his scheme in the offseason and stuck to it.

Without much warning, however, Marshall altered his scheme in practice last week and inserted an array of blitzes and coverages for which players long have been lobbying.

"(Marshall) came up with a scheme in which we haven't seen," McNabb said. "They're known for playing man coverage. They dropped back in a lot of zone, more zone than we've seen in the early games."

The Raiders kept McNabb guessing from down to down. Lo and behold, it worked. The Eagles failed to get inside the Raiders' 15-yard line and finished almost 23 points shy of their average.

Raiders owner Al Davis is a proponent of man-to-man coverage and reliance on the four defensive linemen to pressure the quarterback.

The Raiders were so dominant defensively that perhaps Davis might consider signing off on a new-look approach. They held an opponent without a touchdown for the first time in 48 games.

Oakland finally found a few things that worked offensively, too. The Raiders entered the game last in the league in average yards per game and second-to-last in average points per game.

Scoring still proved problematical, but the 13 were only three shy of their total the three previous games. They were enough the way their defensive mates played.

The key play came on first down from the Oakland 14 late in the first quarter, and it came from an unli