Stepney FC 1–2 Wednesbury Athletic: Bezirci strikes late

Opinion

Wednesbury Athletic have a particular fondness for the uncomfortable. They spent the vast majority of their trip to Stepney FC on Monday 10 August looking like a team that had forgotten why they had travelled. It was a performance of cautious hesitation, the kind of football that suggests a collective fear of the ball.

Then came the 81st minute. Gökhan Bezirci managed to find the net, ending a deadlock that had likely bored the stewards to tears. It was a goal that did not so much reward a dominant display as it did rescue a mediocre one. Bezirci will take the three points, though he probably spent the previous eighty minutes wondering if he had left the oven on at home.

There is something slightly tragic about the efficiency of it. To play so little football and yet leave with the win is a specific kind of luck. It is the sporting equivalent of failing a mock exam and somehow gliding through the real thing because the questions were easier. Stepney FC will feel they were the better side, which is a polite way of saying they were slightly less stagnant than their visitors.

The result keeps Wednesbury moving, even if they are moving with the urgency of a garden snail. One suspects they will spend tomorrow morning debating whether to try playing football again or simply waiting for Bezirci to produce another moment of unplanned brilliance. To be fair, the latter is a far more sustainable strategy for a team that seems to view a scoreless draw as a baseline. We go again.