Aigburth FC 0–1 Marlborough United: a late red card

Match report

Look, Aigburth FC lost a football match 1-0 on Tuesday 11 August, and honestly, their supporters will probably take the performance review and bin it. Marlborough United, top of the table on 29 points, arrived at a ground where Aigburth, 15th on 19, have been drawing like it's going out of fashion. The league leaders have been drawing everything in sight too, which is the polite way of saying someone was about to crack.

For 59 minutes, nobody cracked. The game was a silent stand-off, the sort where you check your watch and wonder if the players have a shared bet on going to bed early. Then Cyril Choisnel, who had been quiet in the way that only a man waiting for one moment can be, met an Edinho Branco-Lima delivery with his head. One-nil, and suddenly all those Marlborough draws looked like a cunning long-term investment rather than a personality flaw.

Aigburth had 11 minutes to find an answer. They got 20. Peregrine Blackmore, already booked against Mancunia back on 1 August for the crime of existing near a midfielder, went in for something ambitious and got the straight red at 70'. Down to ten men, the home side pressed with the fury of people who had just remembered they were 15th. It wasn't enough.

The table now has a proper gap at the top, and Aigburth have a disciplinary headache. Blackmore's absence on Matchday 18 will be felt in the way that missing your best tackler always is: mostly by the full-back next to him.

One line from this one. Marlborough, at last, have remembered how to win ugly. Whether they can do it again so soon, with a short window to ice the bruises, is the question the next matchday will answer.