Pendle Athletic 1–2 Stepney FC: a red card rescue

Pendle Athletic drew their way to 16th place with the diligence of someone collecting stamps. Twenty-four points, nine of them earned by sharing the spoils, and they approached Stepney FC with the quiet confidence of a side who had kept four straight clean sheets. Then the game kicked off, and all that careful arithmetic went out the window inside four minutes.

Stepney scored in the second. Cassiano Avelar-Toledo, who has made a habit of turning up late in matches, decided to arrive early for once, sliding a finish past the keeper before the Pendle midfield had found their positions. Two minutes later, Giancarlo Borghesi, a man who had spent the previous fortnight laying on goals for others, laid on something else entirely: a straight red card for a challenge that the referee judged with the finality of a tax demand. 86 minutes with ten men. The game, you felt, was done.

Stepney, fourth on 41 points, should have turned it into a procession. They did not. Their recent form is a sequence of draws they would rather not discuss, and facing a side down to ten seemed to invite a certain complacency. They knocked the ball around, which is a polite way of saying they did nothing with it. Pendle, by contrast, defended with the grim focus of a man who has lost his keys and is retracing every step. Casper Boerkamp, who limped off injured against Heaton last week, had no such patience. In the 70th minute he rose to meet Honorio Otálora's cross and headed Pendle level. The home crowd, who had spent the previous hour inventing new ways to phrase despair, rediscovered their voices.

It lasted 13 minutes. Angelo Caglioni, who had been quiet in the way that dangerous strikers often are, collected the ball in space and finished with the sort of calm that suggests he had seen the whole thing coming. 2–1, and no time for a response. Pendle had sold a goal early, lost a man immediately after, and still nearly escaped with a point. That is the sort of resilience that keeps you in the division, though it is not the sort that moves you up it.

Stepney bank the three points and will not care that it looked harder than it should have. Tomorrow brings Matchday 25, because in this league the fixtures rarely wait for reflection.