Mancunia FC 3–1 Aigburth FC: a man too few

Match report

Mancunia FC 3, Aigburth FC 1. The scoreline flatters the winners, if you ignore the two minutes after the 40th when Aigburth were a man short and conceded anyway. The table said third against sixteenth. The opening half hour suggested the table had not read the memo.

Mancunia's start had the look of a side expecting a penalty before it was given. Ado Olawoyin-Bashir converted from the spot in the 9th minute, and you could picture the sequence on the training-ground board: the press trap, the tripped runner, the striker doing the one thing he does reliably. He scored in the 45th against Sussex a fortnight ago. Thursday 20 August he finished the job a little earlier, which suited everyone.

Aigburth's response took a quarter of an hour. Cecil Dornbridge, who scored in the 36th against Crookes on the 7th, took a pass from Wyatt Carlisle in the 24th and levelled the thing. The visitors, whose recent form had been drawing everything in sight, looked set to add another stalemate to the collection.

Then Honorio Olabarría got involved. The straight red in the 40th was his second sending-off of the month, the first against Stepney on the 12th having also left his side down to ten. Two minutes later, Harry Beresford-Hope slid a pass through for Hércules Vieira-Pelegrini, and it was 2-1. The contest was effectively over before the whistle, even if the clock still had noise to make.

The 85th was a formality with a name. Léo Daumesnil, assisted by Stanley Bagshawe, made it 3-1. By then Aigburth were pushing numbers forward out of necessity, which is a gentler way of saying there were gaps.

The xG will not have matched the scoreline. Aigburth had chances to punish Mancunia's early looseness, and then lost the ability to punish anything once they were a body short. Mancunia, third and rising, took what the structural gaps offered.

Matchday 27 arrives tomorrow. Aigburth have a short walk back to the practice pitches, and Mancunia a short walk toward second. Neither side gets long to think about it, which is probably kind.