Wednesbury Athletic 1–1 Beeston AFC: the inevitable repetition

Match report

Two teams cannot keep missing each other forever, and on Sunday 23 August at Wednesbury they finally landed on each other with a courtesy that would have done a library proud. Athletic vs Beeston, ninth versus tenth, forty-one points each before kick-off: a 1–1 draw that kept them at one goal each and the table exactly where they began, which is the kind of outcome the league’s schedule believes in strongly.

The home supporters were entitled to a stretch of optimism in the early minutes, and they took it. Damien Coignet has been producing goal-making appearances at a convenient pace in recent fixtures, a small shelf of contributions at the thirteenth minute against Sussex and the sixteenth and seventy-ninth against Wellsford (1), and on Sunday he added another at the fifteenth, from open play, a clean strike requiring nothing except enough room to take it. Wednesbury have been in decent nick, and the early goal came as a confirmation of that fact, though the phrase "early goal" turned out, on inspection, to mean "for six minutes". Anyway.

Beeston’s whole identity lives in the drawn scene: they meet opponents, they gather attention, and they leave without decision. Cleavon Marsh is their appointed agent of that. His recent record is simply a roll of the dice: scoring in the Llandaff draw, a ninety-minute touch away against Heaton (2), and a goal and an assist in the drawn business with Llandaff. At the twenty-first minute he struck the equaliser, and at that point the pattern of the season was fully dressed: the same 1–1 around the corner, the same side wearing the same comfortable invisibility.

The half-time read one each, and the second period, after all, re-affirmed more than hired. Sides pushed at pressing tactics, the wedge gave slightly, and the mistake never arrived. There is a special kind of texture in a league where a squad who refuses to lose meets a squad who is simply playing, and the referee’s whistle at the end produced only the valley of the draw.

Neither dressing room gets a long break from the thought. Tomorrow, on matchday thirty, they move on, presumably at the same 42 points on the same rung, and if the two of them continue to lack the ambition to part company in the table, they will be left to fight the weather of the era. Somewhere in the future a draw will bring one side a point. That trick has always involved these two not providing the answer.