Edgbaston FC 3–2 Llandaff Athletic: the cushion collapses

There is a particular kind of game that manages to be both comfortable and alarming. Edgbaston's Monday is exactly that. Three goals by the hour mark. A cushion you could sit on. Then the chair is pulled away. The 3-2 scoreline does not tell a lie, but it tells only half of it.

On the stroke of half-time, Casimiro Colmenar curls one in from Muzaffer Beyoğlu's run. The kind of goal that arrives just when the away side has survived one wave too many. The breath goes out of the terraces. Two minutes after the restart, Max Foulkes rises at the far post for Ignacio Guadalupe's cross. Game management says sit on it. Edgbaston says no.

Foulkes's penalty on 61 minutes seals the arithmetic. Then comes the odd part. Heinrich Dombrowski pulls one back for Llandaff on 65. The visitors suddenly realise that their drawing habit is a personality trait they can shed. At 70 minutes, Owain Penllyn makes it 3-2. Now the comfort of the early three goals feels remarkably distant.

The red card to Barry-Mali Kabongo-Mukendi in the 73rd minute puts a stop to the wobble. Straight red. Seventeen minutes of ten-man survival that Edgbaston manages with the calm of a side who had already spent their panic. It is not beautiful, but it is enough.

Llandaff's form made them a tough fixture in their own mind. For 73 minutes Edgbaston breaks that spell with three goals of varying elaboration. Colmenar keeps scoring late in halves, though this one is considerably earlier in the day than he usually bothers. Foulkes adds to a season of quietly reliable goals. There is a third win on the board for the league's seventh-placed side. Their recent doldrums now have a stubborn asterisk.

Tomorrow brings Matchday 38. No time to relive any of it. Probably just as well for everyone concerned.