There was a problem before kick-off. It was the kind of problem that anybody who has played Sunday league football in this country at any level, on a cold day on a bobbly pitch, perhaps, when players may be hungover from the night before, perhaps, when no one could find the keys to the changing rooms, perhaps, would have recognised.
The problem was with the net. There was a knot that had come loose and when the linesman spotted it, the kick-off was delayed. ‘That was when I got the shout from Haydn,’ Beck-Ray Enoru said afterwards of his centre-half teammate.