League leaders’ unbeaten start ends as West Midlands side strike in stoppage time
North London club lose for the first time this season after a 94th-minute header from a substitute who had been on the pitch for six minutes
The Premier League leaders’ unbeaten start to the season ended in the fourth minute of stoppage time on Saturday, when a West Midlands club who began the day 17th in the table scored twice in the final quarter of an hour to win 2-1 in front of a crowd that had, for long periods, sounded resigned to another defeat.
The north London side had led from the 23rd minute, when their Brazilian playmaker curled a free-kick into the top corner from 24 yards, and had 71% of possession over 90 minutes. But they managed only three shots on target after the break, and the home side’s manager, Declan Rourke, said his team had “earned the right to be lucky” with a second half in which they pressed higher than at any point since August.
The equaliser came on 78 minutes, a scrambled finish from close range by the home side’s 20-year-old academy graduate Josh Pemberton after a corner was only half-cleared. The winner, in the 94th minute, was a near-post header from Tobias Lindqvist, a Swedish striker signed on deadline day for £14m who had come on in the 88th minute and had touched the ball once before he scored.
“I told him to go and stand in front of the keeper and make a nuisance of himself,” Rourke said. “That is the full extent of the coaching. He has been frustrated not starting and I understand that, but you saw what he is for. He is a big man who wants the ball in the box.”
The result leaves the leaders two points clear at the top with 22 points from nine games, and their manager was unusually blunt about the second half. “We stopped playing,” he said. “We had the game and we decided to manage it, and you cannot manage a game against a team with nothing to lose. That is on me as much as the players.”
The home side had lost their previous four league matches and had scored twice in that run. Rourke, appointed in the summer after three years in the Championship, had faced questions about his position after a 3-0 defeat on Merseyside a fortnight ago, and the club’s sporting director, Anita Okafor, had said last week that there was “no appetite for change” in the boardroom.
Saturday’s win lifts the club to 14th and was their first against a side in the top three since 2021. Pemberton, who joined the academy at eight and was making his sixth league start, said the final whistle was “the loudest noise I have heard in my life, and I was in the middle of it”.
The leaders now face a trip to a south coast club on Saturday before the second international break of the season. For Rourke’s side the reward is a home game against a Manchester club, and a week in which, for once, nobody will be asking about his job.
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