There are draws that feel like wins, draws that feel like defeats and, apparently, draws that somehow manage to feel like both at the same time.
Sutton United’s 3-3 draw with Forest Green Rovers probably belongs in its own category.
At 3-1 down with around 15 minutes remaining, you would have happily taken a point and run. By the final whistle, after Sutton had dragged themselves level in stoppage time, there was still this nagging feeling that we perhaps should have won the thing.
Chris Agutter certainly thought so. His assessment afterwards was “two points dropped”, which sounds slightly ridiculous when you’ve just rescued a game from 3-1 down, until you actually look at how the afternoon unfolded.
Sutton finished with 15 shots to Forest Green’s seven, ten on target to seven, seven corners to one and an xG of 2.29 against 1.25.
Those aren’t the numbers of a side fortunate to scrape an equaliser.
But neither was this a conventional dominant performance where Sutton simply failed to put their chances away.
For long periods it was much stranger than that.
Forest Green started better. Sutton were slow to settle and the visitors looked sharper, quicker and, most importantly, dangerous whenever possession changed hands. As Sutton gradually began to take control of the football, Forest Green increasingly looked like a side that wanted us to have it.
That sounds backwards, but it became one of the defining features of the match.
Sutton would build an attack, commit players forward, lose the ball and suddenly Forest Green were travelling in the opposite direction at speed. The better Sutton became with the ball, the more dangerous the consequences became when they gave it away.
There is probably a wider question in there about how this Sutton side wants to play.
Gabriel raised the shape during the discussion, describing something approaching a 4-2-2-2. There aren’t really traditional wingers holding the touchline, so much of the width has to come from the full-backs. That allows Sutton to get bodies centrally and create overloads, but it also creates space behind when attacks break down.
Against some teams you get away with that.
Forest Green had exactly the sort of pace required to punish it.
And they did.
Three times.
That is what makes this such a difficult game to judge. Sutton were the better side for a significant chunk of it, yet Forest Green could quite reasonably point out that they scored three goals because Sutton repeatedly gave them exactly the sort of game they wanted.
There were individual mistakes, certainly, but it would be too easy to dump the whole thing into the “poor defending” folder and move on.
Will Nightingale will know he should have done better for one of the goals, although I am still willing to advance the entirely unbiased theory that being clattered in the head by the goalkeeper earlier might not have helped.
That incident was another of the afternoon’s big talking points.
Nightingale appeared to get to the ball before the goalkeeper, took the contact and got nothing. Agutter later said he had been told by the fourth official that it was a “stonewall penalty”. The Forest Green camp hardly seemed outraged by the suggestion that Sutton might have had a case either.
Football being football, we can presumably await the lovely apology that changes absolutely nothing.
Still, blaming refereeing decisions would miss what became far more interesting about the afternoon.
Sutton kept going.
That sounds horribly close to the dreaded “good character, lads” cliché, but there is a bit more to it than that.
We saw something similar at Halifax. Sutton conceded in the dying moments and, when most teams would barely have had time to feel sorry for themselves, went straight up the other end and equalised.
Against Forest Green, 3-1 could easily have been the point at which heads dropped.
It wasn’t.
Brandon Njoku came from the bench and scored. The pressure continued. Forest Green were reduced to ten men, which plainly mattered and shouldn’t be brushed aside, but Sutton were already pushing them backwards before the sending-off.
Then, in the 93rd minute, Ben Brookes supplied the ball and Temi Babalola produced what Agutter described as a proper centre-forward’s header at the back post.
Against his former club, naturally.
Babalola’s goal made it 3-3 and gave us one of those slightly ridiculous celebrations where the previous 90-odd minutes briefly stop mattering.
The result also said something about the squad.
Earlier in the season there was a feeling that Sutton were moving towards a fairly obvious preferred XI. Increasingly, however, the bench looks capable of changing matches rather than merely replacing tired legs.
Njoku scored. Babalola equalised. The changes altered the shape and tempo of the game.
That is going to matter during a season where injuries, suspensions and Saturday-Tuesday runs are inevitable.
And then there is Charlie Carter.
For a few weeks now it has felt as though something has been coming.
Carter missed part of pre-season and there have been glimpses rather than the complete package, little moments where he glides away from someone or finds a pocket of space and you think there is considerably more to come.
Saturday felt like another step.
His goal was superb and Agutter was effusive afterwards, describing him as one of the best attacking midfielders in the league “on his day”.
Managers are supposed to talk their players up, of course, but that is still quite an endorsement.
The encouraging part is that Carter doesn’t look like a player who has peaked after one excellent afternoon. He looks like one who is beginning to get properly fit and properly comfortable in this team.
Perhaps that applies to Sutton more generally.
Ten games in, they sit tenth with 17 points. The table is still congested enough that three points separate Sutton from fifth.
That is neither a reason to start planning the promotion parade nor a reason to shrug and declare mid-table inevitability.
What is interesting is how many points already feel as though they have been left somewhere.
Saturday is the perfect example.
You can look at 3-3 and celebrate the resilience required to rescue it.
You can look at the same 3-3 and wonder how a side creating that much pressure managed to concede three goals.
Both things can be true.
That may actually be the most useful description of Sutton at the moment. There is plenty to like, but enough roughness around the edges to stop anyone getting carried away.
The football can be excellent. The decision-making can occasionally make you stare into the middle distance.
The squad suddenly looks deeper. The defensive transitions still need work.
The team can dominate a match. The same team can somehow find itself two goals behind in it.
But when things go wrong, there does appear to be a growing refusal to accept that the game is finished.
You can coach positioning. You can work on transitions. You can spend hours showing players when to switch the ball rather than forcing it through the middle.
Belief is slightly harder to manufacture.
Sutton seem to have some.
And with Tamworth and Kidderminster both waiting away from home in the space of a few days, we’re about to find out rather quickly how useful that belief might be.
For now, though, Saturday can remain exactly what it was.
A game we should have lost.
A game we should have won.
And, somehow, a game we drew.
Never say die.