Second best for ninety-eight minutes, and I'll take the point

1-1 at San Jose, and if we're honest we came away with a point we did very little to earn. They had twenty shots to our nine, seventeen of them from inside our box, and something like three good chances' worth of threat against our one. Paintsil put us ahead before the break, we spent most of what followed hanging on, and we drove home with a draw that owes more to JT Marcinkowski and some wasteful San Jose finishing than to anything we managed on the ball.

The chance count is the whole story. San Jose created roughly 3.3 expected goals to our 1.3, the sort of gap that usually ends in a comfortable home win rather than a level scoreline. Twenty shots to nine, and forty-two per cent of the ball, which is about right for how the numbers felt: they had it, we chased it.

Some of their second-half surge is just what happens when you go a goal up and settle in to protect it, and I'll give us that. But they were the better side in the first half too, before the game state handed anyone a reason to change how they played. So I'm not going to dress this up as a clever backs-to-the-wall plan that came off. We got away with one.

Two of them, really. Paintsil was the best player we had by a street, capped with the goal, and on a night when almost nothing else clicked going forward he was the one piece of genuine quality we produced. He played the full ninety-eight minutes, and there was a lot of ninety-eight to get through.

And Marcinkowski. Five shots on target, four of them saved, and comfortably the biggest reason there was a point in the boot on the way home. He was excellent, and given the traffic coming at him he had to be.

The back line had a night. Yamane and Yoshida both came out of it among our lowest-rated players, which squares with seventeen San Jose shots from inside the box. That many good positions conceded is a defensive problem, not a run of bad luck. Aude didn't see out the hour. I can't tell you from the numbers exactly how the shape kept breaking, only that it did, again and again, and that a sharper finishing side buries this well before the end. Reid Roberts got their goal and was their standout, which was the one bit of San Jose's night that went exactly as you'd fear.

A point on the road against a good San Jose side isn't nothing, and the table won't ask how we got it. It's the performance underneath that nags. You can nick the odd one like this, riding a hot goalkeeper and a cold opposition forward line, but it isn't a plan and it won't hold. Do this most weeks and most weeks you lose.

I'll happily pocket the point. I'm just not going to pretend it tells us anything has been fixed. We'll want a lot more of the ball, and a lot fewer clear looks at our keeper, before this reads like a side climbing anywhere.