Crawley Town 0-3 United: 10th February 2026

Siri, define: "bouncebackability"

At points over the last few weeks, Cambridge United’s seemingly endless run of good form seemed like something from a dream. Navigating three months unbeaten, and within that racking up six wins on the trot, felt pretty hallucinatory. Surely this isn’t the same football team that fell so flat at Shrewsbury and Tranmere just a few months before that? Or the one that battled persistent inconsistency to kick the season off, not able to put together two of the same result back-to-back in the league at any point until November? Or the one that was 18th in the away league table, only above the league’s bottom five clubs on that front? But it was, and they were flying.

And then, there was the inevitable crash down to earth. Saturday’s defeat at Harrogate was a crash that came with an extra dose of frustration. The script suddenly flipped; how has this side that has been so solid and efficient for the last few months, produce that?!

We were all desperate to put it down to ‘these things happen’; file it under ‘one of those days’. But we needed the proof that that was the case before being able to do so. Crawley on Tuesday night was the litmus test for that. Was Harrogate the start of a run that could halt our charge towards the automatics? Or would we get back on the train and put it right on Tuesday?

It’s fair to say, United passed this particular test with flying colours.