Walsall 0-0 U's: 17th March 2026

A bad night for a good point?

It’s a long, long road to success in football. And, unfortunately, it can’t be 5-0 wins in glorious Saturday sunshine every week; there’s plenty of Tuesday night 0-0s in Walsall shaped potholes along the way. But when there’s also the option of the car coming off the road entirely, a little bump in the road might just be a feeling we need to get used to.

That is, if you even class Tuesday’s point as a bump in the road at all. Plenty of U’s fans left the Bescot Stadium happy simply to have not lost the game. Considering the pressure Walsall put on us in the second half, in isolation that’s probably true – we have drawn against worse sides, put it that way.

But, regardless, when we’re playing a team with the 17th best home record in the division, who hadn’t won at home since Boxing Day, against which we didn’t register a single shot in the second half, and on a night where the rest of the top 6 all won, is it possible to take it in isolation? Was it actually a decent point but a bad night, where we lost ground on every team in the automatic hunt?

The standards you have to set for a top 3 finish are high, but with 9 games still to play the chances are we look back at the draw and class it as another point notched onto the board. Because one thing is for sure, it was a hard-fought one.

After a five-star display on Saturday, this was a football match of an entirely different complexion. Where the win at the weekend sometimes felt like a training exercise, this was a footballing battle, fight and grit often being required instead of technical quality.