A ninety-third-minute header sent the home end into the night.

Calder United 2 Port Selwyn Athletic 1. For ninety-two minutes it looked as though Calder United would have to settle for a point and another week in second place. Then Danny Ferreira rose at the far post to meet a corner from the substitute Callum Hart, and the noise from the Ardle Road End seemed to roll all the way down to the river.

The win, United’s seventh in nine league matches, lifts them one point clear at the top of the table after leaders Harrow Moor Rovers drew at Ardle Town earlier in the afternoon. It is the first time Calder have led the division this late in the autumn for eleven seasons. It had not been a classic for long stretches. Port Selwyn arrived with a compact back five and a clear plan to frustrate, and for the first half-hour they did exactly that. United had plenty of the ball but little room between the lines, and their only clear chance came in the 19th minute when Jordan Achebe’s low shot from the edge of the area was pushed round the post by the visiting goalkeeper, Tomasz Lindqvist.

Selwyn strike first

The visitors took the lead against the run of play in the 38th minute. A long throw from the right was flicked on at the near post, and Reece Mallory reacted first to stab the ball in from six yards while the United defence appealed in vain for a push. The away section, around 900 strong, celebrated as if they had won the league themselves.

United manager Simone Kerr responded at half-time by taking off the holding midfielder Owen Pryce and sending on Hart, moving to a back three and pushing both full-backs high. The change worked within twelve minutes. In the 57th minute Achebe drifted inside from the left, played a one-two with captain Marcus Doyle and curled a finish into the top corner from twenty yards.

From then on it was largely one-way traffic. Lindqvist made fine saves from Ferreira in the 64th minute and from the substitute Ibrahim Sall in the 81st, and a Doyle header struck the crossbar with six minutes of normal time left. Port Selwyn, tiring, brought on two extra defenders and were reduced to clearing the ball as far up the pitch as possible.

The header

Four minutes of added time were shown. United won a corner on the left with just under ninety seconds of it remaining after Sall’s cross was deflected behind. Hart’s in-swinging delivery cleared the crowded six-yard box, and Ferreira, unmarked at the back post, headed down and past Lindqvist into the far corner. The centre-back ran the length of the touchline with half the team in pursuit before disappearing beneath a pile of teammates in front of the home dugout.

“I told the lads at half-time that if we kept asking the question, they would run out of answers eventually,” said Simone Kerr afterwards. “I didn’t expect the answer to come from my centre-half, but I’ll take it.”

Kerr, in her second full season in charge, was careful to play down talk of a title challenge. “It’s November. Nobody gets a trophy for being top in November,” she said. “What I liked was the response after we went behind. Last season we would have gone into our shells. Today we kept playing.”

Ferreira, who joined from Ardle Town in the summer, said he had been practising the same run at the back post all week. “The gaffer saw that their keeper comes for everything at the near post, so we put the ball over him. It’s nice when the plan actually works.” Port Selwyn manager Graham Toller was left to rue his side’s inability to hold out. “We defended for our lives, and we were seconds away from a deserved point,” he said. “To lose it from a set piece, after the work the players put in, is hard to take.”

Teams and what comes next

Calder United: Haldane; Okoro, Ferreira, Doyle, Brannigan; Pryce (Hart 46), Whitlock, Achebe; Moss (Sall 70), Kaminski, Duarte (Ellery 85). Port Selwyn Athletic: Lindqvist; Rafferty, Stone, Mbeki, Corrigan, Hale; Mallory, Byrne (Quayle 79), Ashworth; Tennant (Gill 74), Ndiaye. Attendance: 14,212. United travel to Harrow Light next Saturday before hosting second-placed Harrow Moor Rovers at the end of the month, a match that already looks like the biggest home fixture at Ardle Road in more than a decade.