Some points are earned in the cool of the first half; others are wrenched from the jaws of defeat when the fourth official's board has long since gone up and the away end is already singing its way home. Espanyol's leveller belonged firmly to the second kind. Marcos Fernández rose at the far post in the eighth minute of stoppage time, nodded the ball into the bottom right corner from very close range, and then waited — as everyone at the RCDE Stadium waited — for the screen to deliver its verdict. When VAR confirmed it, the noise that followed felt less like celebration than relief.

The 1-1 draw was a strange, lopsided thing. Sevilla had played more than half the match a man down, lost Arouna Sangante to a red card in the 56th minute, and still contrived to lead with five minutes of normal time remaining. That they could not see it out will gnaw at them. That Espanyol needed so long to find a way through their depleted visitors will trouble the hosts just as much.

For the home crowd, the emotion was tangled. A point salvaged is a point that flatters the effort that preceded it, yet the manner of it — so late, so fraught, so nearly not given — carried its own giddy charge. Espanyol move to four points; Sevilla to seven. Both will feel the scoreboard told only part of the story.

The turning point

The afternoon pivoted on Sangante's dismissal just past the hour. Down to ten men with more than half an hour still to play, Sevilla might have been forgiven for retreating into a defensive crouch and settling for whatever they could take from the wreckage. Instead they reorganised, dug in, and refused to let the numerical disadvantage define them.

There is a particular kind of discipline required to defend a lead with ten men against a side desperate to punish you, and for long stretches Sevilla found it. They compressed the space, harried the ball, and dared Espanyol to break them down. The hosts pressed and probed but too often ran into a wall of bodies, their frustration mounting with each cleared cross and each blocked route to goal.

Sending a man off can, perversely, sharpen a team's focus, and so it proved here for the greater part of the closing stages. Sevilla looked the more organised side even while a man light — right up until the very last act, when the effort of it all finally caught up with them.

Stassin strikes

The reward for that resilience arrived in the 85th minute, and it belonged to Lucas Stassin. Collecting possession in the centre of the box, he steadied himself and drove a right-footed shot into the bottom right corner, a finish of real composure from a side that had spent the previous half-hour with one fewer man on the pitch. It was the kind of goal that ought to have decided the afternoon.

For a few minutes it looked as though it had. Sevilla, ten men and all, had turned adversity into a lead, and the visiting support roared their approval of a smash-and-grab that would have counted among the season's more improbable results. A team that had been chasing shadows in a man-down slog suddenly had the three points in their grasp.

But leads held with ten men are the most precarious of all, because they demand a level of concentration that fatigue steadily erodes. Sevilla had given everything to build the platform. They had precious little left to protect it, and Espanyol sensed the gap opening.

The eighth-minute reprieve

Espanyol threw everything forward in a chaotic, breathless finale. Bodies piled into the box, crosses rained in, and the clock ticked deep into an added-time period that stretched to eight minutes and beyond. It was in that last convulsion that Marcos Fernández found his moment, stealing in at the far post to head home from close range and send the RCDE Stadium into delirium.

The delay for the VAR review only heightened the tension, players and supporters alike frozen in a limbo of raised arms and held breath. When the goal stood, the release was total. For Espanyol it was a point rescued from a match they had looked destined to lose; for Sevilla, two points surrendered at the death after an act of collective defiance that deserved a kinder ending.

There is little consolation in narrow margins, but the timeline of the game will haunt Sevilla longer than the hosts. To lead with ten men, so late, and still walk away with a single point is the sort of outcome that lingers. Espanyol, by contrast, will happily bank the reprieve and move on.

Where it leaves them

The draw lifts Espanyol to four points from their opening four fixtures, a return of one win, one draw and two defeats that leaves them 11th and still searching for consistency. Their attacking output — six goals for, five against — hints at a side capable of moments but not yet of control. The manner of this equaliser, snatched at the last, will do more for morale than the mathematics suggest.

Sevilla remain the more settled of the two, sitting seventh on seven points with two wins, a draw and a single defeat. Yet this felt like an opportunity spurned. Having wrestled the game into their grip despite the red card, they will rue not adding to a goal tally of seven that has been matched by six conceded — a leaky record that this late lapse only underlines.

Both sides depart with lessons rather than satisfaction. Espanyol proved they can fight to the final whistle; Sevilla proved they can suffer and organise, but not quite close out. The table barely moves, but the memory of those frantic closing minutes will travel with both teams into the weeks ahead.