NAC Breda secured a 2-1 victory over De Graafschap in the Eerste Divisie's seventh round of matches on Sunday. The away side took all three points after a contest that saw Charles-Andreas Brym fire twice for the hosts before Julian Kania responded for NAC Breda. By then, the visitors had already shown they would not let the home side dictate proceedings.
Brym opened the scoring in the eighteenth minute, putting De Graafschap ahead. He doubled his tally just before the hour mark, and things looked comfortable for the hosts. Kania then got over the line in the forty-fifth minute to level matters before the break. The momentum shifted sharply after that point.
A red card for Thomas Kok in the sixty-third minute changed the complexion of the match entirely. De Graafschap went down to ten men and found themselves chasing the game. NAC Breda made several changes as the match progressed, bringing on Toivo Mero, Kaya Symons, Jannes Van Hecke, Kamal Sowah, Boyd Lucassen, and Rowan Besselink across the final half-hour.
The statistics tell their own story. NAC Breda registered 120 attacks compared to 91 for their opponents, and their shots on target came ten to three. Possession was evenly split at 51 to 49 per cent, but the visitors created more opportunities from those phases of play. De Graafschap managed only three shots on target from four attempts inside the penalty area.
The result keeps NAC Breda in fifteenth place with seven points from six games, while De Graafschap remain nineteenth on four points. Both sides have played the same number of matches, so the gap between them stays at three points. This was not a match decided by volume of chances, but by who made theirs count.
