Bradford City 5 Yellows 0

Your best mate is getting married and he’s turned to you to be his Best Man. You’re very proud to take on the responsibility and all it entails. You organise for the guys head off on the stag do, an opportunity to have a few drinks and a good chat.

Early on in the evening, everything is going well. After a couple of beers you’ve got that warm fuzzy feeling. The banter is flowing; it’s promising to be a good night.

A couple more drinks and the fluorescent shots are brought out. After two, perhaps three, your world tilts on its axis and things start to fragment. A couple of the blokes disappear; eventually you get a phone call. One of them is sobbing incoherently. They’re in prison waiting for a bloke from the British Consulate to negotiate with the swarthy prison guards. They claim the pig was already wearing a thong and an Ugg Boot on its nose when they found it.

Then, of course, there’s the groom. You’ve still got his brown moccasins – the ones he bought to get into the ‘no jeans and trainers’ club you got priority passes for. He gave them to you as he dashed into the sea to win the £20 bet that he could swim across the bay to the sign saying “BEWARE RIP TIDE - DO NOT SWIM HERE”.

Depleted, you head home to face the bride. She’s worried you’ve shaved his eyebrows; you’re worried he’s dead. It was supposed to be so much fun, but it all went horribly wrong. She enters the room with a warm smile on her face. Slowly, as your silence persists, her smile contorts into curiosity, then fear. You’re paralysed, unable to talk, this is your face.

Whichever way you look at it and you can try and style it out if you want, but there’s nothing good about a 5-0 defeat to Bradford with 2 men sent off. From a position of relative comfort, the game descended into a chaotic farce of our own making. Perhaps it’s an aberration, a one off, and a bad day at the office, but there is something disconcerting about this season. It has no mojo. As the dark winter nights draw in, it feels like it could descend into a tedious mid-table slog.