Tuesday, March 04, 2014

The gargatuan massiveness of large

There was a general consensus that Saturday's game was massive, bigger than last week's massive game and bigger than the massive game we played the week before. Perhaps even more massive than any game we've ever played.

I blame Professor Brian Cox. In the past, size has been a relative and generally comprehensible concept. At school I was genuinely proud to be one of the tallest in my class. I wasn't as tall as Mark Drayton, a freakish beanpole with tight ginger curls and pre-hipster NHS glasses who would be used by our useless house rugby team as a battering ram to flatten our more skilful opponents, but I wasn't one of those teeny weeny whippet types whose parents pestered their local GP to put them onto some kind of growth hormone programme. I was relatively tall, which I liked.

I can comprehend things that are smaller than and larger than a bus, for example. I don't mean that as a boast, I just can. When I saw the Alpine monster The Eiger when on holiday with my parents once, I generally got the principle that there were few things bigger than a mountain, although we then saw Mount Blanc and I came to realise that there were bigger mountains.

Then Professor Brian Cox came on the scene like one of those school teachers with an acoustic guitar and a working knowledge of Oasis b-sides. The type that everyone thinks is dead cool until the rumours about their biological practices with sixth form girls become intolerable. Cox introduced a whole new scale of massiveness with his slightly creepy endless wonderment at the universe and its many mysteries and dimensions. Before him, of course, was Stephen Hawkins, but he didn't have the haircut or post-Britpop button-up military style coat. It's Cox that really shoulders the blame here.

Cox, if you didn't know, used to play keyboard for D:Ream, the unloved disappointment from the Acid House family. He adopts a peculiar sense of childlike wonder about the world, which you'd hope, as a highly educated man, he'd have started to get to grips with. He's wanton to saying, in his dreamy Mancunian schtick, 'Imagine something absolutely huge; well the universe is even big than that, but then, imagine, if there was something even more massive.' before staring out into the middle distance of the Nevada desert as the sun sets a massive number of miles away.

The massiveness of our games have been getting progressively large for over a decade. Not a week goes by without someone reminding us just how massive each upcoming game is. I remember sitting in the car park before a game against Darlington in the pre-Conference days with Nick Harris growling about how massive the next 90 minutes would be. We were in a pit of apathy, I looked out of my windscreen at the Oxford Mail stand 10 minutes before kick-off, I'd just arrived and driven straight in. If it was a massive game, then it seemed that the fans had become overridden by the angst of it all and simply not been able to step over the threshold of their front door.

The size of Saturday's game could not be comprehended by merely comparing it to something big. I tried compose an ironic tweet about the comparative scale of the game, but couldn't actually imagine something large enough to compare it to. I felt the overwhelming urge to compare it to a theoretical algebraic equation. The game had acquired a size of multidimensional proportions.

The internet doesn't help, of course, between us we manage to crowd source the consequences of such a game to the point where, like the human genome project or the recipe for Coca Cola, it can no longer be owned by one person alone. The analysis starts in a reasonably neutral way with someone noticing that a team has a particularly high number of away games coming up or a lot of games against teams at the bottom. Before long someone will suggest that Southend's form is reliant on their left back whose loan move is coming to an end, while someone else will make comment on Newport's poor pitch and the likely impact that might have on form and points. Then someone will talk about a planning application that's been put in by Plymouth for an extension to their club shop that has prevented them from signing someone.

Suddenly we're confronted by our own mortality; that we are mere dots on humanity, controlling nothing, at the mercy of everything. Mass panic ensues, and each game acquires dimensions and depth of a scale whose power we can only sit and gape at in awe. No longer are we merely confronting an opponent; eleven men with a vague connection to a market town in Greater Manchester, we are confronting our own vulnerabilities.

The helplessness of being lone vessels tossed in an angry stormy sea; the anxiety is almost too much to bear.

Except, when you think about it, there is only one must-win game a season; the game that makes it mathematically possible or impossible to achieve whatever it is you're ultimately trying to do. Most of those you can discount as mere confirmations of a trend that has been evident for months. Occasionally there are games which genuinely define the fine line between success or failure - Leyton Orient in 2006, Exeter in 2007, Rushden in 2010 and then York at Wembley. In the last decade those have been the only genuine must-win games we've had.

Saturday's result didn't kill the season; it didn't even dent it very much. We remain, as we did at 2.59pm on Saturday, in with an outside shout of automatic promotion and a very good chance of the play-offs. The game appears to have put paid to Mickey Lewis' prospects of landing the management job permanently. Ian Lenagan claimed after the game to be over 50% through the recruitment process, which presumably means that Lewis isn't on the short-list, unless he's offering him the job in a particularly long winded and opaque way using a series of cryptic clues dotted around the Kassam Stadium. Lewis is a good bloke and a decent coach, but he doesn't have the pig headedness or tactical thinking to be a manager.

When will we confront our destiny? Not yet, but soon. As the games in hand held by others begin to unwind in the next few weeks we'll get a better picture of whether we're going for an automatic position or the play-offs. I suspect that we'll see ourselves comfortably within the play-offs, in which case destiny will come in the post-season. However, given the erratic nature of everyone's form in this division, we may still hold aspirations of an automatic slot come May; and then destiny could well lie in the last game of the season at Chris Wilder's Northampton.

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