Barnet wrap - Barnet 0 Oxford United 3

A family trip to the theatre meant that not only did I miss Barnet - one of my usual away days - I was also completely out of touch with the progress of the game from start to finish. The theatre was an  internet blackspot so I had no updates at all. I came out to see a tweet featuring a ‘third wicog’, so I knew things had gone well.

Barnet away was always going to be tricky, they have good home form and Martin Allen is just the kind of manager Michael Appleton struggles to contain. A point would have been good, three excellent, 3-0 out of this world. The euphoria was understandable, even though seeing only the result is still disorientating when you don’t know how the points were won - were there sendings off? Did we actually get battered? Did Kemar Roofe get career-ending knee injury in the last minute?

The table also has a slightly disconcerting look to it. I saw that Plymouth lost and we were six points clear of third, but it was Bristol Rovers and not the Pigrims sitting behind us. Rovers, unusually for a form team in this division, have managed to penetrate the top three. A few times this year we’ve seen teams move threateningly up the table only to fall away; Portsmouth, Mansfield and Accrington. As a result, we are six points from third, which is great, but also six points off fourth which is as it was before Barnet. While the win against Barnet was a good one, looking at the table you could say that because both teams behind us have a game in hand, there are two threats to our automatic promotion place rather than one.

The question, I suppose, is whether Plymouth and Rovers’ current trajectories permanent or temporary. Have Plymouth blown a gasket which they can’t recover from? Are Rovers going to do a Northampton and barely drop another point for the rest of the season? We know both are good teams; both very capable of going up automatically, but what we don’t know is whether there are two teams charging after us or one… or indeed, none. Easter will be telling.

Any other business

On Saturday morning I woke to a minor Twitter storm, Firoz Kassam had made a rare public appearance to talk about building a fourth stand. It opened old wounds - was Kassam a slum landlord and asset stripper or someone who just wasn’t very good at running a football club?

My view is that it’s was a bit of both. I think he started with intentions of making Oxford a successful club, look at the managers he brought in - Joe Kinnear, Ray Harford, Ramon Diaz, even Ian Atkins and Brian Talbot had lower league pedigree. And then there are some of his player purchases - Tommy Mooney, Andy Scott, Paul Moody - not wild successes with hindsight, but they were established players who cost money to bring in.

While he won major battles off the pitch, winning a war that had lasted decades to move the club, Kassam couldn’t make it work on the pitch. Backed into a corner, he simply gave up and went back to what he knew best; making money from desperate people with few choices.

Anyway, now he’s back talking about completing the stadium in his name. I’m fairly certain he would like to complete the stadium if he could make it viable, which I think is the key. Making it viable requires approval for his plan to build houses near the ground. Rather than returning like a benevolent uncle, I think he's using the current good vibes around the club to stimulate interest in his house building project. To be honest, if it does end up with a fourth stand, then the methods he uses to get it done doesn't both me at all.