The wrap - Rotherham and Fleetwood

Oxford United 3 Rotherham 3
"I wasn't at the game today Jerome"; this is a phrase that will strike fear into the hearts of most Oxford fans. The opening gambit of a Radio Oxford post-match phone-in caller typically precedes a tactical dissection of the game they didn't see, a dewy eyed gushing praise of BBC Oxford's coverage, including detailed description of the reason why they can't make games ('my wife had a vaginal prolapse three years ago, but we listen every week.') or an opportunity to ask the real question: ''ave you heard what's going on with the stadium Jerome?".

For many years I couldn't comprehend what people who didn't go to football did at weekends. This is not purple-faced vein-bulging faux-passion only us proper football fans feel. It's simply that I was brought up with weekends defined by football - on Saturday morning, my Roy of the Rovers would be delivered, Saturday lunchtime was Football Focus or Saint and Greavsie (often both), then the date would taper towards 3pm and the game itself. Sunday would be spent scouring the paper for a couple of paragraphs about our game.

I still struggle with the idea of having a Saturday which isn't defined by a match although I can see that full and complete commitment to the club, home and away, week after week, is a path to madness. I've twice been to games which I would consider beyond the norm - Carlisle away in 2002 and York away on a Tuesday night the following year. On both occasions there were happy coincidences which meant I could make the game - friends who lived in Carlisle and a work commitment in York. A few occasions I've traveled home from a holiday and gone straight to a game. But to do this every week is surely commitment too far. There's a bloke who I see at every game wherever I go, I wonder what impact it has on his family on friends.

I was on holiday for Saturday's humdinger against Rotherham on an annual trip to Devon. It was all Michael Appleton's fault, in his dire first season I told myself that I wouldn't be bound by the fixture list in the way I had been before. I previously only missed games for weddings and work, and while that was, in my head, the honorable thing to do, it also meant that I ended up going to games when there were better things I could be doing. In that first year we booked late which meant missing a 1-2 defeat to Carlisle, the year after I followed the 2-3 capitulation against Barnet while touring the Eden Project. Last year it was the 2-2 collapse against Port Vale.

This year we were travelling for most of the game, I saw we'd gone 3-1 up then next picked up the final score. In between, apparently, Ryan Ledson missed a penalty and someone turned up with a drum; though I didn't find out about either until Sunday. While I'm generally happier with the balance I've struck between football and real life, the lack of  detail does leave a disconcerting sensory deprivation.

Fleetwood Town 2 Oxford United 0
It’s been the Baseball World Series this week. Baseball is a game that’s hard to love, superficially it looks like a series of tedious repetitive activities punctuated, very occasionally, with moments of excitement.

You have to put in a bit of graft to understand baseball – teams play 162 games a season - practically a game every day. A pitcher will only throw 100 pitches before being rested for a week, about two-thirds of a match.

A game every week wouldn’t work because it wouldn’t differentiate the good teams from the bad ones. It requires this level of intensity over a prolonged period for the better teams to emerge. As a fan, therefore, you have to stick with it to enjoy the drama.

Football is generally more forgiving; moments of excitement are more frequent, wins mean more as an end in itself. But being a football fan, like being a baseball fan, is really about living the narrative in its totality. The defeat to Fleetwood was a disappointing result, but it comes off the back of a five game unbeaten streak, in a year of the best football in a generation in a decade of steady progress.

In baseball, it is perfectly normal to lose an individual game, it’s the reason that the World Series is held over seven games, it is possible to win or lose via a freak game. Football is not that different; yes, we lost to Fleetwood, but it was the result of a goal in the closing minutes (plus a second in the chaos that ensues when you’re chasing a game). While maybe not a freak in the baseball sense, it hardly constitutes a definitive message about our ability.

Chris Wilder, who seems to have become a bit of a golden boy in recent weeks, used to eulogise about keeping on a level in both wins or losses, whatever you might think of him (and it’s only flat-earthers and climate change deniers that would consider him a ‘bad manager’) it’s a sage piece of advice.