The wrap - Northampton Town 0 Oxford United 0

Following a tumultuous week, a reassuringly dull draw.

Let's start at the top. There will be few club owners held in higher regard by fans than Darryl Eales. He affected a revolution at Oxford which dragged us into the 21st Century and left a legacy of promotion, Wembley, derby wins and giant killings. Perhaps even more.

There were significant barriers to overcome including fan suspicion (including my own) and the perpetual challenge of Firoz Kassam, but he did so, successfully and with integrity. And that's not something you hear related to owners of football clubs very often.

I suppose the reality is that most owners have limited capacity to improve a club. Ian Lenegan could get us out of the Conference, but not out of League 2. Darry Eales got us out of League 2, but not out of League 1. If you can move us forward 20 places or so, then you're doing well. The trick is to hand over to someone with similar values, but also the resources to take us on.

Enter Sumrith 'Tiger' Thanakarnjanasuth and the least surprising takeover in modern history. Several months ago, when Tiger started to appear in the directors' box at the Kassam, the Oxford Mail 'investigated' foreign ownership. They concluded that sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad. It's almost as if the foreignness of any owner is not what defines their success.

The suspicion of foreigners is something the new owner will have to overcome. Fans were quick to jump on his accent and his sometimes confused rambling during Monday's press conference. There have been some pretty grim stories of foreign owners - Portsmouth, Blackburn - and some obvious successes - Bournemouth, Leicester City - but, there is an underlying mistrust. Any wobbles we might have will be looked at, by some, as a sign of the owners nefarious intentions in a way that it may not be with a British owner, even though there have been plenty of catastrophes created by British owners. Positioning himself, as Eales did, as a benign benefactor rather than an all-controlling overlord will certainly help win the trust of fans.

His immediate challenge, of course, is the manager, although if he does announce Craig Bellamy, it will be the second least surprising announcement of the season. Bellamy will come with the baggage of his playing days and unless he affects an immediate upturn in form, that may be a tough barrier to break down.

Then, if Tiger is going to hit the ground running; a focus on putting in place plans for next year has to be a priority. This is, perhaps, the easiest bit - a lot of the infrastructure already exists, it's a question of how much more money you shovel in.

Onto the big stuff; every owner since Firoz Kassam has put the stadium purchase at the heart of their plans. It still seems the most obvious way of moving the club on from relying on an increasingly rich series of benefactors who will bring success through deep pockets and boundless energy.

The question is, can it be purchased? Nick Merry, Ian Lenegan, Darryl Eales and OxVox have all tried and failed. Kassam keeps playing the barely credible 'for the good of the club' card when it comes to who he might sell to. Is a Thai billionaire with few roots in the club, city or country more credible than those who have passed through previously? Unfortunately, I don't think so. Kassam appears completely happy to sit on the asset - perhaps as punishment for the club, but more because it's probably worth more as a brownfield site fit for development than it is as a football stadium. The only real option for Tiger is to offer him an eye-watering amount of money to leave.

Option 2 is to move elsewhere. It took 30 years to move from the Manor to the Kassam, so that's no easy feat. That said, football is good for politicians in a way that it hasn't been in the past, and there's an increasingly established business model about using stadiums to stimulate investment, so finding a site is likely to be less problematic than in the past. But still, it's starting from scratch and that's an expensive and slow process.

And then there's the 'other' option - whatever that might be. Plenty of clubs outside the UK rent rather than own their stadium, and perhaps there's another way forward to put the club on a sustainable footing. Tiger's first press conference implied that there was another way, but there's little doubt he failed in all aspects to articulate what that was.

The initial impression of Tiger wasn't great, but he'd literally walked off the train to his first day in a new role and he was speaking in a language which isn't his first. Early attempts to write him off are unreasonable, he needs time to formulate and fully implement any plan. His subsequent, calmer, considered interview with Radio Oxford shows there is substance behind the bow tie. Writing him off as some chaotic, eccentric outsider is unlikely to bring success.

Oh Sol, amigo

One consolation for the protracted search for a new manager has been the bizarre sideshow of Sol Campbell's application. In the tiny betting market for the Oxford United manager's position, the mere mention that Campbell was in talks with the club served to shoot him up the list of favourites.

It was, of course, way off the mark. Despite their silence, the club are probably dealing with agents and applicants constantly. Being 'in talks' may just have been a courtesy call.

Campbell appears bamboozled by the mechanics of the job market and because he doesn't understand how getting a job works, he's reverted to his playing record and chutzpar as 'one of the best brains in world football' as a battering ram to get people to take a chance on him. It's such a childishly crass way to operate he's simply doing himself more damage. It is a curious bargaining position to suggest that lower league clubs should take a punt because it's not difficult and what harm can it do? The reality is that smaller football clubs lose more through bad decision making - at the top it might be losing out on a place in Europe, further down you risk losing your very existence.

What he fails to see is that the best managers start at the bottom and work their way up - Jose Mourinho was Bobby Robson's interpreter long before he started winning Champions League titles, but we tend to err on the idea that there is some innate genius, a gene that Sol Campbell claims to have.

More than ever, club coaches are following career paths not dictated by their playing reputation, but Campbell doesn't seem to be bothered with all that and just views the lower-leagues as an easy version of the Premier League. A stepping stone to immediate success.

Yes, everyone has to start somewhere and they do need a bit of luck to get that start, but empathy, which Campbell seems to spectacularly lack, is at the heart of all success. 

The wrap - Oxford United 1 Northampton Town 2

Suddenly, so much to cover.


Off the pitch
Starting at the top; no corporate takeover discussions were ever improved by a running commentary for the benefit of East Stand season ticket holder Dave, a plasterer from Wantage. Fans have no formal right to know what is going on with ownership discussions. You might argue that there is an ethical right, and I would agree, and I think that should be formalised by giving football clubs a special status which affords financial and tax benefits in return for greater fan and community control. But, that's not where we're at now.

So while we have no right to know, what is it that fans expect to hear? Darryl Eales’ confirmation of what we already know? That Sumrith Thanakarnjanasuth has been at a few games and they have, self evidently, had discussions? Do we want to know the detailed nature of those discussions? Do we want to agree whether Eales should sell or not via a Twitter poll? What exactly would we be planning to do with that information, even if we understood it?

The truth is, unless a key milestone has been achieved; there is nothing to say. Discussions are just that, part of an iterative dialogue where there is a tacit understanding that the conclusions may end up being significantly different to the start point. You're either in them wholly, or out of them, it's not a spectator sport. Take the Sartori episode, discussions started with a general understanding that there might be a deal and concluded that there wasn't one, updating on the to-ing and fro-ing in between would have been beyond de-stabilising.

But what about Mr Thanakarnjanasuth and his credentials? He may not be right for us. All club owners are a double-edged sword. As the Paradise Papers show, if you’re rich, you tend to be good at acquiring money; avoiding tax and getting rich. This is abhorrent to those of us less capable. There should be rules in place to control the avarice, but they don't appear to be adequate at the moment. The point is, no owner has ever made money simply by taking a reasonable wage home, they’ve taken a risk and got a reward. Darryl Eales, Ian Lenagan, Firoz Kassam, Robin Herd, Robert Maxwell, all had their successes, and all had their, sometimes significant, failings. Mr Thanakarnjanasuth will be no different, if you are waiting for a wholly ethical, straight up, benevolent billionaire with no question marks over his character to take us over, prepare yourself for a long wait.This is the bind of success, until we change the system, we're just going to have to suck it up.

In the stands
Fans do not have any right to be applauded; if only a handful of fans turn up to a game, they are celebrated for their amazing effort, if loads turn up, they are celebrated for their amazing numbers. Fans are always in the right, as judged by the fans. Players, on the other hand, are right when they win and wrong when they lose, as judged by, well, the fans. If fans walk out 10 minutes before the end, as they did on Saturday, or boo, as they did on Saturday, then that is their right, according to the fans.

I know you stayed to the end and applauded and screamed until your head throbbed, I know you haven’t slept since the final whistle, but we’re not talking about you, we’re talking about the collective force that is ‘The Fans’. And, while it might disappoint you hugely, The Fans are not a singular feverish hoard, they don't pulse with a great seething anger, you cannot divide them into those who are like you (and therefore proper fans) and ones who are not (and therefore not proper fans). Fans are a mixed economy of people and the club is far healthier for it.

Insisting that the players applaud The Fans, when The Fans boo and walk out on the players, is a form fan fascism, as is fans insisting that other fans behave to some predetermined template. When we lose, the players are not punishing the fans by not applauding, they are probably consumed in their own frustration, their thoughts clouded by their own exhaustion. Fans, it is not necessarily all about you.

On the pitch
Pep Clotet is not failing; he’s made a better start than Michael Appleton did. And if you argue that he’s had more to work with, you’re probably right, but he’s also had a better start than Michael Appleton did last season, which is as close as you’ll get to a like-for-like comparison.

Football matches are not won by passion. They are not won by talent, luck or form. Football is full of a language which implies that it is reliant on magical powers. Application, technique, preparation and organisation wins games. On Saturday, people were lambasting the lack of passion, only one caller to Radio Oxford picked up a genuine tactical concern – whether Rob Hall and James Henry should swap wings allowing them to cut inside and cross the ball rather than to shoot. This is a tactical and organisational observation which deserves reasonable analysis. The players' passion is not.

The problem, as I see it, is that we are currently struggling to organise as a unit; throughout the first half, Rob Hall could be seen pointing down his flank wanting the ball in front of him so he could run onto it. But the ball didn’t come and the play moved on. Ryan Ledson tried too many hail-Mary passes to get things moving, when he should have been playing calm simple passes that moved the play forward. His reaction to the first goal was to smash the grass with his hand in frustration. A sign that he was not functioning in a calm dispassionate and therefore effective way. Watch any good team, even when their backs are against the wall, and you’ll see they rarely deviate from their trusted template because that’s the most likely way of winning rather than doing something extraordinary.

So, if Pep Clotet isn’t failing, but we’re suffering from a lack of organisation, what’s driving that? I would say it’s injuries. We have a constant rolling programme of players entering and exiting the treatment room, the latest being Curtis Nelson. As such, the organised unit on the field is constantly having to adjust the way it does things. The squad is too new to have a clear pattern of play, a DNA, and it will struggle to develop one when the core is constantly changing.

Do we have an abnormally high number of injuries that will, by the law of averages, eventually even itself out? Or is there something in the way we play or train, or select or treat players which results in more injuries than in previous years? This is worthy of analysis.

While this run is frustrating, we are far from failing, throwing blame around from takeovers to managers to the players is simply a distraction from solving the problem. Tactical discipline, better injury avoidance, and above all, clear heads will see us progress.  

Weekly wrap - Northampton Town 0 Oxford United 0, Oxford United 5 Bury 1

When Donald Trump tried, and failed, to repeal Obamacare, he found it largely impossible to do. The problem was that the bill was structured like a tower of building blocks. If you took one from the top, it just produced a slightly less tall tower, if you took one from the bottom the tower would fall down completely. As a result, repealing the bill was too radical for some, not radical enough for others. Brilliant.

Sunday’s EFL Trophy Final to some a non-event, to others a low priority, but it might actually be the building block which might define the season. What does that do to your moral compass?

After Saturday’s non-event against Northampton, the game against Bury threatened to be a peculiar one. Five days before Wembley and with only an outside chance of the play-offs, it was difficult to predict which team would play let alone how they would react. Why throw yourself into challenges and risk missing Sunday? Why play your game changers when you need them fresh for the big stage? As our ninth game of the month, fatigue was always likely to be a problem.

Certainly the crowd seemed to take the week off with it being the lowest we've seen in over a year. The atmosphere was sleepy, those who did turn up seemed to be there out of a sense of duty rather than anything.

Bury came off the back of some solid form, avoiding relegation is the only thing they have to play for. With some application and a bit of organisation, they could have picked us off, which would have left us further adrift of the play-offs and with doubts going into Wembley.

However, they contrived to put on a display as inept as any team we've played this season. If this was an illustration of their ability they would struggle in League 2. Passes went astray, shots ballooned into the night’s sky, organisationally they were hopeless and their discipline was completely absent.

It was a non contest as we cut them to ribbons. If we'd scored seven it wouldn't have been a surprise. It was the perfect pre-Wembley fillip, an opportunity for those who have struggled with form and fatigue to gain a bit of confidence. But, with results going our way we also suddenly found ourselves  just four points off the play-offs.

I'm not quite sure how; form this month has been pretty moderate. Two games in a week has looked too much for our small squad. But somehow we've negotiated our cluttered agenda and come out the other side with the season in tact.

So, to the weekend and what seemed like the least important game of the season might just be the most important. Ultimately, it's a play in two parts; first, Saturday’s results have to go our way. If by 4.45pm we’re still within sight of the top 6, then the whole perspective on the season changes. Part two is Sunday; firstly, because it will get the distraction of Wembley out the way, but also the objectives for the season become clearer – either the play-offs are on or they’re not. If we win on Sunday, that might just give us the boost we need to propel us through the final stages of the season. Suddenly what might be the most innocuous building block of the season becomes critical to its success.

Northampton wrap - Oxford United 0 Northampton Town 1

Christmas is a great roosting of families. People gathering to spend a day in an enclosed space veiled in an unnaturally consistent, artificially heated, climate. At first, there’s the gathering of the flock, a sense of togetherness, a sense of fellowship and well-being. But then, there is a point, usually signalled by the first sprouty burp of Christmas dinner, where you crave for the fug to be blown away by a chill wind, the increasing need to re-engage with the world beyond your living room, away from the constant call of food and drink. That release, for many, comes through football on Boxing Day.

As a result, the crowd at Boxing Day football is an unusual one; young women in those wooly hats with oversized fluffy bobbles neutrally coloured with matching gloves, the older brother back from London comparing the Kassam to when he watched a game from a box at Stamford Bridge, visiting friends in wonder at the novelty of it all, over-excited children suffering separation anxiety from their new X-Boxes. It is the only day of the season where you will see middle-aged women handing round a pocketful of Celebrations swiped from the bowl in the living room before leaving.

For season ticket regulars, we host the party. When I’ve taken friends to a game on Boxing Day, I become the font of all knowledge. Can I get tickets? What time to leave? Where might we park? Do we have time for a drink before the game? In return, I display Jedi-like knowledge of every movement and twitch around the ground – “There’s Martin Brodetsky” I’ll say with a flamboyant wave in his general direction. My guests respond with a deferential nod as though I have accurately identified a rare sculpture by Alberto Giacometti.

I wouldn’t swap it for anything, but football without context is just a really erratic sub-genre of the entertainment industry. The families who come as much for the fresh air as anything expect a win. But football doesn’t work like that; it’s like watching an over of a test match and expecting it to decide the result of all five-days’ play.

Last year I came with a friend who purred at what he was watching; Baldock, Roofe, Lundstram, Sercombe and an Exeter team in abject form being thrashed around like a whale killing a seal. This year’s game against Northampton was never going to be like that, no team in League 1 is going to be turned over like that, at least not by us, not at the moment.

As the minutes ticked on and the game petered out, people began to drift away. Even at half-time there seemed to be a glut of vacant blue seats that weren’t there in the first 45 minutes. It was clear the ‘show’ wasn’t delivering what was expected. But, this isn’t pantomime, you can’t guarantee that the Aladdin with marry a princess. When they scuffed in their last minute winner, it signalled a cue for a great exit and within seconds the stadium looked like it did at a mundane fixture during the barren League 2 years. Only the regulars remained.

Inevitably, some conflated the rumblings about stewarding and flags and Darryl Eales’ ‘hard-hitting’ programme notes with an evident downturn in form. In truth, they were pretty average but got a lucky break. None of this was helped by the fact it was Northampton; the target of Michael Appleton’s hilariously indefensible statements on us being ‘statistically’ the best team in the division last year. He’s wrong, of course, not that I would trade anything we achieved last year for what they achieved. It just made it a more galling defeat, but it was no more signal of our imminent collapse as the previous eight games undefeated was a signal we were going up.

Boxing Day football blows away the cobwebs of a Christmas party hangover. It feels like 2016 has been one long party at the club. Everyone has got a bit tired and emotional and the hangovers are kicking in; perhaps we just need 2017 to come to start afresh.

Northampton wrap - Oxford United 0 Northampton Town 1

Tuesday saw a few Oxford fans scuttling to reframe the defeat to Northampton as some kind of moral victory. Partly, because it any extinguished any title aspirations we never really had in the first place, mostly, because we lost to Him.

Truth is they were the better team and Chris Wilder is the more complete manager. Of course, he’s also 8 years older than Michael Appleton and benefits from having Alan Knill to work with. In Wilder’s latter days at Oxford he was left isolated because of Kelvin Thomas’ departure, at Northampton he has Knill to work with which is working as well as it did when they were together at Bury.

Some Oxford fans re-edit Chris Wilder as a failure, but he was nothing of the sort at Oxford and never has been. He's has a tactical flexibility that Michael Appleton doesn't; what he does well is exciting to watch, but when it is exposed, he doesn't have an adequate plan B.

There wasn’t a lot in it, they were direct, strong, fast and purposeful, we were a bit fussy in the final third, which is nothing new this season. I do think that Appleton recognises this, which is why he signed Jordan Bowery; to offer a more direct route to goal. Whether it’s fitness or not, I’m not sure, but Bowery’s contribution seems fitful at the moment, unlike, say, the more reliable contribution made by Marc Richards for the Cobblers. I don’t think it’s fair to judge Bowery yet; he needs games.

The game wasn’t helped by the contribution of referee Keith Hill. The idea of a game being played on the floor and at pace seemed to flummox him. Any contact; whether malicious or simply a normal ‘footballing incident’, was considered a foul. It meant that we either had to allow them to plough through or risk a booking. In truth, there were three malicious challenges that I can recall - one by Maguire, who was booked, one by Skarz who wasn’t, and Danny Rose’s challenge on Liam Sercombe, which was worthy of a sending off. As well as losing control of the players on two occasions, he killed the contribution of a number of players, not least Danny Hylton.

The penalty decision followed Hill’s liberal interpretation of the rules; the ball seemed to hit Mullins’ hand, but he was under no pressure, it came from a Northampton player hooking the ball over his shoulder and it was in a fairly benign area of the penalty box. It's difficult to see why Mullins might do it deliberately, and anyhow, was it foul play deserving of losing a goal? Of course not.

But that’s not to say we deserved to win; in a parallel universe we may have snatched three points or a draw, but the defeat was not in any way unjust.

Coming up - Northampton Town

The drop

A big game, but at the same time, not. In the greater scheme of the season, this will have little significance but  it is first versus third, maybe even a title decider, well, influencer a least. There's a Chris Wilder factor; Oxford fans protest too much about how irrelevant he is. 

In some senses this is a battle of philosophies. New-Oxford is all modern and high-tech - act like a Premier League team and you'll perform like one. Wilder's Oxford was all about the right style in the right place. Every meeting with Wilder is a bit like showing off your new girlfriend to your old one. in the hope of proving that you were right to split up in the first place.

I don't buy that Wilder was negative at Oxford; until the trials of London Welsh and the pitch took over, we played fast attacking football. It was only in the latter years that we had to keep the ball off the ground as much as possible. What's more, his latest charges are the highest scoring team in the division.

I do think that we're probably a better football team than Northampton because I think we're the best football team in the division. However, that doesn't necessarily mean we're the best equipped to beat the teams we're facing. We have shown a weakness for defending balls into the box, but we've shown that we can also play teams off the park particularly if they come to play rather than defend. I doubt Northampton, in their current position will come for a point. 

Let the philosophies clash.

Old game of the day

Northampton Town wrap - Northampton Town 1 Oxford United 0

Inevitable? Yes, the longer a run goes on the more likely it is to end. Being unbeaten for 15 games isn’t normal, so we’ve been getting closer to defeat with every passing week. Only an improbable fightback at Luton, a missed penalty at Mansfield and a wonder strike at Bristol Rovers has prevented this from coming sooner. It’s not a question of luck, it's just maths.

There was a groaning inevitability that it had to happen against Chris Wilder. But it’s not because of some mystical hoodoo, he can organise teams to beat the best on any given day. That’s his thing; in the three whole seasons he was with us in the Football League he managed to win away at the eventual league champions every year. This was the wrong team at the wrong time.

You might curse our luck with injuries and suspensions, although this is also inevitable. Most of the season will have that feeling of never quite being at full strength. Professional sports people are always in pain because they’re constantly at the breaking point between optimum performance and being injured or exhausted. It’s the same with teams, they’re always broken or close to broken in some way. We need to get used to it rather than wait for it to pass.

On this basis, criticism of Ryan Taylor is slightly unfair. He's never going to be a direct replacement for Kemar Roofe. No team at our level can have a bank of Roofe and Hylton back-ups. Taylor's primary role is to create space for others - Roofe, Hylton, McDonald, O’Dowda - and so judging him solely on his goals and his Roofeness is not right. Roberts, on form and fit, would be an interesting partnership with Taylor; but those calling for him to replace Taylor are asking for a Roberts of last year, it doesn’t sound like he’s in the same place at the moment.

What next? We keep going. When Bradley Wiggins won his Tour de France in 2012, Team Sky employed a particular tactic in the mountains. Wiggins isn’t fast or explosive like typical climbers. However, he knew that if someone attacked, they would eventually slow. Wiggins’ trick was to maintain an average pace faster than that of his rivals so that if they did ride away from him, he would, like a diesel engine, eventually pull them back. Aside from the physical challenge, the mental challenge is not to panic, that expends energy particularly if you find yourself pushing too hard.

We’ve dropped back to 8th, which risks all the old insecurities re-appearing. But despite everything, we are still in title winning form. The challenge is to keep plugging away.

Coming Up: Northampton Town

The drop

I don’t like the comparisons between Michael Appleton and Chris Wilder. It’s not a zero based game; just because one is good, doesn’t make the other bad. Chris Wilder is one of only thee managers to achieve promotion in my lifetime, which puts him among the greats. Anyone who experienced the rush of 2009/10 should remember the time as one that was as good as any we’ve had at the club.

On that basis, I'll always hope Chris Wilder does well, wherever he is. That said, he seems to be in the second phase of his time at Northampton. Having saved them from relegation and then stabilised them last year, he’s now on that difficult second album of taking them on to promotion. Like his time at Oxford, achieving this extra 10% looks set to be a challenge. 

None-the-less, as with all Wilder teams, they will prove a challenge to break down, nobody should be expecting an easy ride. The loss of Kemar Roofe is obviously a blow, he's the magician in a tight game. But, with O'Dowda back we go into the game in rude health; this is part 2 of a trilogy of games that will test our mettle as promotion contenders. Part 1, against Bristol Rovers, was effective if a little hairy; something similar will do on Saturday.

Old game of the day

Northampton Town, a team we seem to live in parallel with Oxford. During the Ian Atkins years, he basically schlepped his old Northampton squad down the A43 to play for us. Now, of course, there's a slow reconstruction of the 2010 promotion team at Sixfields, although they're in competition with Eastleigh on that front.

This is from 1996, the promotion year, and an actual, proper, FA Cup run. We'd beaten Dorchester 9-1 in the first round and followed it up with this before going on to beat Millwall. We eventually went out to Nottingham Forest, in a heroic fight. This was the only home game I missed that season, which still lives with me 19 years on.

From the blog

"On Saturday we came into the game against Northampton with a degree of trepidation about the home-form hoodoo that hung over us. And then the team put in a performance and delivered a result which conformed entirely to the form book. If I'd watched that game on my iPad with the sound down as the Hairy Bikers made a lightly toasted Kirsty Allsop and brie cassoulet would the anxiety have been the same? Just how many layers are there in watching football?"

Read on

We came to mock him

The return of Chris Wilder to the Kassam was being billed by some as the game in which new-era Oxford would sweep away his new charges with a dazzling display of pace and passing. In return, it was assumed, Wilder would – in a fashion typical of the man – launch the ball forward in the vein hope of snatching a goal before defending for grim death. More important than a win, we were going to prove a philosophical point.

Those, like me, who supported Chris Wilder throughout his time at the club and will continue to defend his legacy are labelled as living in the past, as hankering for a time that never truly existed.

This is unfair, any support for Wilder is not revisionism, there were games during his time which left me giddy with adrenaline, feelings an adult male deadened by life’s trudge are no longer supposed to feel. Before yesterday’s game I was trying to think of Wilder’s top 10 Oxford moments and got to 17 candidates before giving up; everything from Wembley to my favourite moment; the last minute goal against Wrexham in 2009. Most of the Kassam Stadium’s greatest moments have been under Wilder with perhaps only Louis Jefferson’s goal against Swindon threatening to break the hegemony. 

Being featured in great moments at the Kassam might feel like winning the world’s tallest dwarf competition, so beyond that, aside from Denis Smith’s half-season aberration 19 years ago, which lead to a thrilling last ditch promotion via wins over Swindon and Wycombe, you have to go back to THOSE years in the mid-eighties for anything to compare to the period under Wilder.

Nor is it a pining for his return, I think everyone accepts, as he said, that the bus was driving itself by the time Wilder left. We were chipping away at the same problems with the same tools. Wilder didn’t have the support to develop as a manager, the club didn’t have the money to help him develop. It was time to move on for all concerned, it was only a matter of when and how that would come about. An increasingly delicate game of chess being played behind the scenes meant a handful of Ian Lenagan missed steps – his failure to back or sack Wilder in 2013 and allowing him to talk to Portsmouth a few months later – opened a door to an inevitable conclusion.

What I do pine for is what was demonstrated by Northampton on Tuesday night; organisation, structure, commitment, purpose. Basic tenets on which teams perform and in League 2 can actually be enough to help you succeed. The sort of stuff you only miss when it’s gone.

It is difficult to describe how bad we actually were, but rather than dazzling Wilder with a hybrid of tiki-taka and Brazillian showmanship, it was the Cobblers who passed the ball over our rutted pitch, around and through us for long periods while we stood around waiting for someone to take control of the situation.

Wilder spent most of the night hidden away in his dugout, as he did in his last game as our manager, rather than at the edge of the technical area. He left Alan Knill to bark instructions out to their players.

This was an illustration of the man and perhaps explains why he frustrates people. He is, at heart, an introvert; treading a precarious line between wanting recognition and hiding away from it. He wants to be successful, believes in his abilities, but doesn’t want to become the focus of the attention that success inevitably brings. He fears being labelled as a failure or having weaknesses exposed, because that too brings unwanted attention. As a result introverts tend to work extra hard trying to stay one-step ahead of a dragon of their own making. In a sense, not being liked is a more comfortable position.

Those who don’t understand that mindset can find their subject awkward and difficult to like. Introverts appear diffident and scratchy whereas this is really just a method of avoiding talking about themselves too much. But, players respond because they don’t want to be on the receiving end of the wrath of their managers’ anxieties. When compared to the cosy comfort of someone satisfied in their own abilities, who believes success will come from the osmosis of philosophical belief, there really is only one type of person you want in charge of your football team.

Game of Football - Summer is coming

Our season finale against Northampton; such a strange fixture. On one level its significance is massive; Northampton's very survival is at stake. On another it's parochial and local - there's a revenge sub plot related to Chris Wilder. And yet, for us, it's ultimately pointless. Perhaps Game of Thrones helps us figure it out.

Perhaps I don’t watch enough TV; although my mum certainly didn’t used to think so, but Game of Thrones completely re-writes the fundamental rules of television. Perhaps all box-set dramas are like this nowadays, but as I say, I don’t watch enough of TV.

To my mind, the traditional narrative of any TV show or film is to have clearly defined good people and bad people. The story covers the good people overcoming the bad people, usually from a position where the good people are at an initial disadvantage. As TV is supposed to be passive entertainment, you’re supposed to be able to lounge around in front of it while it jiggles its bits in front of you, it’s not really in anyone’s interest to have anything more taxing than that.

Game of Thrones, however, follows a completely different set of rules. You find yourself staring into the middle distance after an episode asking yourself whether a) what you’ve just seen has actually happened or b) whether the passing comment by an apparently marginal character halfway through the episode actually meant something much more significant. It’s very visceral in that respect, and benefits from the post-show analysis available online. The plots are so interwoven and unpredictable, it isn’t really possible for one person to figure out what’s really going on.

Superficially it's wrapped up in that sort of Lord of the Rings-style medieval fantasy drama which often serves to exclude the right minded and positively include the maniacally deranged. However, to read it as this is simplistic and incorrect. Lord of the Rings fundamentally follows the same schtick - for all the Hobbit’s jeopardy with dragons and the like you can be pretty certain you’re not going to see any of the little guys empaled. There’s a particular sequence in the Desolation of Smaug where the band of elves are sat in barrels going down a river being pursued by a hoard of archer orcs. Their arrows hit absolutely everything except the bloody elves. You know the good guys will ultimately beat the bad guys, because that’s the rules.

Not so with Game of Thrones; nobody is safe; good guys get killed, bad guys get killed, good guys turn into bad guys, bad guys turn into good guys. Some guys have spent some 34 (and counting) hour-long episodes simply trying to get to the centre of the action. You wouldn’t rule out the possibility that even if they do make it into the main theatre of the story, that they wouldn’t be obliterated on first contact. It would be the Game of Thrones way. It’s not often that, as I sit here today, amongst the top 5 good guys in Game of Thrones is someone who paralysed a helpless child because that child saw the bloke banging his sister, with whom he has previously sired a sadistic child who had become an illegitimate air to the throne. He’s almost a good guy, at the moment. Oh and he's just raped his sister in front of their dead child.

It is a meandering story in which nobody is good or bad, they just lurch from one crisis to another making the best they can of a world they can’t control. Nobbing your own sister aside, it is as much like real life as anything you’re likely to watch.

We’re so drilled by Hollywood that we believe in the ‘good versus evil’ story arc, we’re convinced that it seeps into real life, we characterise people by a single dimension; blame is laid and that wrong will be righted in a pre-determined set piece finale. Our season finale had supposedly been written for some time; Oxford United visits Northampton, managed by our former manager (and architect of our own success or failure, if you like) with our star striker (and said manager’s protege) set to break the club’s goalscoring record that will propel us to promotion and condemn them to relegation.

However, life, like in Game of Thrones, sees this differently. This is a programme which killed a central character to avoid the perception that the story was ultimately about avenging his father’s death. The set piece finale of this football season is far more nuanced than it was originally painted.

Over the last few weeks it’s become clear that, for us, Northampton v Oxford would be a dead end-of-season rubber. If the game was the fabled episode 9 of a typical Game of Thrones series, the battle that was originally pencilled in as a big promotion/relegation/revenge play-off will end up with James Constable unpredictably being decapitated by a falling floodlight pylon.

The fact that the script had it written that Northampton v Oxford would be the climax, the chances are that it won’t. This is basically analogous of the civil war waging through the middle of Westeros where Game of Thrones is set. There is a battle of five pretenders to the throne to the disputed iron throne. After several rounds of battle and with momentum clearly with the ‘good’ people, the final battle ultimately ends with, well, nothing fundamentally changing illustrating the futility of all the effort.

And when all this effort ends up with nought, you have to question what are we actually fighting for. ‘Success’ is a strange concept; at the scheming Queen Cersei contends ‘in the game of thrones you win or you die’. This is certainly one definition. But for all the anticipation of promotion or the play-offs or relegation, is it that the only real winner are those who win the Champions League? But then does that mean that the rest of us are, metaphorically, dead?

In fact, the real clue lies in the story of the Free Folk. This is a ruddy band of northern peoples migrating south to escape harsh living conditions and an unseen threat of ghost like undead. Unbeknown to them what faces them in the south is the hellish political maelstrom of King’s Landing and beyond that - and largely unknown to everyone - the even more hellish threat of a women with a huge murderous army and some dragons. Threats behind them, threats in front of them. And where they are, for good measure, are a band of cannibals. This is a clear analogy of the fact that our failure to get promoted  has resulted in realisation that we're soon to face the resurgent undead of Luton. However, if you think that represents failure, you have to remember that success would merely have had us walking into the even greater misery of Swindon.

Ultimately what Game of Thrones teaches you about football, or football about Game of Thrones, or they both confirm about life, is that the game is not to win or lose, but to survive. The Northampton game is characterised by being both meaningless and meaningful, parochial and epochal, nuanced and obvious. A complex fixture, which is, well, just like life.

How did Chris Wilder end up at Northampton?

I'm often asked on Twitter what went wrong with Chris Wilder and Oxford. It seems such weird scenario that a club on the brink of promotion allows its manager to go to a team at the bottom of the football league. This is easy to answer in a 140 characters. So, for the benefit of future reference, here's my take on the whole episode.

When Chris Wilder joined Oxford we were perhaps at our lowest ebb for the best part of fifty years. We’d suffered more than a decade of decline which had seen us fall from lower Championship stability into the Conference.

The return of Jim Smith into management as part of a takeover of the club failed to arrest the slide. Magic and sentimentality, it seems, wasn’t enough. The club handed over the reigns to Darren Patterson; general club good egg. He couldn’t stop the slide either and was blighted by falling funds.

The club then appointed a bullish new chairman, Kelvin Thomas, who appointed Chris Wilder. Wilder had managed well in a difficult situation at Halifax and had been part of the management set up at Bury which saw them promoted. He was not a name, and in some ways, it seemed like the club had given up. But, below the dour northerness, he had a track record.

The impact was immediate; despite the loss of arguably our best player, a low starting league position and a questionable points deduction for fielding an ineligible player (someone who had been with us for 3 years but hadn’t had his registration paperwork completed for the season), Wilder took the club to within one game of the Conference play-offs. Eventually we fell short by 5 points; the number of points we’d been deducted.

The following season; chastened by previous experience (Wilder describing the Conference as a ‘poxy league’) the club invested heavily in the best it could afford. The aggressive policy paid instant dividends as the club lead the Conference at Christmas. However, in what is a very typical Chris Wilder pattern, we hit a bad patch and were gently reeled in by the ever consistent Stevenage, who eventually took the title.

The club recovered in March to go into the conference play-offs with an apparently unstoppable momentum. And so it proved; we roared past Rushden and then York at Wembley; a high point in Wilder’s Oxford career.

The first season back was a ball as we continued to enjoy the afterglow of Wembley. Performances weren’t bad; we lost in the last minute at West Ham in the League Cup. Wilder got rid of Dannie Bulman and Mark Creighton; stalwarts of the promotion campaign, and didn’t replace them. The season petered out to not very much, but that was OK, we were just happy to be back.

Another bonus of not being promoted was the prospect of facing Swindon Town in the league for the first time in 10 years. What’s more, they had morphed into the most evil team in the league with the appointment of known fascist Paolo Di Canio. The game at the County Ground in August was another key highlight as we beat them for the first time in 38 years with two goals from James Constable who had been courted by Di Canio in the weeks leading up to the game (including claiming him to be a Swindon fan). We followed it up with a home win in March to complete the double with a patched up team. More great memories. To some extent those results glossed over another moderate season and there were early rumblings of discontent. We had won the battles against Swindon, but their title meant that they had won the war.

Our third season back saw a third win over Di Canio and Swindon, this time in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy, but this couldn’t disguise the lack of league progress. This was made worse by our ability to fall away from strong positions. The questions were growing as to whether Wilder could take us any further.

Last summer, things started to go wrong, the debate about whether Wilder would stay or go were answered when owner Ian Lenagan offered him a one year contract, with options for extension. These options favoured the club, putting Wilder in the position of subordinate. Lenagan was neither backing nor sacking the manager.

This season started spectacularly with a 4-1 win away at Portsmouth. We performed well on the road, remaining unbeaten right up until after Wilder eventually departed. At home things were not good and we stuttered from week to week. However, as unlikely as our form suggested, it was still good enough for us to dance around the top three or four all season.

The poor home form couldn’t be denied; most fans were seeing a team that won only occasionally, and even then with turgid performances. Many fans had now turned on Wilder, and it seemed the damage was irreparable.

Nonetheless, we continued to occupy the top spots into Christmas. Ian Lenagan hinted at a new contract for Wilder, but it wasn’t forthcoming as form dipped, again. Crowds were dropping as we rose up the table. The owner was stuck between a rock and a hard place; should he back a manager who got results, but entertained few - perhaps we're the only club in the country whose crowds fell the better we got.

Portsmouth then sacked Guy Whittingham. Wilder was in the frame for the job and Lenagan held firm in not offering him a contract. Instead, he allowed him to talk to Pompey, although he didn't get the job. Suddenly it was clear that Wilder had value as a manager who could get failing teams working, a financial value he couldn’t realise at Oxford, who were already a functioning unit.

When Northampton came along they were in a similar predicament; facing relegation, but with some money available. They were able to offer Wilder the longer term stability that Oxford wouldn’t or couldn’t.

By Wilder’s own admission, the Oxford bus was driving itself, he couldn’t add much more and even if he had succeeded in getting us into the play-offs or promotion, his time at Oxford was probably numbered. He was the third longest serving manager in the league, and so was already in an extraordinary position within the club.

Wilder went to Northampton amidst a brief acrimonious drama. He set to work doing what he originally did at Oxford, he got them organised and playing. Even if he succeeds in keeping them up – and presumably becomes a hero - they too will eventually grow tired of his approach. But there will always be a place for a troubleshooter like Wilder; a club, somewhere, staring at catastrophe and with bit of money to spare.

Oxford in the meantime handed the reigns over to Wilder’s trusted sidekicks Mickey Lewis and Andy Melville. The owners, quite reasonably, perhaps, considered Lewis and Melville capable of continuing the Wilder philosophy while finding his replacement.

They were horribly, horribly wrong. Lewis, as ostensibly the caretaker manager, began to employ a series of baffling tactical changes. By their own admission, players took their foot off the gas; Lewis is a lovable teddy bear and a complete contrast to the scratchy, sometimes unlikeable Wilder. The season gently fell apart while the club’s slow and considered recruitment policy ground away in the background.

Eventually Gary Waddock was brought in 10 weeks after Wilder's departure. Waddock is a man with all the right credentials, but with a squad that despite sitting at the top of the league, were already on their holidays. Form was terrible and we fell from the play-offs. On Saturday we go to Sixfields with Wilder and Northampton needing just a point to ensure survival and a great escape.

Wilder has accumulated 73 points this season with his two teams; good enough for 5th place. Factor in that he’s been rebuilding at Northampton, you might have expected him to achieve even more if he’d stayed at Oxford and been backed in a similar way. It wouldn’t have been pretty, but it would have been effective.    

Peeling away the layers of doubt

We could all feel it, the hex that was hanging over our heads. That dreaded feat that we actually weren't capable of winning at home. But Northampton are in wretched form and we've got a decent squad; victory should have been assured. So what is it that stands between the cold logic of the form book and the irrational fears of real life?

It's the big one on Tuesday. We'll all be sitting glued to our television sets as England's finest take on the challenge that, if successful, will see them considered amongst the greatest exponents of one of our country's most treasured art forms. They will have earned the right to compete amongst the best and be, ultimately, crowned champion of them all. 

For sure, if I haven't telegraphed this gag too much, Great British Bake Off really is exciting this year isn't it?

In our house, the Venn diagram of our TV tastes has imperceptibly crept at a glacial pace so that its intersection now consists of the things my partner likes and the stuff I don't object to that much. Cooking shows, Location Location Location, Grand Designs, that kind of thing. That's what 'we' watch. She doesn't like football, I don't like Keeping Up with the Kardashians; we don't live in each others' pockets. So, as a result, on Friday while something generically lifestyley happened on our TV, I watched the first-half of the England game on my iPad on mute. 

With just the pictures to go by, it struck me that England had the game pretty much wrapped up from about 20 minutes in. They were playing at a good tempo, they were positive, their pressure was sustained; their ability to pass the ball around meant that Montenegro would inevitably succumb. When, at half-time, I finally secured the TV, it turns out I was wrong. According to Adrian Chiles, Roy Keane's terrorist-turned-respected-informer-beard and obviously-Theo Walcott-obviously it was all really jittery and nerve wracking, and there was concern that England hadn't made the breakthrough and weren't taking their chances. With sound, it was, in effect, a very different game to the one I watched without sound.

On Saturday we came into the game against Northampton with a degree of trepidation about the home-form hoodoo that hung over us. And then the team put in a performance and delivered a result which conformed entirely to the form book. If I'd watched that game on my iPad with the sound down as the Hairy Bikers made a lightly toasted Kirsty Allsop and brie cassoulet would the anxiety have been the same? Just how many layers are there in watching football?

Well, the first is the myth that football is exciting; football is moments of intense excitement carefully scaffolded in lengthy periods of tedium. That's not to say that it's not enjoyable; that's kind of the point. Going to a game is a weekly gamble; will we be rewarded or will it all fall flat? In our heightened sense of anxiety we instinctively expect unrelenting unbridled excitement, which is only partly down to the persistent marketing that promises it. Oddly, most sport is actually quite dull, that's why edited highlights are so popular. But sport has to have a degree of repetition so that the marginal differences in skill between one opponent and another can manifest themselves in some sort of decisive result. If you played football for 5 minutes, you'd always end up with 0-0 draws, if a bike race was held over 200m, nobody would win. You need to manifest a lengthy war of attrition to deliver a conclusive result.

The second layer is that football is bloody difficult. And because it's so difficult there are long periods in which things go wrong or are imperfect in some way. You could argue that football is 90 minutes of mistakes punctuated by one or two moments of success. It's a simple game, but with 22 men trying to move one ball you're not giving anyone a reasonable chance to be successful. That's the dynamic which makes football very hard; even a team as obviously poor as Northampton should be able to frustrate a half decent league two team like us. 

So, on Saturday there were at least a couple of moments where Northampton should have taken the lead but fluffed their chances. Meanwhile, Hunt and Newey both demonstrated the artificial intelligence of 1992 edition of Sensible Soccer by never straying more than 5 feet from their allocated position on the pitch. On those moments, things could easily have been very different. But that's not because we were lucky, it's because football is really hard and we benefited from being the better team.

And so, because football is so difficult and so frustratingly boring, it's simply not possible to watch it without passing irrational comment. When Danny Rose picked up the ball to take the penalty after James Constable had slipped over in that decidedly icey penalty box, the bloke behind me groaned 'Oh no, not Danny Rose'. We just don't comment on what we see, we comment on what we feel. Rose hadn't actually done anything wrong, it's just he hadn't created 5 clearcut goalscoring chances and balanced the ball on his nose like a performing seal. It wasn't like he was tripping up his own laces and bumping into the goalposts. He was grinding away like the other 21 players on the pitch. Even good players look like they're toiling.

So, it's difficult, boring, irrational and we still care. And that's another problem. It helps if you don't care, of course, we have a lot emotionally invested in the club; your friends know that this is how you spend your weekends. It is a measure of your judgement as a human being. A shorthand to your general well-being. It definitely helps when you don't care so much as is the case with me and England. I want them to qualify, but nowadays I look forward to an England game in the same way as I look forward to spaghetti bolognese for tea. It's a nice to have when you get home from work, but its not something that occupies much of my thoughts beforehand or afterwards.

And all of this transfers onto the pitch. The players set out to play and then they find that what they are seeing and feeling is being wholly contradicted by thousands of irrational people around them. It's no wonder that the bow wave of doubt is so difficult to cut through.

Should we blame the Olympics?

The Northampton defeat surely extinguished any lingering hopes of a play-off place. So, let the post-mortem begin. There are so many factors to consider from the pitch to the manager. But, let's start big; let's blame the Olympics.

I remember the closing ceremony of the Olympics last summer, I lost interest halfway through and flicked over to one of the temporary BBC Olympic channels in the forlorn hope that something would be on. For two weeks I'd watched late into the night everything from wrestling to basketball. Eventually channel each just ran out of sport and would shut down for the night. It was my favourite part of the Games. Just me and sports I didn't know with countries I barely cared about. Often there'd be no commentary. There was something both epic and intimate about it, like watching the sunrise over Glastonbury Tor.

The next morning I'd switch on and each channel will be replenished with another full day of sport. I knew at the time, and before, that this was going to be a special time and that I should absorb as much as I could. During Euro 96 I'd been complacent about having a major tournament on our doorstep and generally missed out on the live experience.

As special as it feels at the time, it's nothing in comparison to how it feels as time passes. Sometimes I transport myself back to days sitting in my shorts watching my new TV (bought especially); an eternal summer.

Looking back, I remember that same feeling after an FA Cup or World Cup final. The final whistle would blow, the trophy handed out, the interviews and then it would be over. I would carry on watching the news, which would tend to lead with the result of the game I'd just seen. The goals were shown but there was nothing new to be said. I went outside, to replay the game in the garden. I didn't want it to end, but it did.

After the Olympics, this football season would always have something of the winter about it. It arrived apologetically at the conclusion of the Games like your mum picking you up from the school disco. Opening with the League Cup was the equivalent of an agreement that she'd park around the corner while you tried to snog the face off someone (not that this ever actually happened to me). As awful a prospect as it was; normal life, and with it football, needed to return.

Pre-season passed me by because Beth Gibbons mouthing 'I love you' to her dead mum after taking bronze in the Taekwando was the magic of life, not the signing of someone who previously played for Crawley. We had a new kit; the only Nike template we'd yet to use and was in fact yellow and black, not yellow and blue.

In some senses, the routine of going to games was a bit of a relief, like getting back from holiday and having beans on toast after two weeks of rich restaurant food.

At first it was good, there seemed to be a post-Olympic glow in our early season form. The big names were injured; Duberry, Whing and Leven, but we were still winning. This was the Olympic legacy - humble hard work winning out; good things happening to good people. We even turned the otherwise moribund Johnstone's Paint Trophy 1st round into a sparkling spectacle; beating Swindon in the last minute.

It didn't last of course; we started losing. The bleak winter descended and refuses to go away. Like blooming daffodils confused with the increasingly extreme and unpredictable weather, we haven't coped with the changing of the seasons. An injury crisis; something that lasts for weeks, lasted a year. The Christmas period is usually a mid season celebration and the signal that we were turning  for home. But we didn't play a league game at home from the 8th December to the 1st January. The grey wintery trudge of midseason started in September and  just won't finish. On paper we're six games from the summer; outside it feels like January.

The season basically needs putting out of its misery and after several attempts at clubbing it to death it seems, after the defeat to Northampton we've finally cleaved it's head in. We haven't been terrible; genuinely, we've been average and we'll end up in an average position.

Perhaps it's fitting that the post-Olympic football season has been a crushing disappointment. It's a bit like being inspired by Bradley Wiggins only to find out that bikes are expensive, you look terrible in lycra and climbing hills is really bloody hard. The Olympics were amazing; too amazing. Suddenly everyone was expected to turn on the success module. All it would take is effort and dedication. Nobody said that you also needed world class coaching and enough funding to bail out Cyprus and still have enough left over to buy a Scalextric for Christmas.

I'm sure that those who are currently chasing promotions and titles, aren't feeling underwhelmed by this season. But we're a club which is already stoked with unreasonable expectations, chuck in an Olympic games and the whole thing blows apart. After the brightness of last summer, the gloom of winter is pretty hard to take.

When do we start believing again?

One of the binds of being a blogger is that you spend all your time thinking about things to blog about. Match reports would be pretty easy to do - who scored what, when and how; but there are plenty of good places to read those. But, I want to write something else, although that else isn't always easy to stumble across. The challenge is that going to football is a routine that doesn't change hugely from one game to another. There are precious few extraordinary moments or events that effectively write themselves. Instead, an idea will usually begin to manifest itself at the beginning of the day, but that will evolve until, a couple of days after the game, I've finally settled on something to write about.

When I got out of the car on Saturday and headed towards the ground a theme drifted into my head. The walk to the Kassam is quite different to the one to The Manor. The Manor, of course, was in the middle of Headington and fans would congregate around pubs, chip shops, supermarkets and programme sellers. There would be obstacles all the way into the ground. It would create a pre-match atmosphere. At the Kassam you've pretty much got two options; go to the ground or go to The Priory, and then the ground. The net result is that you get an overly efficient flow of fans straight into the ground; fantastic for law and order and time and motion studies, but the result there is there no pre-match atmosphere outside the Priory until you get to the queues for the turnstile.

So, I was heading towards the ground in my overly efficient way; it was grey and raining. The slightly intimidating gangs of kids on BMX's had been forced inside. The streets were even more deserted than normal. A theme came into my head; loneliness.

With the current apathy surrounding our club and its performances, 4 games; 2 draws 2 defeats, the idea of Ultimate Support Saturday seemed a vacuous marketing scam; even if it was one conjured up by the fans. The problem is that marketing only works when you fundamentally believe in the message. A cold, grey, wet lower-league game involving a team with no form to speak of was never likely to serve up an ultimate anything.

Liam Davis had been on the radio giving the most unconvincing interview I've ever heard from a professional footballer. Yes, performances have been disappointing, he said, but If the boys keep doing the things they've been doing they'll still keep moving forward. And the fans have been brilliant. And so on. Except its evident none of this is true. Regardless of what you think of Chris Wilder or Ian Lenagan and whether they should be given more time or not, by no measure is the club moving forward. And before you start, the fans haven't been brilliant, they've been subdued and negative.

We're sitting in a no man's land; promotion looks as unlikely as relegation. We're not bound by a common purpose; club and fans have become isolated from each other. Going to football has become a lonely experience.

It's not dissimilar to the situation we found ourselves in when Chris Wilder arrived. Football was a habit for a dwindling number of people. But there was a growing acceptance that promotion was getting harder; perhaps too hard to really bother. Wilder was on nobody's wish list; his appointment underwhelming. The club seemed to have thrown in the towel. We lost his first game and Sam Deering broke his leg. We shrugged in acceptance of our lot.

Then in the next 11 games we had 9 at home. We were docked 5 points, harshly, because of Eddie Hutchinson, but we only lost 2; one a FA Trophy game that didn't matter; the other was a 2-0 defeat to Torquay which turned a potential promotion chase into a fatalistic cause. Malcolm Boyden launched his 'Believe' campaign galvanising what we'd all started to think; the world was against us, but we could triumph anyway. It was magnificent, the ultimate failure to reach the play-offs even enhancing the belief in the quest we were on.

Saturday started with that feeling of loneliness, the listlessness of not having a cause to galvanise us. The dog days had gone. There was just a vague recollection that things were good once. Northampton fans were the ones showing the spirit of togetherness with the noise they were making while a goal down.

But, James Constable scoring is always reassuring, like a barometer for our stable world. Coming back from a late set back is a reminder that we're not incapable. And it was against a decent side on a decent run. Perhaps there is a reason to be hopeful.

Cup games seem to be acquiring a significance that they haven't had previously; it's a fanciful shot in the dark, but results against Accrington and Plymouth, a bit more luck with injuries and maybe someone in the transfer window to kick some arses in the midfield and we might start to feel like believing again.

Morecambe 0 Oxford United 0, Oxford United 2 Northampton Town 0

Perhaps it was just fatigue brought on by Friday's office Christmas party, a night which inverts the world's fundamental structures by giving power to the brainless - dividing the world between those who like to sway self-conciously to Abba and those, with the power of rational thought and opposable thumbs, who don't. Perhaps it was just that and a month of organising and then moving house. But whatever it was, as I walked up to the Kassam on Saturday, I could hear the familiar strains of Use Somebody by Kings of Leon playing out and it felt kinda' old.

When it was first introduced at the Kassam in 2009, it was symbolic of our resurgence under Chris Wilder. Now rather than anthemic and uplifting, it sounds a little tired. Last season it seemed fitting that it was part of our pre-match canon; recounting the enduring spirit of, and reward for, an epic promotion season.

Last year's Bad Run (BRI) was confirmation of how difficult life in the Football League can be. There was some concern that Chris Wilder wasn't up to it, alongside the likes of Constable and Wright, but there was a general acceptance that league football is and should be hard - a kind of self flagellation. When the run was emphatically smashed at Chesterfield it was proof that the Oxford spirit, so perfectly captured in the soaring chorus of Use Somebody, will always win out.

Something is different post- Bad Run 2 (BRII), the breaking of the run was no new dawn, just a bloody grind against Morecambe. The 'return to form' win against Northampton had a more pragmatic feel about it. This is because playing Northampton is no longer treated like we're meeting an old friend, they're a team we're expecting to beat if we've got any ambition of promotion. Which we have, no longer a momentous soaring ambition - a magical story of redemption and resurrection - more a serious, let's get down to work ambition.

Last year we were hopeful of promotion, but more than anything, we were glad to be back and playing good football. Relegation back into the Conference was always a lingering fear, even when things were going well. This year, thoughts of relegation are non-existent, mid-table safety is not acceptable, promotion is expected, not just hoped for.

As a result, Use Somebody feels like it's from a by-gone age of wide-eyed naivety. In this more pragmatic time, its swooping refrain is representative of a dumb less wizened time. Perhaps we're beginning to see that League 2 doesn't represent the promised land as was enthusiastically proclaimed post-Wembley. League 2 is a mere stepping stone to something bigger, where we belong is not in the football league, it's at the top end of the football league.

I'm not sure this is altogether a healthy state. Ambition is important, it keeps complacency at bay. But, I enjoyed last season, there was a freshness to it. Everything good that happened was greeted with rapture, failure was greeted with a comforting arm around the club. Now it's getting a bit dour; we walk away from a win against Northampton with a firm handshake of a professional job well done. Fitting, perhaps, that the club have chosen Kasabian's Club Foot as the music to come out to. It's a ballsy, driving, serious about being good and since it was adopted by Sky; corporate as hell.

Successful teams drive out risk. They buy when they're to the top, they manipulate games and competitions to minimise the risk of failure, they don't seem to enjoy themselves a whole heap. Sometimes it seems more exciting to avoid failure than to succeed. But, we do want to succeed on the pitch, and sadly, I guess we've got to be professional about it. We shouldn't, however, forget that a win against Northampton is actually something to be celebrated, not just acknowledged or expected.

Northampton Town 2 Yellows 1

Up until now, there has been a pensive, let’s see how things go feel about our season. Suddenly the game, as it were, is on and the prospect of promotion is becoming a real one. Perhaps it’s the feeling that we’re coming good just as the mid-season slog turns into the end of season run-in. If this was a middle distance race, we’d be sitting on the shoulder of the leader, perfectly positioned.

A combination of the short schlep up the A43 and our current form saw a massive 1,600 strong surge of positivity descend on Sixfields on Saturday. Northampton marked a sudden release, the sort of energy burst amongst the fans that was evident last season. Although last season we were well equipped to handle the expectations on the pitch.

That’s not so true this season. We haven’t kept a clean sheet since God was a boy, we’ve yet to truly nail our best midfield or attacking options, McLean – the man who gives us new striking dimensions hasn’t exactly got a hatful, whilst we’re only just starting to warm to Tom Craddock, who is scoring. Good though the results have been and the prospects still are, this season’s squad has yet to gel and, in that respect, we still haven’t found our mojo.

Look at the table and you could reasonably argue that everyone from Crewe in 6th to Burton in 20th might still consider themselves contenders for the play-offs. We sit comfortably amongst that massive pack, and whilst we may still sneak into the top seven, we still shouldn’t be expecting it.

But then, my own weekend, which didn’t include Sixfields, was a bit of a stuttering mess of unfulfilled plans and feral children. When that happens the rolling, unending soap opera of your football club provides the perfect diversion. Chris Wilder, Kelvin Thomas and the players can be serious about football. As fans we can be too earnest about tactics, football politics and financial meltdowns, any radio phone-in will tell you that. My head says we're not ready for promotion and Northampton proved it. But, perhaps we should enjoy the indulgence of our absurd expectations and the resulting highs and lows. If we get promoted whilst being incapable of defending a corner, then that sounds like a lot of fun rather than something to be truly concerned about.

Macclesfield 3 Yellows 2; Yellows 3 Northampton 1

My first ever driving lesson was in the deserted car park of the local industrial estate. I sat in the driver’s seat and my dad told me that all I had to do was lift the clutch, press the accelerator and I’d be off.

I did just that, and kangarooed off around the car park, unable to get my foot firmly onto the accelerator to truly pull away. It was driving, but not perhaps as it was envisaged.

Yesterday, we saw the next evolution of Chris Wilder’s blueprint. Following last week’s miserable capitulation to Macclesfield, it was evident that all-out attack was being sacrificed for something a bit more sophisticated. Instead of launching forward, we took a leaf out of Herbert Chapman’s old playbook and decided that we didn’t need to attack all the time.

With a back-four of full-backs, Northampton were clearly expecting an assault. But, by holding the ball we were able to draw them out allowing us to probe throughout the whole 90 minutes, not until we ran out of ideas around the hour mark.

Comfortable, though, it was not. I was reminded of Graham Rix’s first game in charge. Insisting on playing ‘the right way’ we witnessed the likes of Andy Crosby and Paul McCarthy (both classically trained in the Ian Atkins ‘put some snow on it’ school) attempting to pass the ball along their own six-yard line. You could see what they were trying to do, but it was nothing like the slick passing side that Rix envisaged in his head. As he tried to re-train a bunch of whorey old pros to play Total Football, we slipped out of the play-off positions.

Like my first driving lesson, what we witnessed yesterday was a rough-cut version of the Oxford Wilder is trying to fashion. Effective though it was in terms of the result, you suspect there’s some way to go before we see it in its completed form.