Practice will make perfect, but have we got the patience?

Matthew Syed is a journalist and former international table tennis player. He tells a story of interviewing German tennis player Michael Stich. For the benefit of the camera, some of the interview is done with Syed and Stich gently rallying across a tennis net.

Syed, feeling confident, asks if Stich will serve a ball at him from the baseline. He's a a former table tennis player, an Olympian indeed, so he feels his naturally fast reactions and his general competence at hitting balls with a round shaped bats means he should be able to return a couple of boomers.

Stich winds up and fires an ace past him. Syed doesn’t move. He fires another one. And another. Five balls are fired down, five aces, Syed doesn’t move. He asks Stich what the trick is to returning a tennis ball from a world class player. Don’t look at the ball, Stich says, watch the server's body movement and shape as he tosses the ball into the air.

With this advice Syed returns to the baseline, Stich fires another one down; another ace. Syed still can’t get close. The point is that despite the many similarities between table tennis and tennis, he simply isn't competent at the latter despite being more than competent at the former.

In reality; one had no bearing on the other because professional tennis players spend years learning the relationship between body shape and movement and the direction of the ball. Only through what Syed calls ‘quality practice’ is this possible, innate talent is a myth.

When Eales, Ashton and Appleton swept into Oxford, they implemented a new tactical philosophy which turned the club on its head. It provided the peculiar spectacle the football being aesthetically more pleasing but the results markedly worse. Appleton has defended the approach with dogmatic promises about there being no alternative and not taking a step back.

But, what he failed to recognise was that the ‘quality practice’ that the players at the club had been engaging with for nearly half a decade was significantly different to that which he wanted to implement. The transition was always going to be a difficult and long one, and it was naive to think otherwise.

Take someone like Jake Wright, an imperious defender when fit, there is no better player when being asked to absorb pressure and actually defend. He looks decidedly uncomfortable in the new system where he's being asked to bring the ball out of defence and turns defence into attack.

On Saturday, he found himself needing to do just that with nobody from midfield dropping back to help him out. It's all very well expecting Wright to do something differently, but assuming he'll just switch it on is daft. Not putting in place the tactical support from midfield is doomed to failure.

There are other concerns about the system; fitness, for example. Tareiq Holmes-Dennis had a magnificent opening 35 minutes on Saturday, but was sucking on energy gels before half-time. Andy Whing was also quick to take on board fuel.

Both may have had mitigating circumstances but is there the fitness or quality in the squad to be able to turn the principles into 90 minutes of winning football? And can it be done every game? Tranmere, a clunking shadow of their former selves, hardly offered a threat, and a better side probably wouldn’t have given us quite such an easy time.

But, the good news is that it would seem that the system is working enough to mean that we shouldn’t need to worry about relegation. Tranmere look desperate, although you’d expect Mickey Adams to improve them. There are others - Hartlepool, Carlisle, Accrington, York, Dagenham who are either blighted by a suicidal free fall or a distinct lack of resources. It doesn’t really matter, to us, who might recover, but as long as at least two don’t; which seems likely, we should be OK.

Of course, avoiding relegation is a very low bar for a club that was threatening promotion or at least the play-offs this time last year. And there’s still a long way to go to reach even parity with those heady heights. Yes, the system is better and yes, we should be reasonably confident that relegation isn’t a concern, but the true tests are whether we can perform away from home and against the best in the division. That's the next milestone in our development.

To do that we either have to compromise the system to make it a more prosaic, pragmatic beast fixed on results more than style, or we have to invest in the squad to replace what already exists with both the quality and quantity of players we need to make it work. Or, patience is the key, and we need to get in plenty of quality practice. Of those three options - the last is most likely part of the plan - there is little evidence of investment and no sign of compromise, but it will also be the slowest one to pay dividends.

Trial by TV

When I played football at primary school, we’d get the last hour of the day off in order to fit the game in before darkness fell. Games were on Wednesdays; you’d have lunch and then freewheel through to 2pm when you were fished out from class in order to prepare for the game. We departed like soldiers off to war; petals were thrown at our feet and teachers bowed down to us.

For away games we might be away even earlier. The journeys would be epic; sometimes as far away as Chinnor; about 10 minutes away. We once even went to Berinsfield, a distance Google tells me is about 14 miles away. Nowadays that sort of distance would require an overnight stay to prevent muscle atrophy or DVT.

This was natural selection; in the privacy of your own school work it wasn't possible to truly work out who was top dog. In sport, it was unequivocal. Eggy Evans and Flid Davidson would be left behind along with Woggy Lawrence. These are actual nicknames we legitimately and openly referred to them by. I don’t know whether the teachers were aware that the only Asian kid in the school was known, always affectionately, as Woggy or Wog, but if they did, they didn’t seem to mind. It was a different time.

Anyway, with greatness bestowed upon us, we would disappear only to reappear the following morning with tales of derring do from distant primary schools of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

I had always imagined that being an England international was very similar; although I’m fairly certain they didn’t have to change into their kit on the plane to an away game. The general principle was the same - on a Saturday night, Brooking, Keegan and the rest would pack their bags and leave the humdrum of their club changing room for the exalted environs of the England 'camp'. I loved the idea of England being camp - a tented village where Ron Greenwood and Don Howe would plot the downfall of Luxembourg or Poland. The camp would be set up half way around the world (Norway, for example) the raid would happen on a Wednesday, news of its success would be broadcast only on the radio, and the players would return heroes the following Saturday.

The point was that the domestic calendar wasn’t disrupted; playing for England was a reward for being the best, an addition to your domestic commitments. At some point it was decided that this was a barrier to international success and, as has been emphatically demonstrated at every tournament since, the domestic calendar was cleared to give the true greats of the English game the space to express themselves and come home dripping with silverware. That’s the equivalent of closing the whole school in order for the school team to play.

In even more recent times, those internationals don’t even seem to happen on the date that’s been cleared for them. Presumably this is some kind of experiment with TV audiences, although a less bloated, more competitive qualifying programme would have a greater impact in maintaining people's interest.

Saturday's are cleared of domestic football; and because the Premier League is now global that fixture clearance runs throughout the top two divisions. And then, England don’t even play. Where once the international games were a bawdy weekend in Amsterdam; the international weekend has become a meandering insipid long weekend in the Cotswolds with your girlfriend which starts on Thursday and drifts sometime into the following week.

What remains is the Eggy Evans' and Flid Davidson’s of football; League's One and Two. Sky pulls one of those games out as if to make an example of the ineptitude. On Saturday, presumably on the spurious reasoning that this was a varsity clash; Saturday was us against Cambridge.

It's as if that fixture is a demonstration of the incompetence of what’s left over when you remove 'world class' Premier League from the calendar; hate the Premier League? OK, try watching this shit on a weekly basis. And when it comes to ineptitude, we have again demonstrated that we’re the Eggiest of all the Eggy Evans'.

The game completed a trilogy of appalling performances live on TV after Port Vale, Southend and now this - three games, three defeats, eleven goals conceded, one scored. Three different managers, three identically awful results.

There's some indication that even some Oxford fans weren’t aware the game was on, so it’s difficult to believe that anyone but the truly demented or housebound were interested from a neutral perspective. But, despite this, TV magnifies the problem and reinforces our growing irrelevance.

Live football needs a narrative and context, and on TV it needs to be unsubtle for the neutral to engage with it. In a division starved of publicity, anything goes - spuriously constructed local derbies, top of the table clashes, even vague notions of nostalgia; for example the attraction of Wimbledon v Oxford in 2011; an opportunity to remember halcyon days of the 1980s. Increasingly, for us, these narratives become less plausible - it’s difficult to look on us as a big team with Wembley glory in our past or a team resurrected from the Conference and going places. We are, well, nothing much.

The implication of that is the growing ambivalence towards the club; the media is less attracted to you and so are the sponsors, and, ultimately the fans become disinterested. Perhaps it will act as a wake up call as to our parlous state. All the talk of Plan B being Plan A, sticking to The Principles and judging the new owners by their actions is just vacuous boohockey. The game against Cambridge would have had less impact had it not been on TV, but maybe now our failings have been the subject of public consumption people will begin to learn the lesson that we are failing fast.

All hail The Normal

Last week was a strange one; I was sitting waiting to get on a plane to Rotterdam when I checked my blog to see what, if anything, was happening. There was something happening; I had eight comments about my views on Luton Town. Nobody normally comments on my blog unless they’re from another team and they want to abuse me.

The post wasn’t not exactly anodyne, but it was genuine. I have a  visceral, only semi-logical dislike for Luton Town. But, perhaps I should have known better. I turned my phone to flight-safe mode and pondered for an hour what to respond with. I fought a reasonable rear guard action against a growing number of comments accusing me of spitefulness and more. Apparently it was picked up by a local Luton tabloid who considered my comments newsworthy.

The conference I was flying to was a bizarre. The Chinese won (and for that, I mean bought) an award for being Chinese, a man described the ‘competence of endurance’ through a protracted story about how, as a 53-year-old working early shifts on an oil rig climbing up and down a ladder all day really took it out of you. Lots of people told me how important they were, how important their work was and how many other people, who similarly said how important they are, they knew.

Eventually I left the conference centre and sat down outside a coffee shop and yearned for a bit of normal – to get home to family, away from restaurant food, away from the self-served and self-important. I looked at my diary, a couple of normal meetings back in the office, then a normal league game against Newport on Saturday.

On Saturday morning, back home, the rain sleeted down; my daughter trotted over halfway through football training with a big smile on her face but no feelings in her fingers. It was a good moment; in the past she might have crumbled, but this was what it was all about. She was beginning to get football, the joy in its misery.

Autumn was here, grey skys, chill air, rain. I’ve said before how football fans are people of the gloaming; we don’t do t-shirts and shorts well. Tans and shirt sleeves don’t work in English football grounds. Autumn and winter, wrapped up in coats, is when we finally awaken.

On the radio Michael Appleton talked about never losing his rag and never taking a step back. He was referring to The Principles, the vaguely threatening value-set imported into the club by the new regime. It followed the revelation at the Fans' Forum that Plan B was Plan A – or that there was no Plan B, there were just The Principles. We were also told to judge the regime by its actions, apparently oblivious to the fact that its actions to date have been largely ineffective. It's felt less like a football club recently, more like we're part of an ideological experiment.

The lead through Collins was slightly fortuitous, but just about deserved The sending-off of Tyrone Barnett may well have been a blessing. His first booking was deserved, but ultimately a punishment for his incompetence at tackling as much as any malice, the second seemed to have no merit whatsoever. Appleton lost his rag, throwing a water bottle across his technical area at the booking of Carlton Morris shortly after Barnett had departed. He then took a step back, choosing to ditch The Principles and fight for the points; we would stick with one up front and attack on the break, if we could.

It was dogged and gritty, but it was normal. The Principles were still there, we passed neatly out of defence, through midfield and attacked where we could, but they didn’t get in the way of The Normal.

Despite what they might say, fans will always value results and effort over style, and that showed in the way the fans got behind the team rather than sitting back waiting to be entertained. We can match raw effort from the stands, we can’t help pass the ball around. The final whistle came, our first win on a Saturday at home for eight months, and suddenly it felt a bit more normal, and that felt good.

For me, a little bridge was built, particularly towards Michael Appleton. We’re not a showcase for his coaching principles, we’re a football club that wants to win games. He seems like a nice guy, and I worry that he’s took nice, too much of a theoretician in the art of coaching. Is he faced with jeopardy to focus on results? For once, it looked like he wanted the fight, he took on the fourth official, he was animated on the touchline, he valued the three points over The Principles. If he can keep that going, then maybe we’ll get somewhere after all.  

I really really hate Luton

You don’t need to know much about Oxford United to know that Swindon Town is its nearest and deadliest rival. The historical rivalry with Reading seems to have withered due to a lack of use, whereas Wycombe Wanderers snap at our heels trying to provoke us into a reaction which rarely gains any traction.

The Swindon rivalry is well rehearsed; insults are traded, there is periodic, out of context, abusive songs sung for no other reason than to remind us all of the animosity. When games happen they’re highly anticipated, broiling affairs which, let’s face it, we tend to win. As much as I like the rivalry, I like the insults, the anticipation and the games, it’s all very knowing. We know they hate us, they know we hate them and we all act according to a pre-ordained script.

As a result, like many derbies, there is something of the American wrestling about the whole affair. At the top, a layer excitement, fury and action, below a carefully constructed pre-rehearsed narrative. So, in a sense I hate Swindon because I’m supposed to, but in truth I don’t hate them with a visceral loathing. That feeling is reserved for Luton Town.

Luton and Oxford’s histories have followed very similar trajectories. We both experienced a Wembley victory in the mid-eighties and then Conference football in the late 2000s. It is possible, perhaps, to use each other as a benchmark of our true success. Being in the top flight is not either team's natural position in the world and nor is struggling in the Conference. Our natural position, you could argue, is somewhere relatively better or worse than a team like Luton, and likewise them with us.

Along with Wimbledon, Oxford United and Luton Town were Thatcher’s children. During the 80s Thatcher dismantled the traditional British economy pushing many of football’s traditional heartlands into recession. Clubs like Blackpool and Preston fell down the leagues, others, like Manchester United struggled along without the success they once enjoyed. Oxford, Luton and Wimbledon were heartlands of the nouveau riche feeding off the false riches offered by privatisation and other economic reforms.

You would think that we would galvanise into a ‘movement’ but like all middle-class neighbours we were all racked with jealousy and mistrust. We, beside being funded by a fraudster, achieved our success the right way - playing exciting attacking football, marauding over all-comers in front of packed crowds. Wimbledon were fabled route-one specialists, aggressive and physical. Luton simply cheated their way to the top laying a carpet of artificial turf at Kenilworth Road which caused the ball to bounce as if on a trampoline and burn the legs of those who had the temerity to fall over. The only football you could play on it was ‘Luton football’. In short, rather like Thatcher's economic miracle, it skewed the market to enable their success.

Thatcher acolyte David Evans, a Conservative MP and Luton chairman, also took the decision to ban away fans from Kenilworth Road further distorting their home advantage. Superficially, it was an attempt to combat hooliganism - as if there was something about round balls and rectangular goalposts - the functions of the game - which cause otherwise happy people to turn violent. He was also a vocal supporter of Thatcher’s plans to introduce identity cards for football fans; an absurd abuse of human rights. Luton were basically Thatcher’s version football porn and Evans fawned endlessly over her to gain favour.

There were notable scuffles between the clubs on the pitch - they knocked us out of the League Cup in a often forgotten semi-final in 1988 thereby denying us a second Wembley trip in 2 years, there was an astonishing 7-4 defeat at Kenilworth Road and a 3-2 Oxford win on the plastic that all but secured our survival in 1987.

Fast forward to the Kassam years; we’re plummeting back down the league and the latest Kassam saviour, Joe Kinnear, resigns from Oxford on health-grounds. He reappears days later at Luton. He could have given so many reasons for resigning, but he simply, publicly, lied. Plus, he left us with David Kemp. Then, he took Luton on a dance back up through the divisions - beating us on Boxing Day in 2001. While we struggled, they celebrated and we were eventually relegated to the Conference while they sat pretty. This would have been galling enough had it not been based on one of the biggest lies in English football history.

The club were operating way beyond their means and when the money dried up administration was an inevitability. In addition it was revealed that Luton had been paying agents via third parties against the Football League’s regulations. The result was an accumulative 30 point deduction which meant they were relegated into the Conference the following season. In essence, we’d been a victim of their ill-gotten success, or that’s how it felt. Their points punishment was one thing, but it didn't compensate for our suffering.

By now we were both in the Conference, this put Oxford and Luton in the unfamiliar position of being giants of their division. Inevitably, they arrogantly predicted an immediate return to the Football League - being the only team, they said, ever to be relegated from the league for 'non-football reasons' (not true, their cheating artificially inflated their footballing capability; the points deduction was just a readjustment for that). But it was us who set the pace winning 2-0 on a fantastic night at the Kassam with a James Constable goal moments after missing a penalty (spewing a mini-YouTube classic) and a wonder goal from The Great Carrier Of Hope, Jamie Cook. The stadium seethed throughout - the size of the crowd and its intensity taking the police and club by surprise - part of the chaos being that it wasn’t considered important enough to be all-ticket.

Months later and the tide was again beginning to turn; Luton was finding their feet and we were suffering a characteristic mini-collapse. The problem appeared to be stemmed at Kenilworth Road as Matt Green put us into the lead, which we carried deep into injury time. Then, perhaps inevitably, they won a corner from which they equalised; and then heartbreakingly about six hours into injury time, we conceded again and walked away with nothing. Chris Wilder talked paternally about us being alright despite us metaphorically falling off our bike and getting a boo-boo on our knee.

The season, inevitably ended with a play-off. It seemed pre-ordained that we would meet Luton at Wembley (maybe even a full Wembley) for the right to promotion. But, while we completed our side of the deal dismantling Rushden, they inexplicably capitulated at home to York. It probably did us the world of good as their form suggested they’d have gone to Wembley as hot favourites. But, all of this was overshadowed as angry Luton fans chased the York players into the away end hurling abuse and objects at them. A shameful episode for which they were barely punished - even more galling when you consider that a year before we were deducted five points for a minor administrative error involving Eddie Hutchinson.

Saturday's defeat, which seems to have opened the debate around Michael Appleton's commitment to The Right Things, seems to have been self-inflicted. However, this doesn't make me feel any better about them.

I haven’t even touched on what a horrible place Luton is or what a pipsqueak of a stadium they have with their grandstand of greenhouses down one side. It all adds to a great pyre of evidence that makes Luton a team I loath beyond all others.

Oh, but I love their kit.

Addendum: There is a fine line between deliberately nasty and simply discussing a genuine feeling. And this is about the latter, not the former, although I realise that it does look like the former – particularly if you are a Luton fan. If you think about it, I’m describing a relationship over a 30 year period. The only real constant in this relationship is me and the name Luton Town.

It just so happens that Luton and I have never really got on – from plastic pitches and bad results to banned away fans and hooliganism. But that’s not to say that there aren’t good people in Luton and it hasn’t done good stuff. I have vague recollections of being a "Luton fan" during the 1985 League Cup final. It’s just my only interaction with the club has really been through the bad stuff listed above.

At least Luton is a memorable team for me. I suppose, in a sense, I should dislike other clubs even more because they just happen to turn up at Oxford games from time to time and leave no impression at all.

What I do know is that frequently when you dislike something, that it says more about you than the thing you dislike. Perhaps that’s it – Luton Town is a bear trap for me; which says more about me than it does about them. 

Reasons to be positive

Well, we have established a number of things about this season. Michael Appleton is a better coach then he is a manager - he will improve your players, but will he win you games?

Our owners have a preference for untried, high risk signings - the talented but injured, the talented but inexperienced, and the talented with questionable attitude. There is no evidence, currently, of a wider strategy for the club - particularly around stadium ownership. We have a sickly sweet PR machine in place which has face-aching smiles and talks in management-speak of ‘customer journeys’ and ‘USP's’.

Commercial successes have been limited - we have a shirt sponsor who is almost certainly not paying any money for the privilege, but the pop-up club shop outside the South Stand is a good innovation.

The club are demonstrably worse off than they were 12 months ago and yet the fans are compliant in this apparent failure. Perhaps it's out of apathy, perhaps from politeness. One thing is for sure, no other Oxford manager - throughout our history - would have been given this much time.

Is there anything to be optimistic about?

Well, change does take time and it is to football’s eternal failing that it doesn't give things time. The preference is to continually role the dice in the hope that, by the law of averages, you will eventually throw a double six. The football is certainly better, chances are being created, logic would suggest that it should be possible to accumulate enough points for a mid-table finish.

We are on a very, very gradual upward climb form-wise. We’re unbeaten in six games and West Brom was a great night.

As optimism goes, this sounds underwhelming. But, it was highly unlikely, given the financial constraints Ian Lenagan became under, that we were ever going to go up this season. So, considering what might have been - poor mid-table football - with what should be - entertaining mid-table football - you might argue that things are progressing.

I like the new branding at the stadium, although we’re a long way from creating a decent match day atmosphere, but I quite like seeing the club badges on each stand as I walk to the ground. The portakabin club shop is a good idea, as well as generating cash and it helps centralise the match day experience.

And that’s all I have, it is too easy to be wholly positive or wholly negative about things. It’s almost, to some, an question of pride to side on an issue in such a binary, absolute fashion. Most things are in fact usually a bit negative and a bit positive.

But, the truth is that on balance, things are worse, and what is perhaps interesting is the lack of frustration that seems to be coming from the fans. Perhaps there is a point when everyone gets fed up with fighting and starts to give up.

I struggle with the idea that a decision about a manager should rest on a single result rather than a prevailing trend, so must-win games are a bit of a nonsense. However, we continue to fall short. As pretty as the football may be and as gloopy as the PR is, if we can’t win games, then you have to question what is the point of the Ashton revolution?

A win is a win

A win is a win, right? Well, yes, and no.

I found the standing ovations for Callum O’Dowda, Brian Howard and Danny Hylton slightly troubling. Not because they didn’t, in their own ways, have very good games against Accrington. It was because it reminded me of a phenomenon that seemed to arise in the late days of The Manor and early Kassam years. Despite ever falling quality of our performances, the frequency of standing ovations at substitutions increased.

There was a time at The Manor when you knew a player had done something special by the wave of people rising to their feet in the Beech Road stand. It happened very rarely. By the end of the Millennium, simply running around in a yellow shirt had become reason for wild applause. Our standards had slipped.

I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon. A win is definitely better than a defeat; I am not one of those people who claims to want to see their team lose to affect a change of manager. For one, that’s a buffoon’s logic and two; from what I hear of him, I quite like Michael Appleton. I’m not convinced by him as a manager for obvious, tangible, reasons, but he speaks well and appears willing to take responsibility for his team. I don’t particularly like myself for not being convinced by him as a professional.

And, I’ve had worse Tuesday nights at The Kassam; Howard’s ball to Hylton for the first was excellent and Collins’ goal was spectacular, Callum O’Dowda’s performance shows he’s developing well and there was plenty of entertaining, attacking football to watch. As an isolated 90 minutes, it was definitely entertaining.

But. This was us winning against a moderate team, at home, who had ten men in order to pull within a point of the fourth bottom team of the whole football league. We hadn’t won in seven games - it wasn’t a must-win game, it was a 'should win' game by virtue of the law of averages alone. On other days Collins’ shot sails over, Barnett wouldn’t have been given such a daft opportunity and the referee would miss the sending off and it all ends up decidedly more close than it was. Eventually it was going to come together, but could you say it's the start of something?

While it would be great to be goldfish-like and receive every victory like it was the best one we’d ever seen, the win remains tempered by the context. Last year; and in fact, for the last 8 years, we have had aspirations of winning promotions. And, particularly early in those seasons wins meant going top, or staying in the play-offs, they dared us to dream.

I don’t expect every game to have the same feeling as a win at Wembley or in a derby, but while I am satisfied with the win over Accrington, I can’t quite get excited about it in the context of our terrible start to the season.

Perhaps this is the start of something; but there’s still a lot to resolve before it becomes clearer as to whether it is or not. Can Hoskins and Howard stay fit? And Hylton? And Clarke and Whing? Has whatever turned Tyrone Barnett from a million pound player to a free transfer in two years been left behind at his former club? Does Appleton have the ability? Does Eales and Ashton have the money?

This will only become clear when looking at the context; in other words, the runs we go on. If we’re to even have an average season we’re going to have to hit a run to compensate the awful start - five or six wins in seven or eight games, that kind of thing. If we’re actually going for promotion; which seems frankly ridiculous right now, that run will have to be more sustained. Was there enough evidence from the Accrington game to suggest we will put that kind of run together? No, because it’s impossible to judge over 90 minutes.

It’s not easy; football should be a visceral and spontaneous experience. But, it's difficult to divorce the experience of a game from what's going on around it. Perhaps that's a plague of growing up; it creates a clutter of history; a ramshackle filing cabinet in my head full of scraps of memories. So, Callum O'Dowda's performance had me delving into that filing cabinet to try and remember how it compared to Joey Beauchamp and Paul Powell, Collins' goal was quickly compared to Leven's. A win is tempered by the context in which it happens; good in itself, but far from conclusive as to whether this is the beginnings of the return of the good times.

Are football fans a bunch of dumb asses?

There’s a tweet that’s been bugging me ever since it was posted just after the transfer window closed and we’d failed to sign Tyrone Barnett. It basically said that the club should be applauded for being willing to spend money on players and also to be applauded for not being held to ransom by a player’s wage demands.

Now, in reality, it seems that the problem with the Barnett deal was between the player and his agent, but it seems that this one Oxford fan was wholly satisfied with the failure of the bid. In fact, he viewed it as some kind of success.

This is one of the themes of this season so far; it has been a terrible, terrible start - disastrous form and we're still three or four players short of a competitive squad. We are the second worst team in the entire football league and by next Saturday afternoon, it is conceivable that we will be the worst. And yet, not only are Oxford fans apparently satisfied by our parlous state and optimistic about our future, they are prepared to find ‘evidence’ from even the most incongruous sources to prove that fact. In addition, there are others re-writing our recent history; claiming that this is better than life under Chris Wilder (currently 7th with Northampton).

Now, I’m not going to bang on about winning at Wembley or the three wins over Swindon, I’m not going to talk about the nurturing of James Constable into not only a genuine goalscorer but a modern day club icon and talisman. I’m not going to talk about Peter Leven’s goal against Port Vale, or the semi-final play-offs against Rushden or Jamie Cook goal against Luton.

I’m not going to talk about any of those things, I’m not going to talk about half a decade which we will look back on as a golden age. I’m not even going to talk about the mean-spiritedness of that revisionism. Instead, I’m going to ask a simple question; are football fans just a bunch of dumb asses?

I sometimes see spats on Twitter between fans - obviously in our case it’s usually with Swindon fans. Insults are traded; but, I do often wonder if anyone is genuinely serious about this. I mean, does anyone genuinely believe that all Swindon fans are scumbags or that arguing over who is best will actually ever be resolved?

Do those who one week, after a defeat, call for the kneecapping of the manager and then the next, after a win, claim him to be a genius, recognise the idiocy of their inconsistency?

I enjoy the rivalry, I enjoy the pantomime, even when it’s vicious and foul mouthed, but I also know it’s fiction. It requires a suspension of belief in order for it to work. I had assumed others see it as well, but perhaps they don’t, perhaps they genuinely feel it is real. The problem is that we’re all so busy playing along, and we’re too afraid to ask anyone if they genuinely believe it in case they do and you’re exposed as being one of the uncommitted.

But, you have to be a simpleton to genuinely confuse the fiction of football rivalry and the reality of the reductivism of it all. I don’t know how many people do fall for it, but some clearly do.

Rivalries are probably the least of our worries right now, we seem to be plumbing new depths of idiocy when it comes to our current form and predicament. I wholly get the idea of going to a game regardless of your form because that’s kind of the point. But, the acceptance of our current state completely baffles me. We have scratched two draws in six, and yet, that is deemed to be acceptable. Apparently we’ll be rewarded for sticking to higher principles of playing attractive football, but with what? A win? Avoiding relegation? Mid-table safety? Do people genuinely believe that our form or even our play indicate that we’ll match or improve on last year? When was a home draw with Dagenham, as entertaining as that might have been, considered the height of any club’s, let alone our, ambition?

I’m assuming that we all secretly know that our form this season has been catastrophic, and that should it continue in this vein then that could do irreversible damage to the club. The casual observer who makes the real difference between our future success and failure - because they attend when we succeed and don't when we fail - are simply not fooled by the idea that we are, in fact, succeeding. I’m hoping we know this and we’re all putting on a brave face. But what I’m thinking is that we’re all so dumb that this is genuine acceptance, or genuine belief, that some magical spirit is about to step in and fly us to the stars.

Suspending reality is at the heart of any entertainment, you have to give yourself over to the format whether that be film or theatre or sport - which is basically theatre without a script. But, if you suspend your reality completely, then there is always someone ready to exploit that. Football rivalries get hijacked by the politicised far right, for example. My fear is that we have handed ourself wholly over to rhetoric and we’ve ignored the reality of our situation. There is a very real possibility that by the time we wake up to that it will be too late.

Perhaps there is a commitment to entertaining football under the new regime, and perhaps there’s more money to invest in the club. Perhaps the stadium issue is moving forward at pace. But, if we wholly believe those promises and passively hand ourselves over the new regime - without an ounce of scepticism or pressure - then we are truly as dumb as we look. They should be buying our trust and respect with their performances, currently, they’ve built no capital in that respect and yet a draw at home to Dagenham or away to Southend is considered to be a major success and somehow proof that this is an improvement on the previous regime.

The marshmallow club

I have a friend whose husband had a near-fatal aneurysm five years ago. At first, the doctors battled to save his life; he was passed up the food chain from one expert consultant to another even more expert consultant. He was regularly given just hours or days to live. He went from standard treatment to world class treatment to experimental treatment. He is, in short, a medical miracle.

And it worked, his life was saved; he still suffers setbacks, but he is no longer on the brink of dying. He is, to quote my friend, like talking to a marshmallow. The reality of caring for a human marshmallow takes its toll. It affects their children’s behaviour and development; he has lost the ability to empathise and is incredibly personally offensive towards her and he suffers periods of both deep depression and even more damaging euphoria (spending thousands of pounds on a whim). As he’s otherwise stable, he’s in his late forties, he could be like this for another 50 years. My friend, obviously, feels a great obligation to continue to care for him, but, she admits in moments of candidness, that there are times when she’d prefer he wasn’t around.

I think I might be coming to the same conclusion about Oxford United. Its 15 years since Firoz Kassam bought the club, cleared its debt, knocked its stadium down, built another one and sent it plummeting down the divisions. Then Ian Lenagan came in, stabilised things but took them as far as he was able given his resources. And now Eales and Ashton are in control and are threatening to drive it into the ground once again, or at best keeping it in its current vegetative state.

The difference now is that our league position, our form, none of it bothers me that much. I don’t find it particularly humiliating, we’ve been here before and for a long time, and the hope of a bright future is dwindling. We are becoming a marshmallow club; our options seem to be to make the best of a bad job or just to let it slip away.

Ashton was on the radio before the Cheltenham game, his PR onslaught continuing with the Radio Oxford ‘Ask Ashton’ feature. The ‘best’ of these questions received, apparently, were around the bias of the referee on Saturday and smoking in the toilets.

Are you actually fucking kidding me? Is this what the anaesthesia of the Ashton PR machine has done to us? It’s fine to have gone eight games with one win, be next to bottom of the table, had the lowest league attendance in five and a half years just so long as we can have a fag at half time.

There are two questions that Ashton needs to answer – how much money is going to be invested in the team? And how and when is the stadium going to be purchased?

On the former issue, it seems evident that the answer is; not a lot. Ashton and Appleton have pleaded for time to develop the squad. But it is them who lobotomised the management of the club when they came in. Should they be afforded time when they weren’t prepared to give time to what already existed? They were the great saviours; not Lenagan and Waddock, both of whom were removed or sidelined, and we all compliantly, and shamefully, cheered their demise because we believed the new broom's bullshit.

But, what have they delivered? A handful of players, materially no better than those they replaced, and, judging by the results, worse. Pretty but ineffective football; I get that football clubs need to evolve into new cultures and styles, but this isn’t evolution; this is revolution into an abyss. It is more entertaining, but it is still losing football.

We’re not allowed to mention Chris Wilder, of course, but, by contrast, when he arrived at the club he, by his own admission, threw a team together; Sandwidth, Batt, Chapman, Clist, Nelthorpe. He came in with that plan – short term and a plan - longer term - to establish a squad to win promotion.

This didn’t happen with Appleton; nothing was thrown together; they talked about getting in the right bodies, not anybody. The rhetoric is fine, but what we’ve really had is neither the right bodies, nor anybody, we’ve had nobody, at least nobody who has changed the direction of travel. Perhaps Hoskins will when he’s fit, perhaps Jakubiak and Morris will with some more experience and game time. I have hope that, goals-wise, Hylton might compensate for the loss of Constable.

The next transfer window will be different, says Appleton. Will it? I’m tired of this constant gazing to the next horizon – wait until the next transfer window, wait until the stadium is bought, wait until Richard Branson buys us. But no, they want us to wait another three months by which time the season will have been trashed, or worse, a sullen malaise will have baked in and a relegation fight will be our only prospect. Appleton, by the next transfer window, nobody will care about your intentions, less your style of football. You may still be in a job, but you’ll be playing to empty stadiums.

Many say that patience is needed, but I'm not sure I care enough to be patient. With each passing failure – Cheltenham being the latest – comes ever growing indifference. There's no longer a fear of failure and even less expectation or hope of success. If we get relegated, then it won’t be a novelty, nor will it be any greater shame than 2006. Then you begin to kind of wonder what is the point of blindly following something in which you don’t care the outcome.

The glory in defeat

I’ve never seen a Premier League game. I’ve seen top flight football before it was re-branded in 1992 but nothing in the new era. One of the appeals of our League Cup tie at West Brom was the prospect of visiting a Premier League ground, and one I hadn’t been to before.

I still think there’s something slightly magical, when you get to a big stadium, about that first glance from under the stand out onto a pitch framed with the banks of unoccupied seats. You don’t really get that in the lower leagues; usually the stands are too small, or in our case, they don’t exist at all.

I came to realise that it’s been a decade since I was in a top flight stadium to see Oxford; I missed the West Ham game four years ago and before that it was our 2003 FA Cup tie at Highbury. We really have fallen far.

It’s clear from first contact that The Hawthorns drips with money; other peoples' money, Sky money, dirty money, who knows? Obviously not in the absurd scheme of Premier League things, but in terms of the normal world, the riches are obvious. The pitch is immaculate; a constant of green from end to end and corner to corner. The seats are uniform and shining, not faded by a decade of exposure to sunlight like at the Kassam. Advertising animates, videos play out. The sound system is crisp. The floolights, gleaming white, tower above the stadium. Even under the stand, around the toilets and snack bar, the floor is wood laminate. With the height of the stands with the corners filled-in, the stadium is complete and enclosed; a theatre with the world shut out. I can see it would be fun to watch football here on a regular basis. As ‘real’ as things might be in the lower leagues; you might also describe them as ‘a bit shit’.

The game gets going and quickly falls into a pattern; we’re organised, but they pass the ball crisply and with pace. It’s the pace that’s the difference. Everything moves a bit quicker. Before the game there’s a montage of nauseating video clips played on the big screen; positioned awkwardly so that only about 20% of the stadium can see it properly. Baggies fans give their predictions for 'fan cam' – 4-0, 5-0 – they disrespectfully ‘give all due respect’, but, they say, the Premier League class with surely tell. They are filmed self-consciously doing the ‘Baggies Boing’ like they're being threatened just off-camera by separatists from a terrorist operation.

But, we hold them, generally untroubled by both pace and style. There’s an inevitability, a pattern, emerging. We will compete as equals, but once minds and legs begin to tire, they will slowly euthanase us like a vet putting to sleep a suffering calf. That’s how this plan will play out.

That’s the Premier League philosophy; the quality will ooze out, ejaculating all over us, consuming and suffocating to the point extinction. Us, other sports, other forms of entertainment, football will consume us all in quality. It’s not exciting; it’s like a piece of precision engineering which mesmerises you with its intricate moving parts, even though it doesn’t really serve any real purpose.

On the touchline, is Alan Irvine, one of many Premier League managers whose agenda is one of survival. His own and his team's. He’s not paid to be exciting. Do the right things most of the time and they will survive another year to be fed by the Sky money machine like a zoo keeper rewarding a performing seal with a piece of fish. Being average amongst the elite is his target, staying the right side of average is more important than taking risks and winning games.

We concede, but we don’t lie down. Key moments pass, when you might expect us to lose concentration and crumble. Just before half-time and then just after. An hour ticks by and we pass the point of ‘not disgracing ourselves’. The massed bank of Oxford fans begin to get frustrated that we’re not taking the game on, not taking risks.

And then, we start taking them on and they don’t know what to do. We throw a punch and they flinch. We throw another and they seem to rock. Most importantly, they don’t hit back. The tired minds and legs don’t open up the chasm in class; as a result, they have no additional gear, no plan B, we’re not partaking in their set piece ballet, we take them on. They have no response; we were supposed to be long dead by this point.

While they flick frantically through their scripts trying to re-find their place and regain their composure; we attack again, where does it say that? And again. Eventually, a breakthrough, Hoskins nods down and Hylton bundles in. Delirium.

Then, each pass seems to bind the team together more; Appletonians, Wilderians, they’re beginning to trust each other, they’re working together. The fans too are bonding to this team; Riley – he’s one of ours now, Collins, him too, Hylton, Brown, Morris. We're starting to get them as a team. The confidence is transferred into a forward motion and we’re no longer holding them, we're attacking them; relentlessly.

Into extra time; during the break lactic acid fills the legs, they can feel like lead and we’re vulnerable again. But, we’re out of our corner at lightning speed, throwing punches putting them in trouble. This is beyond survival, we're outplaying them. Are the West Brom fans worried? Who knows? You can’t hear anything beyond the bedlam of the away end. They should be.

But, we can’t break through and they begin to regain composure. Composure but still no threat. Now we’re tiring. Brown overstretches a challenge and takes a second yellow card. It matters not; we’re deep into the epic now. The outcome, whatever it is, will see us victorious.

And finally penalties; on and on it goes, slugging away. Like a city under siege, we’re running out of men to fight, soon it’ll be just the children and cripples left to defend out honour. The old warrior, leaden legged Jake Wright, steps up, he’s never scored for us before and he doesn’t now; he swings a boot and the keeper parries.

The defeat, in some ways, is more glorious. Their reaction reveals much about what we’ve just done. They don’t celebrate their team’s success, for there is none; they mock our misfortune in callous revenge. It’s short lived; some celebrate like they’ve won the cup, most know that it should never have got to that point. Their players, far from piling on top of each other in a breathless orgy, simply turn to their opponents shake their hands and leave for the tunnel. The understatedness of their celebration at last revealing their Premier League class.

One does not simply walk into Oxford United

I feel a bit conflicted; I’ve long been an advocate of the long steady development of a football club. Less boom and bust, less hire and fire. I was proud of the fact we had a manager that was the third longest serving in professional football. I liked that we were committed to investing in local talent for the long term. What’s more, it worked, the steady progress saw us improve annually; albeit by decreasing margins in later years.

But, only five games into his reign, I am finding myself critical of Michael Appleton. He hasn’t benefited from a stellar start, like Chris Wilder did, but at the same time he’s yet to match Wilder’s seasonal winless streaks, although not by much. By the token that we should look to the long term, Appleton needs time. So why am I frustrated by him so soon?

Defenders of Appleton say his style of football is an improvement on what went before and that good will out; if we play the right way we will win games, we just need to be patient. The style has improved, chances were being created against Portsmouth, but another defeat and with it a drop to the bottom of the table shows that at the plan isn’t working in terms of results.

I struggle with the results/performance equation. I agree with the aesthetic of playing football the right way, but only if you get the right results. The best times I've had as an Oxford supporter at the Kassam were under the pragmatic tactics of Ian Atkins and Chris Wilder. The common factor was we won games.

I’m not sure, on reflection, that it is Appleton where my frustrations lie. During the summer, Ashton and Eales came piling into the club; all toothy smiles and promises of passion. The callous removal of Gary Waddock suggested that they had arrived with a sure-fire winning plan. But instead, they’ve installed a manager and starved him of resources. Or at least, struggled to get their act together. Time will tell as to whether they were unable or unwilling to invest in players, but at best it appears that they beyond a hectic PR schedule, they didn’t have a plan, certainly not on the playing side.

I’m not for a second suggesting that Waddock was the answer, but I’m guessing he did have a plan for the season and had that not worked, and we’d opened with four defeats, then the decision about his tenure would have been an easy one, given his performance at the end of last year.

Ashton pleaded for time; but the first shot in anger, the appointment of Appleton, showed that time wasn’t a key consideration. Waddock was gone within hours of them taking over. But what they replaced it with was a void rather than a another, better, manager.

Appleton may still come good once he’s found his feet and Ashton has found his phone book and chequebook amongst the packing boxes in his office. Will Hoskins is an interesting signing, which could be the game-changer, but also could be another Peter Leven. In the meantime we’re relying on passion, talent, hope and other immeasurables.

It’s probably fair to say that we’re not far off; each game to date has been lost by the odd goal to teams who are currently first, second and fourth, but we’re relying on the law of averages to pick up points; currently we’re slightly on the wrong side of average, presumably over the season we’ll come out on the right side. But, by that token, ultimately, we’ll end up average.

The concern, of course, is that this isn’t a concern to Eales and Ashton because buying into the club is just the latest move in a big land deal. And that for them this isn’t a results game. Promotion, relegation or mid table doesn’t impact the value of the land they’re hoping to acquire, so why invest? It’s possible that Appleton is a stooge; he seems a reasonable chap who is probably happy to have any job given where he's been previously. Plus, he is wealthy enough not to work. Unlike, say, Wilder or Atkins, who needed to be successful to pay the mortgage, Appleton may just be the passive front man Eales and Ashton need. It would explain why Waddock was ousted so quickly.

I should say, that I’m not convinced the real story is quite so linear. I doubt anyone wants to fail, presumably the duo want to impress the masses (and I mean masses) of people who now occupy the executive box at home games. However, I can see that in a world of competing priorities; some things are more important than others. If Eales is going to spend, say, £100,000 - there’s a far greater, and more certain, return on investment paying for legal fees on a land purchase than on a 27 year old, fit, proven goalscorer. It probably wouldn’t be a one-or-other option; but if his resources are limited, it seems to me that the allocation is likely to go on the land deal, not the player.

As an aside, I like Danny Hylton more than I thought I would; stuck amongst Wilderian players and Appletonians, it seemed he was destined to become the Sansa Stark* of the club; stuck between the houses of former and emerging kingdoms while being part of neither. But, he ran himself ragged on Saturday and seems to have thrown himself at the challenge like no one else.

I feel for Morris; he seems keen to get on the ball, with players preferring to pass rather than put the ball in places for him to attack, he keeps dropping deep and out of position. At one point in the first half, the pattern of play suddenly presented itself with an opportunity. A quick cross to the edge of the box, where a gap had opened up, and Morris would have been in. Then I realised that Morris was the man on the ball and the space in the box was the result of him not being there. Another time he was tussling with Portsmouth’s deep lying midfielders leaving the back four as an untroubled final defence.

On the hour, Morris suddenly seemed to be going backwards. He’s a hulk of a player, but nearly a decade from his physical prime, spending an hour dropping deep and looking for the ball had taken its toll. At that point the game became a war of attrition, and it was likely to be a survival of the fittest. Experience will eventually teach him to take his time, but it would also be nice to think that his habit of looking for the ball might be coached out of him.

Neither side really looked like they were going to win it at that point. Both teams were likely to get a chance or two, less through talent, more by virtue of the fact that eventually the ball is going to end up near one or the other goal. They bundled in their chance and Junior Brown headed ours over the Oxford Mail stand. As I say, we’re relying on the law of averages. At some point Eales and Ashton need to tip the odds more in Appleton’s favour; this week’s activities are likely to be telling.

 * A character from Game of Thrones whose family is all but wiped out by a powerful, ruling, family during a bitter civil war. By this time she is promised to marry the king; a member of her family's killers. A deal she is unable, now on her own, to renege on. She subsequently finds herself neither a member of her own family - all of whom are dead or on the run - nor that of that which she is expected to marry into. Like Danny Hylton. 

What's the difference between a coach and a manager?

What’s the difference between a manager and a coach? In the chaotic world of professional football, it’s probably little more than semantics, certainly the definitions seem to have been blurred since he good old days when the manager wore a sheepskin coat and the coach was a wiry bald man in a tight tracksuit.

The concept of the ‘head coach’ is an affectation of the modern game. A reaction against the omnipotent management tradition styled by the likes of Brian Clough and Sir Alex Ferguson. It’s a message from the owners that says; ‘you may be the one in the limelight, but I run this schizzle’.

The head coach is quite exotic, a hipster move, something foreigners do. But, like many things adopted by Britain from abroad, it’s not taken on wholesale. Much as we admire the German approach, we’re still fond of our despotic owners. When things are going wrong, fans call for ‘someone’ to come in spend money - it’s rare you hear them calling for the club to be run as a not-for-profit democracy.

So, there is almost certainly no consensus on the difference between the two and perhaps it doesn’t really matter. Perhaps, but perhaps not, because if you do confuse the two, then how do you know you’ve got the right people running your team in the right way?

By definition, the coach is there to develop players. It is a positive, nurturing role; taking players to their full potential. As such, it’s fairly easy to be the good guy. In fact, it’s pretty important that you are the good guy if the players are going to respond to the things you want them to do.

The manager, however, is almost the opposite. Within his arsenal has to be the ability to be the bad guy, he has to make decisions which are not always popular - scratch that, no decision is popular. Every decision will upset someone; players, fans, owners or media. He has to earn empathy and respect, but he needs mental robustness to resist criticism and the emotional detachment to remain objective. In a world where ex-players continually lament the banter and camaraderie of the dressing room over almost everything else the game offers, the idea that you might want to move into a role where you are almost always going to be disliked by someone can’t be for many.

So, like anyone in a senior role, a football manager, to be successful, has to be a sociopath. And this could be after a career where the idea of the individual is beaten out of you. Of course, many coaches are considered for managerial roles because they are amiable and they do the right things playing football the right way. They follow the textbook, which sounds just great if you’re an owner.

We’ve had a few managers who were good coaches; by all accounts Graham Rix was an excellent coach, David Kemp’s career in the Premier League shows that he was a much better coach than manager. Ian Atkins and Chris Wilder were very good managers, as was Jim Smith who always needed a very good coach to make things work. It doesn’t stand to reason that a good coach makes a good manager, or that a good manager makes a good coach. So you interchange them at your peril.

When Danny Hylton slotted home the equaliser at Mansfield on Saturday, it seemed like we might have escaped with a barely-deserved draw. The first reaction of the players was to get the ball from the back of the net in order to hurry up the restart. We did the right thing by the fans, and the spirit of football, and we went for the three points.

But, having suffered a home defeat on the opening day and with a gift of an away point eleven minutes away, is going for the win the right thing to do? Or, given the nervousness that comes with being one of the handful of teams without a point, should it be time to shut up shop?

His decision was a coach’s decision, not a managerial one. The coach goes for the win; sticks to the principles of the game, does the right thing. The manager recognises the value of an away point which settles everyone and puts us amongst the pack.

Perhaps it illustrates an inability to operate in the managerial role. We don’t know whether that’s a permanent thing or whether he will gain a managerial mindset. Let’s face it, his previous roles have hardly given him scope to spread his wings. Securing points by any means is one of his easier decisions. As the season progresses, things get harder - there will be decisions about playing injured players, rushing them back to do a short-term job, he may look at fixtures and decide they’re worthy of sacrifice because of more significant jobs coming up. Then there are the habits, bad or otherwise, that players begin to adopt. He will need to develop some of those habits, but he will need to suppress others. He may also need to make decisions about players who are good and decent people - players he perhaps brought in - who will need replacing. In short, the job will get dirtier.

Partly, this is about Appleton’s ability, but it’s also about the strategy of the football club. Is Appleton’s role to be the manager? To make tough and unpleasant decisions? Or is he the coach? To develop players’ technical ability? Do we know what a head coach is supposed to do? To date, it’s not clear. While the single point of failure concept that operated for most of Chris Wilder’s reign is not desirable, we currently have a gap in ability which needs filling, or developing, quickly.

A refreshing change

The first round of the League Cup is perhaps the weirdest game of the season. Few clubs involved harbour genuine ambition of going far in the competition and you have to go fairly deep into it (or get very lucky) before you draw a genuine money-spinning tie. So, in that sense, it seems obvious to rest first-teamers and give fringe players a leg stretcher.

On the other hand, we’re just three days into the new season and players are still looking for rhythm and sharpness. With just one competitive game under their belts its also difficult to know whether you’re on or off form.

The manager doesn’t have the benefit of half a season to assess under what kind of threat their job might be under. Cup runs can offer a respite from the pressure of the league and sustain, if not save, people’s jobs. But the manager can’t tell after one game whether what he has at his disposal is a team shooting for promotion or fighting relegation. This, ultimately, defines how important or otherwise the cups are.

Then, of course, there’s your opponent, who is in much the same position. Bristol City, for example, had a good opening away win in the league and stand 5th in League 1 after just one game. They are in the promotion race but by next Sunday could be in the relegation zone, by the end of the season they could be facing League 2 football and we will face them as peers. That’s what happened with Bristol Rovers in 2010.

So, it's difficult to know just how good a League Cup win is. Particularly if you add the conundrum about whether or not they are taking the competition seriously and playing a full-strength team.

What is of little doubt, however, is that we really needed that win. We are on a venture into the unknown, with a new manager and several new players, plus some brow beaten and skeptical fans. The league hasn’t been kind to us with few games coming up that you might confidently hope for some points. A few barren weeks could be catastrophic to morale. As they say, you may not be able to win the league at this stage in the season, but you can lose it. While winning the league might be beyond us, we surely need some early success if we’re going to have a good season - however that might be defined.

In particular, a goal for Morris seemed essential. He has no experience or track record and a barren spell is likely to be damaging to his confidence. For all his outward confidence, he doesn't know whether he can cut it in senior football and going out on loan must be unnerving; it doesn't exactly scream confidence from your manager that your breakthrough is imminent. He also looks like a player who needs confidence to perform. Historically big target men like Paul Moody and Steve Anthrobus need good and plentiful supply to get goals. They don’t create goals themselves (Paul Moody’s solo goal against Cardiff in 94 aside, perhaps). So if the supply dries up, then so do the goals and confidence. And then to complete the vicious cycle, players around him lose confidence and try to work around the target man, not through him, to find success. If you add in the weight of expectation that might occur given that he’s wearing James Constable’s shirt, an early goal of whatever nature, seems essential.

One swallow doesn't make a summer, but a win is a win. While the context is difficult to judge, whether we’re playing a full-strength team destined for promotion to the Championship or an understrength team in free fall to League 2; or any combination of those two extremes, there can be few that will argue that we needed that.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The new season often looks unfamiliar. Fans look refreshed, new shirts are worn, people are in shorts. Pitches are a lush, deep, green colour; benefiting from a couple of months loving preparation rather than the usual 48 hours of intense forking and watering.

There is a buzz of anticipation because months of football deprivation play tricks on the mind. We begin to believe that we cannot fail, forgetting that every other team is similarly preparing and determined to succeed.

In the stands, the singing area worked to a point; I suppose when you put yourself in a singing area there is an obligation, of sorts, to sing. During the first half it was noisy and vocal, although it couldn't be sustained. Expected, given the energy needed to sustain 90 minutes of noise and the result on the day.

On the pitch, players look leaner; hair cuts are sharp, Alfie Potter's beard seems to have become more proportionate to his face. Danny Rose looks like he's been taking some miracle dietary substitute you see advertised on Facebook, his tan looks like he's been attacked by a creosote spray. The players who last year looked like children, look like men, like they'd grown into proper footballers over the summer. The football is technically better - at least for a little bit. And, of course, there are new signings which I can't tell one from another.

On the touchline the familiar questionable tracksuits of Chris Wilder (frankly, I can't remember what Gary Waddock wore) were replaced by the suited Michael Appleton. Mickey Lewis was barely visible barreling around the technical area.

Nothing was more different than in the executive box. It was rammed full of suits wearing those garish yellow club ties. Some people I recognised, most I didn't. There were wives, girlfriends  looking like a lost wedding party. Some were self-consciously wearing Oxford scarfs which you suspect had been hastily purchased for the occasion. Were they investors? Officials? Or were they simply the family and friends of new regime offering moral support and coming to admire the owners' new toy? Where did they all come from? And, will they still be here in November?

The area was so full that when Burton rolled in their winner just before half time, the phalanx Burton suits rose as one in their seats, not on the front row of the box as is usually the case, but about 20 seats to the left towards the open end. They seemed to have been ousted by the hangers on.

Nathan Cooper reinforced the sense of renewal by announcing the arrival of the players with a bellow of 'A new era'.  Things were different, of that there's no doubt.

Different until a ball was kicked, that is. Then there was a distinct familiarity about it all - decent shape, good passing, no urgency and no goal threat. As a bloke near me said 'we won't concede many, but we'll score even less' which, by any measure, is a withering assessment.

Even after we fell behind and the game ticked past the hour there was no change of plan. We remained pathologically averse to crossing the ball.

Channel 4 once briefly ran a series called the Sex Inspectors where a couple of self-styled er, 'sex inspectors' would try solve the problems of couples whose sex lives were damaging their wider relationship. In one episode a couple had become consumed with role play, sex toys and dressing up. 

The programme's hook was for the experts to watch the couple in action and commentate on what was going on. If that sounds like fun, believe me it wasn't. In this one episode, the bloke spent 25 minutes meticulously lacing up his girlfriend's corset. It was all part of their 'game'. She was pulled and yanked about and told off for not standing still until she got bored and cold. His obsession with dressing her up in 'the right way' meant he completely overlooked the objective of actually having sex with her.

That was us on Saturday; we were so obsessed with shape and technique that we'd forgotten to score any goals. Even into injury-time nobody was prepared to launch the ball into the box in one last attempt to salvage something. I don't remember if the bloke and his girlfriend ended up launching the ball into the box to salvage something.

But, fans on the phone-in purred with appreciative sympathy. The ubiquitous 'Dougie', who might be one person, or perhaps, like Dr Who, lots of different people being a single character, carefully re-wrote history by claiming that Wilder and Lenagan would have come on and given excuses. To my mind Appleton's assessment of us dominating was way off the mark, not an excuse, but misleading nonetheless. We were just compliant in failure.

Some of this is politeness towards the new regime, and nobody is suggesting that Appleton shouldn't be given time, but a tame home defeat to Burton is not honourable in the way a cup defeat to a Premier League team might be. If you have ambitions of success, you don't want to lose any more than 3 or 4 home defeats in a season. The first game is very early to be giving away one of your lives and to do it so cheaply has to be a worry.

Oxford United 2014: Who are we?

Around this time of year I'm often asked by fellow bloggers to provide some kind of season preview for our club. The ask all the usual questions; best signing, prospects for the season, that kind of thing. They never ask the most important question; just who are Oxford United in 2014?

Richard Starkey, in his book Crown and Country, nails in the space of the opening few pages, a pro-monarchy argument I’ve been trying, and failing, to formulate for years. He argues that anti-monarchists are pre-occupied with the Royal Family. They believe them to be too rich, privileged, unaccountable and detached from mainstream society. But that supposes the family have any real choice in their role within the wider monarchic institution. In actuality, the Royal Family subscribe to their cosseted world, not because they see the riches it brings, but because they legally and constitutionally have no other choice. The monarchy is a corporation of which the family is its ‘brand’.

The monarchy, he argues, rightly in my view, is the organisation which holds the ideas and concepts that make us British; the keeper of our rambling evolving, and hugely robust cultural constitution. Take marriage, for example, the British concept of marriage is a melting pot of the French idea of romance, the old English idea of it being a way of dealing with practical issues like having babies and acquiring and protecting land and Germanic concepts of class - that we typically marry within our own ‘status’. The monarchy is where these concepts actually met and formed. If it hadn’t, then marriage in Britain today would be predominantly loveless, practical and arranged - a very un-British thing.

So, while we obsess over the royal family and its supposed riches, its actual purpose is frequently overlooked.

As we sit on the brink of a new season, we might well question what Oxford United is in 2014. It is too simple to say that Oxford are just a football club; early in the close season, after a turgid end to the last campaign, there was much hand-wringing as to why we should all leap to renew our season tickets. I renewed mine primarily out of habit; I knew when it came to it, i would regret it if I didn’t; but ultimately it wasn’t a rational or considered decision.

Others didn’t feel the same; some of the most loyal and thoughtful fans chose not to renew; not reactionary types or Johnny go-lightly’s; rational, intelligent and loyal people. Could I muster a rational and intelligent idea as to why they should? I eventually concluded that the only argument that I could muster was that this is a football club and that your season ticket is your membership subscription.

Of course, that argument only holds water to some degree. Yes, we’re a club because we’re only as strong as our ‘members’. But our membership doesn’t give us any rights. That’s because football club’s gave up on being traditional ‘clubs’ decades ago. I can almost pinpoint when Oxford United ceased being a club; I have a club handbook from 1982/3, possibly the last of its kind to be produced. It is full of clubby type news, like the state of the club’s finances. Within months Robert Maxwell had taken over at which point we ceased being a club, we were part of a rich man’s investment portfolio.

It’s difficult to fully understand Robert Maxwell’s motivation for taking over Oxford United; perhaps he was being genuinely altruistic towards a local institution in peril; supporting it as he might a charitable trust protecting an old church. But Maxwell would have struggled to resist his natural business urges. He foresaw football’s attractiveness to TV a decade before the Premier League came into being. He also fought hard, without success, to re-home the club because there was money to be made from new facilities. What he did exploit, however, was the power of a football club as a vehicle for advertising.

Maxwell bought up Oxford just as shirt sponsorship became fashionable; and he used the new liberalisation of rules around that to publicise a number of his businesses; Pergamon Press, BPCC and the Sunday People were all in Maxwell’s stable. It seems unlikely that any cash exchanged hands for their logos to appear on our shirts. Even in the 1st Division, with the club at their most marketable, the fabled Wang sponsor was, in fact, a contra arrangement where The Mirror Group got a discount from the computing firm in return for some in-kind shirt promotion. When people ask what happened to the money we earned during the Glory Years, the answer is probably that there wasn’t any.

Some thirty years later and we see the same coming again. Last year the yellow shirt was adorned with the legend Animalates; a start-up or franchise owned by Ian Lenagan. There appeared to be no cash involved; it was just that the club offered a national and local platform to promote another of Lenagan’s businesses. And now, the dubiously entitled ‘Round n Black’ will be blazoned across this season’s shirt. This is a company which currently doesn’t even appear to operate, but which lists Darryl Eales as a director. I am probably over simplifying things; but essentially the club gains nothing from this deal but Eales earns some free national advertising. And in essence, football is simply a platform for people to advertise their wares. And Oxford specifically quite often has just been a billboard to promote its owners other business interests.

It’s not all bad; United in Business and United We Achieve are two initiatives which, in concept at least, seem to position the club at the centre of local Oxford society; which is where the club should be, in my view. It is a rare institution which brings together the professional and working classes on an equal footing, but football club’s can do just that.

But, in 2014, Oxford United’s real purpose in life is as a pawn in a land deal; a position it has held, more or less, for more than a decade. Firoz Kassam, of course, profited hugely from buying up the bankrupt club and more importantly its valuable real-estate and selling it on for a healthy profit. There are few businesses that can survive the hardships that football clubs survive, particularly when there is a bankable asset available to be liquidated, as The Manor was. Had this been a conventional business, it would have been wound up and its assets sold off years before Kassam got hold of it and years before the Manor was worth so much. So Kassam was lucky enough, or wise enough, to spot that a bankrupt business sitting on a pot of gold that the banks and other creditors feared to close. He then used the self-same power of the Oxford brand to bully through planning permission for the stadium releasing the value of The Manor and making him an increasingly rich man.His argument at the time was that he was the man with the balls to do the deal, so he should profit. Unarguable in some senses, but you could run the same argument about people who get rich human trafficking, drug dealing or tricking old ladies out of their life savings - if you’ve got the balls, then why shouldn’t you get the spoils. But is it right?

For a period, it felt like we might actually become a sporting institution again; Ian Lenagan may or may not have been a ‘football man’ but he was certainly a sporting one. He never managed to do the big land deal at the heart of the club; either because it wasn’t a priority or because he simply couldn’t raise the funds to do it. But the benefit was that football became the focus of attention. That was particularly true during Kelvin Thomas’ time, when the players and fans seemed, literally, united behind a single, footballing cause. It’s why I’m a Lenagan fan and, therefore, a Wilder fan. But, you know, move on.

Even latterly, however, football has come first with the investment in the youth system which has paid some dividends.

This summer has seen the emphasis shift again; Eales and Ashton are in place, and the land deal is back on; and currently the club exists as a key part in the execution of that. I may be wrong; but I don’t think I am. I’m not suggesting that Eales wishes for the club to perish, in the same way that I don’t believe Kassam set out for it to either; it’s just that football is not the priority. There have been some good signs; Ashton for all his reputation is dedicated full-time to the job, which Lenagan wasn’t, and he has a football background - if that counts for anything. Appleton, I can’t pass judgement on, he could be a knowing or unknowing stooge in the whole thing or he could be the next bright young thing - although we’ve had a few of them over the years. Derek Fazackerly’s appointment does appear to be a positive in the summer’s maelstrom; although it was Kassam who brought in Ray Harford and Joe Kinnear as respected names in the game whose impact came to nought. Some of the signs are good, no doubt, but what Eales wants to achieve with the football side of things remains unclear; player investment to date has been under-whelming or at least on a par with the previous regime. There have been view clear statement on the playing strategy going forward.

The suggestion that the club may be about to issue a million non-voting shares is a good one, overdue and also welcome. Granted, there’s no rational reason to buy such stock in a football club. Essentially a non-voting share is an investment in a company’s future profit which is paid as a dividend to the investor. The idea that Oxford might one day return a healthy enough profit to pay a dividend to its shareholders seems remote. But even if the investment case is not a strong one, the availability of shares allows the fans the opportunity to feel they are investing in the club as members rather than just buying merchandise and tickets as customers is a good thing.

So there we have it; on the brink of another season and the club exists again, primarily to secure land and secondary; to play football. Maybe I need some actual football to distract me, but it makes me wonder whether this blog has actually helped me figure out the purpose of the club, and in fact, any football club. I have a friend who loves films; after a while he worked out that there was a formulae to the stories told in films, at which point he became interested in what went into stories; the storyboarding, the structure, the technology, the logistics and the economics. When he figured out that formulae he began to realise that the magic of films had been lost to him. Film making was, like everything else; a business driving out risk by formalising its practice. Perhaps ultimately I’m beginning to realise that at the top end of the game, football is about advertising and at the bottom end it’s about land. It is rarely about football. So, will we see some footballing magic in the next 12 months? Will we reignite a long lost fire? Or will we slowly realise that football barely registers as the primary reason that Oxford United exists at all.

Farewell Dave Kitson, you very strange chap

In many ways, Dave Kitson at Oxford made more sense to Dave Kitson than it did to Oxford United. Signed during the First Summer of Austerity, Kitson didn’t fit Ian Lenagan’s vision of a squad of young players with the robustness to last a whole season of League 2 action.

For Kitson, on the otherhand, there was the opportunity to add a couple of years to his dwindling career in an area close to where he lived. He was still being paid an obscene amount of money by Portsmouth although his (alleged) book suggests that, due to excessive spending and some poor financial planning, he wasn’t necessarily as cash-rich as many would have perceived. Above all, in Oxford he had an environment that, to a certain extent, meant that he could still play out his big-time footballer fantasies.

But, as we’ve seen time and again, when once big-time players end up at Oxford there's usually a good reason for it. The pattern; as seen with the likes of Gilchrist or Duberry, is that you typically get a good first season and a second season blighted by injury as the player finally falls apart. With Kitson, his first season was more like a second season and he didn’t even get to his second season announcing his retirement after a couple of sprints up sand dunes or whatever it is they do for pre-season nowadays.

As fleeting moments of genius go, Kitson barely registered on the Leven Scale. For a period he seemed to be the key to unlocking goals for James Constable who was his willing workhorse up front, but the odd threaded through-ball and masterful take-down aside he generally seemed to dally around the field in vague disgust at the inferiority happening around him.

There was something not quite right about Kitson. Perhaps it was that he was a square peg in a round hole; one of the lads, but the one with all the best stories and the best Ford Mondeo - or whatever it is footballers drive nowadays. Perhaps it was the opaque insight we had into his life and views as The Secret Footballer. Perhaps it was that he did genuinely seem to come across as a footballer like no other in terms of erudition and intelligence.

But, there was something else. His disciplinary record was atrocious; particularly for an experienced player who had played at the top level. It revealed a strangely narcissistic streak where he was prepared to aggressively criticise the officials as the ‘worst ever’ – demonstrating almost a perverse desire to deliberately get into trouble with the authorities. Perhaps he was the only player in League 2 whose comments would register with the FA, and that’s what he liked.

Even more darkly, and perhaps this is just a sign of the times, there was something even more cynical in what he did. He seemed to draw bookings or injuries almost, it appeared, deliberately, as if he just wanted to give himself the week off. Even worse, one particular incident – inexplicably conceding of a penalty against Plymouth – an act so oddly deliberately and his protest so strangely contrived made me, for the first time ever, question a player’s integrity. Perhaps it was just the toll of injuries meant that he just couldn’t do it anymore, perhaps (as suggested in the book) it was his mental state. This seems most likely to me, but perhaps it was something else.

He just never really seemed that committed, in a team that needed direction, experience and a bit of class, he drifted in and out at will. When he was on his game it looked like he was the key to unlocking success, but for much of the time it was like he was just mucking around.

How will Kitson be remembered? Well, he probably won’t, in truth. He’ll be filed alongside people like Colin Todd and Steve Perryman, former Oxford players who will forever be associated with  things than us. In the short term he leaves us with a gap in class and just a couple of weeks to fill it - thanks Dave.

You say it best, when you say nothing at all

There's old journalistic lore which says that when something is presented to you as 'newsworthy' if the opposite of that thing is more surprising, then it isn't news, and therefore isn't worth writing about.

So, if someone says that it's going to be hot in July - a particular favourite amongst newspapers - the opposite is that it's going to snow. Because the opposite is more surprising than the reality; the story is redundant.

Whether that holds in the world of 24-hour rolling news is highly debatable. Quite simply there are just not enough genuine news stories to fill up the all-day real-time media machine.

We become anaesthetised to this, wholly accepting that the news we are given is not in fact of much, or any, value. The Daily Mail have taken it to the extreme by apparently considering news to be factual descriptions of women wearing clothes in a place somewhere on earth. Given the opposite; naked women on the moon would be considered somewhat more surprising, the existence of women wearing clothes is not news. While there is a low muttering of disgust at the vacuousness of it all and the objectification of the women concerned, we are generally accepting of its existence.

As Mark Ashton appeared on Malcolm Boyden's Radio Oxford show on Wednesday, Twitter muttered a genuine appreciation of his performance. In a summer of silence, anything parping out of the top table at Oxford United must feel like a feast to some.

It was a cloying matey interview, Boyden knows Ashton from somewhere although it wasn't clear from where; both come from the same part of the country and appear to be lay West Brom fans, perhaps they boing boing'ed next to each other at the Hawthorns back in the day.

Ashton was allowed to remain deep within his comfort zone; ladling on thick, heavy globs of media-grease throughout the 20 minute grilling simmer. He talked of Oxford being 'something special', and creating 'something special', about the community work being 'a passion'. Boyden echoed him back, almost hypnotised, 'You're really passionate about this aren't you'. 'Yes I am' said Ashton in the tone of a man who had just been asked the challenging question of confirming his own name.

Amidst the matey-ness, he also talked in a faintly sinister collective tense; 'The way we do things...', 'What we do...' it gave the impression of a masked cabal rolling into town to get whatever they want  before everything all falls apart or they get bored or they run out of money. This is something I've yet to resolve in my head; what is the motivation for them buying into the club? It might be success on the pitch, but there are other motivations in buying football clubs, not all of them in the long term interest of club.

Perhaps the 'we' was his family, who are apparently as 'passionately' committed to the club as everyone else. On the face of it Ashton has got himself a new job; but he gave the impression that this was akin to his family converting wholesale to Mormonism. There was a frankly improbably anecdote, set up by Boyden apropos of nothing, of Ashton's son switching allegiance from West Brom to Oxford on FIFA, and how he now looked at Oxford's results above all others (of both of our pre-season friendlies, presumably).

Basically, Ashton didn't say anything at all, certainly nothing that passes the old journalistic test. There was nothing that would allow you to pass any judgement - good or bad. The club needs players, but the right ones, we need firm financial footing, the club needs to own it's ground, it needs to engage with the community. We know all this, Lenagan said it, Kassam said it, Herd said it, Maxwell said it. Some of them delivered some of it, nobody did it all. Effective strategy is not about coming up with a list of ideas, it's about prioritising them and funding their delivery.

Talking of strategy; there are basically two questions that need answering when talking to the Chief Executive of Oxford United in 2014. In the short term; how much money is now available to invest in the team to help it move beyond its current position? The club cannot move forward much beyond its existing position within its existing business model, the only immediate opportunity is the unlocking of extra funds from outside that model.

And secondly, for its long term, how are the club going to own its own ground? Owning the ground is the new business model; whether that be at the Kassam or elsewhere. Without those two issues addressed, the latter in particular, Oxford are set to bob around the upper reaches of League 2 for the foreseeable future regardless of the owners or the level of passion they're prepared to invest in it. Neither question has even come close to being answered in the last two weeks. They've talked about 'the passion' to do all these things, they've not talked about 'the how'.

I don't blame Boyden for soft peddleing; local radio needs football. Senior bean counters at the BBC must be constantly questioning the value of signing cheques to pay for another documentary on the thriving West Oxfordshire jazz scene of the 1950s. Local football is a rare 'killer app' and a protective forcefield that almost justifies the existence of regionalised radio and TV. If you're Radio Oxford, you don't come out fighting against the owners of your local club. If the shop does shut, then the station's access to club news and interviews will dry up and that weakens its viability in the media landscape.

But, the fans listening in soporific stupor would do well not the be drawn into the mythical powers of 'passion' that Ashton is currently using as his magical staff. It is not so much his intentions that concern me; few people come into a club with the deliberately intention of it failing, but it is his competence and priorities which have yet to come to the fore.