It’s a favourite old cliché that there are no more easy international games. Oxblogger is old enough to remember when there were easy international games, when you pre-date a cliché’s you know you’re getting on a bit.

It’s also a cliché that there’s hardly any difference between League 2 and the Conference. And so it was proved on Saturday, in fact the only perceptible difference was the colour of the corner flags, which are now red and blue. We can only assume to be to match Nationwide‘s corporate colours, or that they were going cheap at wherever it is that you buy corner flags.

In the end the 2-0 win over Halifax proved to be an almost perfect result. A controlled win with enough signs to suggest that walking it will require more class and application.

The Shaymen were a decent side, sort of middling League 2, I guess. They seem to lack any cutting edge up-front to reward some half-decent approach play. Oxford looked reasonably controlled, they too need a bit more punch up front (though Oxblogger has a theory about that, more of which later) and the passing could have been a little crisper.

Oxblogger is not into match reports; but you can read the Halifax (slightly bitter) view on the game here.