Back in the 1980s football was in the grip of a seemingly unending torrent of hooliganism. We remember The Manor as a homely, welcoming place, but in truth we were regularly dragged in front of the FA disciplinary committee to explain a riot, pitch invasion or why an object, usually a coin, had hit the opposition goalkeeper.

As a club, we were never punished for the trouble, hearings would commend club secretary Jim Hunt for having done everything he could. Blame sat wholly with the mob. 

Hunt himself would often lead the condemnation of the ‘thugs’, they were not welcome, we were a family club and they (who didn’t have families, obviously) were ‘other’, but he also argued that football, and its troubles, didn’t fuel society as many believed, it simply reflected it.

The government response to the problem was to lay blame with the fans. These were people who were, they assumed, happy and content, but chose to cause trouble. They legislated to ‘improve ground safety’ by insisting that fans were penned in with high fences and barbed wire – a policy which directly contributed to Hillsborough disaster – they wanted fans to carry identity cards and to be banned from travelling to away games. It was a process, deliberate or otherwise, of dehumanising people and, unsurprisingly, there was a reaction.

Nobody ever questioned why it happened; Margaret Thatcher didn’t believe that there was such a thing as a ‘society’; odd given that her ascent to become prime minister was based on a system which political parties compete to convince people their societal values are best for the country. If you believe that the world functions purely on free will, why would you question what might be causing that free will to be manifested in violence?

The reality was that conflict was everywhere – the miners’ strike, the print union strike, the Falklands War, the Brixton and Toxteth riots. People were upset, and rightly so, more than three million were unemployed. Some were benefitting from owning their own homes and buying shares in de-nationalised companies, but many weren’t.

The trouble at football grounds reflected the disaffection; beyond the fencing, there was no investment in stadiums or the football experience because football fans were pariahs, thugs, animals. Football, all of football, was the ‘English disease’. We, even people like you and I, were the virus. 

The world feels a bit like that once again; conflict is back in fashion – Ukraine and Russia, China and Taiwan, Brexit, Trump, striking workers, climate change. Collaboration and co-ordination is too difficult, boring, slow moving, sometimes you have to compromise, urgh! No thanks. It’s like someone has unscrewed a pipe that was working fine, but making a funny noise and now waste water is gushing all over the floor, it’s hard to keep your composure trying to screw it all back together again with effluence shooting up your nose.

While we’ve invented plenty of other people to blame than football fans – foreigners, remainers, trans people – football can’t be completely immune from the changes in society that we’re seeing.

Yesterday’s win over Burton, our third in a week, was universally viewed as ugly and ragged, but necessary. It’s hardly a surprise, at the start of the season nobody would have predicted that we’d start a league game with John Mousinho and Gatlin O’Donkor and end with James Golding, Tyler Goodrham and Slavi Spasov.

But, I couldn’t see why there was a chorus of boos at the end of the first half because the referee had indicated a minute of added time. Yes, Burton’s Tom Hamer’s theatrical and ineffective long throws seemed to take an age, but did anyone need more than a minute more of the dross that had been served up in the first half? Jerome Sale was apoplectic afterwards, effectively saying the referee was robbing fans of football they’d paid to watch. But that’s like buying a meal deal of sandwich, drink and a mouldy turnip, and then being angry that the turnip is mouldy.

The second half was better, mostly because there were goals to entertain us with. Cameron Brannagan continues his one-man mission of dragging us through the fug before Kyle Joseph found himself with acres of time and space to face down the keeper.

It took so long to reach the box; I started having flashbacks of Rob Duffy against Exeter in 2007. I doubt that was going through Joseph’s head, but in that split second, I was consumed by the doubt and ennui that caused Duffy to pass the ball back to the keeper when he should have blasted it into the net and sent us to Wembley. I transposed that onto Joseph; he didn’t look confident, he didn’t look composed, I convinced myself he was about to Duffy the ball straight to the keeper.

He didn’t, of course because Joseph was six years old in 2007 and doesn’t know who Rob Duffy is, his was a competent and assured finish that all but sealed the win. The doubt, it turns out, was all mine.

Perhaps this is something we need to get used to. We live in uncertain, worrying times, it’s easy to become distracted and anxious and to bring those feelings into games. Players too will have similar worries; they have bills to pay, they won’t come to games with the assuredness we expect of them. Our societal experience becomes the lens through which we watch and play games. We’re not tight and fluid because life isn’t tight and fluid, it’s disjointed and uncertain. So I suppose the answer is, a bit like when faced with an injury crisis, rather than complain about our transfer activities and lack of funding, the lack of class and slickness, we just have to gather what we’ve got and give it our best shot.