I’m on holiday; a fact I directly attribute to Michael Appleton’s first season at Oxford. The whole thing was such a dreadful sludge, I decided two things; unless things improved, 2015/16 would be my last as a season ticket holder and, secondly, that I would stop organising the rest of my life around the fixture list.

The promotion season saved me from giving up my season ticket, but it was liberating to give myself permission to not to have quite so much of my time dictated by football. Most football is rubbish, most games are forgettable, we attend in part in the hope of seeing extraordinary things. This means, by definition, most things are ordinary. There’s little to lose when you sacrifice the odd game, you have to be particularly unlucky to miss something extraordinary. Caring a little less has its advantages.

With the exception of, perhaps, the League Cup games against Manchester City, I never go into a game thinking we’ll lose, even when we’ve been at our very worst, something convinces me to believe. But some games offer more optimism than others. Peterborough was never going to be easy; they’re a very good side, a win was never going to be the most likely outcome, a point would have been acceptable, a defeat, not exactly a shock. I didn’t feel I’d miss a lot.

However, in the context of our current situation, any loss was going to heap more pressure on Karl Robinson. Grant Ferguson’s programme notes before the game raised a few questions, when mentioned a ‘vote of confidence’. He can’t win really – if he gave a vote of no confidence, he’d have to sack Robinson, if he gave him a vote of confidence, speculation would be rife of what that would really meant. If he said nothing at all, then the vacuum would be with whatever predominant narrative was.

He did, and I think this is a mistake, reiterate how much everyone cares about the club’s situation. This has become a trope to mock Karl Robinson with. It’s something he brings up time and again, which is weird, because I’ve never seen any suggestion that commitment is a problem. More caring is not a solution.

So, what is the problem? Perhaps it’s the endless quest for the perfect full-back; ones we can’t quite afford forcing us to seek out loans and curiosity signings like Chris Cadden and Djavan Anderson. Maybe it’s that you can’t sell a ball playing centre-back from the heart of defence every season for three seasons and not expect to, eventually, run out of suitable replacements.

For a while, it’s felt like we’re a club that competes on the edge of the play-offs and who need a bit of luck or an injection of cash to go further. For two seasons we got that bit of luck, last season was perhaps a bit of an adjustment back to something more normal.

The thing is, we’ve been spoilt by those play-off campaigns. Achieving the play-offs has been materially more normal than missing out, even if, in reality, we were reliant on a last-minute goal and a pandemic, and then a strong run in and the collapse of Portsmouth to make the two post-seasons. 

As a result, last year felt like a backwards step and attracted the first rumblings of criticism, particularly around our comparatively poor defensive record. This year we feel like a more robust unit, but we’ve sacrificed our attacking flair.

Maybe it’s that Karl Robinson simply cares too much. That he’s been lured into listening to the fans’ frustrations about last season and our inability to defend. He’s responded by disposing of our attacking threat, perhaps he’s been a little over-relying on players the local hero Taylor and ‘the GOAT’ Henry to drag us through despite both being on the wrong side of thirty.

I’m not suggesting Robinson should ignore what others are saying, and I’m not criticising the fans for saying it; but perhaps we were always a bit more of a top-ten club than a top-six one. And that tinkering with what made us that has now left us wanting.

It was pointed out that at exactly this point in the lockdown season, we lost 2-1 to Swindon fell to 19^th in the table and still made the play-offs. That required us to do some extraordinary things including a sequence of eleven wins in twelve and an end-of-season run of six wins in seven. Plus we were all locked at home; our frustrations didn’t seep into ever pore like they do now.

A similar turnaround seems, frankly, unlikely, but improvements are possible. In the middle of November, there are some very winnable games against Forest Green, Port Vale and Accrington coming up, and that could give us a foothold. But, with Portsmouth and Bolton both away this week, Karl Robinson’s got to get there first.