There was a time, back at The Manor, when a player would need to turn in a truly outstanding performance to receive a standing ovation. The Beech Road would ripple with people rising to their feet in appreciation. It was a rare and beautiful thing, the truest mark of a quality performance.

It wasn’t easy to get The Beech Road to rise, it contained the most reserved, wizened and cynical fans, the plaudits were always hard won, and most of the rest of the stadium were already standing, so their views weren’t so easily expressed. It was the toughest audience to please.

Nowadays, pretty much every substitution is greeted with a Pavlovian ovation almost regardless of the performance of the players leaving the field. A standing ovation no longer means that a performance has been outstanding, it merely shows the player was on the pitch.

It’s easy for fans to become locked into patterns of behaviour, in the early 2000s, the half-time whistle was almost always greeted with a chorus of boos regardless of how a game was going. If we were losing, then the boos would resonate loud and clear, on rare occasions we were winning or drawing, we still seemed to boo, perhaps in anticipation of a poor second half.

These patterns become corrosive and can be very difficult to get out of. We booed because that’s what we did at half-time, then we justified it because we have the right to voice our opinion. Then we booed just to show that we could. As a result we lost our ability to show encouragement and appreciation, it took years to turn it around on and off the pitch. 

The French call it the ‘Dance Macabre’, the dance of death, a kind of unavoidable and destructive performance, a prelude to your inevitable demise.

You could argue that Karl Robinson has been performing his own dance macabre in recent weeks. We’ve heard it all before, every excuse and explanation, and we never seem to learn. We just now have to listen to him roll out the old favourites about players caring and injuries being bad luck until everyone becomes sick of it and the cycle ends with him leaving.

Some fans are locked into their own performance in this regard; Robinson talks, we mock, he talks some more, we mock some more. Nothing will change their view, there’s no way back. We begin to assume that whatever he says should be mocked; nothing he says will ever be good enough.

There’s no doubt that Robinson is in a difficult position, but it’s not always helpful to get into this kind of downward spiral. Nobody wants to be proved to be wrong, so taking a hard line on anything strips you of your ability to compromise, to turn the downward spiral into an upward one. We end up with a dance of death where fans talk Robinson and the team into failing. 

The performance against Portsmouth was certainly encouraging, it didn’t fit the established narrative. Pompey are a benchmark club for us; we can judge our progress against theirs. Compared to them, we’re underperforming, but they’re a good side and Fratton Park is a hard place to get a result from so a point is more than we might have reasonably expected.

It’s easy to pick apart the way the point was gained; yes, we ‘threw away’ a lead, Billy Bodin’s sending off was a moment of ill-discipline and Karl Robinson’s booking was hardly the model of composure. But, these were all consequences of a team under pressure that dug in and battled to get something from the game.     

It worked, it didn’t play into the Robinson-out narrative, it showed there’s fight in the old dog and that’s a good thing. Perhaps it’s a mere blip in a downward spiral, maybe it’s the start of a revival. Without doubt, it was objectively a good point, let’s agree on that.

It gave us was the model we need to do to tack away from the problems we face. It showed that we can perform, we can get something when under pressure. It showed we’re not a bad team. It showed even when everything seems to be going against us, we shouldn’t give up and that there’s something worthwhile to build on. Above all, it showed our downward spiral doesn’t have to be inevitable.