I hadn’t even noticed that we were playing Shrewsbury on Wednesday until the day of the game. I mean, it’s a Wednesday and we don’t play on a Wednesday. I’ve no idea why we did, but I’m sure there’s someone on Twitter being outraged about it.

The team was announced, someone said something about full backs, someone said something about Matty Taylor and I dutifully logged on because that’s what I do.

And then we scored and played OK and then we conceded and then it was over and then Chey Dunkley clapped our fans and I felt nostalgic for a happier time. Another point, another step towards something resembling safety. 

I was struck by something Jerome Sale said in his commentary. He was complaining about the effect the Wednesday kick-off had on the crowd, and the likely effect on, and wranglings about, the Woking game next week. Sale and Nathan Cooper lamented that it’s only likely to get worse when the World Cup starts in a couple of weeks. ‘Football’s got itself in a bit of a muddle’, he said with all the rancour the BBC’s editorial balance agenda would allow. You could hear Cooper murmuring his agreement as though he was sipping on a pint of stout in the snug of his local pub.

And that may have hit the nail on the head. Football can act as a balm in a messy world, but in many ways that world has become so messy that even football can’t help. It also seems to be going through its own personal crisis. It’s been reaching this nadir for years; in the past supporters complained about a small number of teams dominating the game, for the last decade, the game seems to be dominated by two players; Messi and Ronaldo and now, as their powers begin to fade, they have been replaced by one player in Erling Haarland. Football has found the ultimately singularity, its entire universe squeezed into one person. It’s like all that makes football what it is has been whittled away until you get to this point. Where do you go from there?

We’re about to witness a winter World Cup that nobody wants, the product of corruption, in a country which is intolerant and detached. It’s hard to imagine a World Cup being worse.

Perhaps football has reached an endpoint in one of its eternal cycles. There’s a documentary at the moment about Italia 90, two episodes are dedicated to the run up, which documents football’s collapse – Bradford, Heysel, Hillsborough, hooliganism. From there, things started to take an upswing. Perhaps we’re seeing the ending of a similar era.

During the chaotic premiership of Liz Truss, somebody commented that the Tories needed to spend some time in opposition. Not simply because of a preference for the alternatives but just because they need some time out to figure out what they stood for. They needed a break from all the governing, perhaps football needs a bit of a break from all this footballing. 

We need to find new impetus, a new chapter as a game and as a club. Perhaps the issue we have now isn’t about the manager or the full backs, its bigger than that, it’s about the game and the world it operates in.

We’ve just got to get through the next month and get the World Cup behind us, then perhaps we’ll start to see chink of light, because at the moment, it’s just many shades of grey.