I don’t gamble, I would worry about the risk of addiction and the loss of large quantities of cash. I also have no confidence in my foresight. Apart from the biggest cup games, I don’t go into any game thinking we’ll win but can rarely envisage us losing either. Like the amnesia of childbirth which tricks you into having a second baby despite the traumas of the first, my brain somehow won’t process a win or a defeat like it’s a viable possible outcome in the future. In fact, I tend to approach games in neutral gear, where I can’t really picture any result. 

Apart from yesterday; I’d already written the game off as a loss, after our Boxing Day annihilation and our poor home form, I couldn’t see us scoring and could definitely see us conceding. That, in my book, is a nailed-on defeat.

Plus, all the talk around the club was about Tuesday’s council meeting. The club, Oxvox and others have timed their campaign well, it’s hard not to be compelled by the messaging that’s been produced. A far cry from the days of Maxwell and Kassam who both tried to bully their way to a new stadium, we’re trying to win hearts and minds. 

And, then there was the weather, there were question marks about whether the game would go ahead and, even if it did, people were questioning whether they really wanted to spent an afternoon in sub-zero temperatures given the likely outcome.

I was completely unprepared for the cold, making no additional preparations to keep myself warm, perhaps I was half-expecting or wanting the game to be postponed, part of my brain was on the settee at home. 

We’ve had foggy games before, where the cinema disappears and the game is viewed through a light, white filter. But I can’t remember watching rows of the opposite stand disappear. By kick-off we sitting in the South Stand, the last 10 rows of the North Stand was clouded in a thick mist, there were already questions about whether the game would be completed.

The lack of a proper striker seemed to suggest Karl Robinson was accepting his fate. It was a damage limitation exercise. But, as far as it was possible to tell, we started well and put them under a bit of pressure without really threatening to score. Something that has come so naturally in recent years, now seems to be incredibly conscious and difficult.

One problem we seem to have this season is that we have a bunch of players who are really good at one thing at the complete expense of other skills. Djavan Anderson has brilliant pace and close control, but can’t cross or pass. Yanic Wildschut is a powerful winger with the ability to beat players, but won’t unleash a shot.

So, when he burst down the left side towards the box, the expectant murmuring wasn’t so much would he score, more ‘I wonder how close he’ll get before being tackled’? But, on he went, past one, then another, he seemed to be blocked, but to his and everyone’s surprise, found himself on the edge of the six-yard box with the ball at his feet. 

Afterwards he said he’d been telling himself to just toe-poke it, so he did. For a split-second the ball disappeared into a group of players before reappearing in the back of the net. 1-0 up against one of the best side’s in the division? We’re not in Kansas anymore.

By this point, the fog was becoming a pre-occupation, the ball was switched to something more luminous, everyone seemed more interested in coming up with fog-based jokes – our rousing chorus of ‘we can’t see you sneaking out’ was definitely better than Ipswich’s attempt – ‘we’re Ipswich Town, we play in the fog’.

And indeed, within minutes of taking the lead, they did play very well in the fog, slicing right through us for the equaliser. There was a noise, but no movement, the North Stand had disappeared from view. 

At that point, it looked like there’d be one winner, and it wasn’t us. In normal circumstances they might have taken control, but there this quickly became a game with three sides – Oxford, Ipswich and the weather.

It was punctuated with pauses as the referee consulted with the captains, managers and his linesmen about whether the game should continue. Whichever end you were in, the far side became a complete mystery. ‘It’s like Spot The Ball.’ Shouted someone before going into minute detail about what Spot The Ball was to the millennials around us.

There was a goalmouth scramble which was watched in almost complete silence, you could vaguely see a lot of players doing something in our six-yard box, only from their movement could you deduce where the ball might be. It does take away a lot of the anxiety when you’re brain is frantically trying to fill in the gaps of information you need to understand what’s going on.

Of course, objectively, the game should have been abandoned, but we’d got this far, did we really want to do it all again? No, we’d press on, I think I’d assumed everyone would settle for a draw in the circumstances. Then Taylor and O’Donkor combined on the right to cross, the ball was cleared into midfield and Brannagan drove home in spectacular fashion.

Probably. I didn’t really see the goal as much as sense its aura. Nobody around us to tell who’d scored, but the assumption that it must be Brannagan was based on the theory that Bate couldn’t kick it that far. It seemed odd to be cheering a concept.

The dynamics were now different, the crowd had seemed content with the point, now it was hard to reconfigure towards the idea we might win. The ball and players kept disappearing, the light from the advertising boards made the game look like some kind of performance art as shadows kept popping up depending on whether the boards were promoting carp fishing or ear wax removal.

As we stroked our beards in contemplation of what it was we were watching, the referee finally brought the game to an end. It wasn’t so much a celebration, as the gasping thankful shock of a plot twist. Was this what death feels like? The slow removal of the real in place of the ethereal? Maybe it’s a metaphor, the evaporation of an unloved home to be replaced by our utopian future. Perhaps we’ll never know what this game really meant, but maybe Tuesday’s council meeting might give us some clues.