Sam Baldock sat on the turf like a broken-down Rolls Royce owned by a faded professional gambler. The pleas of the gambler’s wife to buy one of those nice Qashqais rang in the air, but he couldn’t bear to part with the old thing, it suited his brand. It might have been a source of constant problems, a money-pit worth less than a Kia Sportage, but in its day, it was glorious, even if that was in the unrecoverable past. 

Amy Cranston, in her role as roadside assistance, earnestly tried to locate the problem, professionally, she’d love to get the engine purring like it once did, but she knew she needed him back in the workshop again if she’s going to salvage anything.

Two minutes after Baldock had been returned to the margins, an apparition of hope who wafts into view occasionally, Cameron Brannagan overstretched for the ball, swinging his leg through those of Lamare Bogarde in the box. His eagerness to please clouded his timing and the referee simply confirmed what everyone knew: penalty. Scott Sinclair stepped up, sent Simon Eastwood the wrong way and the sinking ship hit the seabed with a puff of sand and a gentle ‘thunk’.

Of course, there’s further to fall, even a sunken ship decays, consumed by barnacles, eroded by salt, disintegrating into the ocean bed, but this was the point when the only hope that remained was to salvage the wreckage.

Bristol Rovers are a benchmark, this was our twenty-third encounter since returning to the Football League in 2010. As a rule of thumb, when we’re ahead of them, we’re doing OK, fall behind and we’re below par. On Saturday, we’d reached a point of achingly perfect equilibrium; both teams with one point from their previous six games; this was The Shitshow Derby.

If our form was, as in Karl Robinson’s increasingly unconvincing view, some kind of mega-blip, then this was the opportunity to show otherwise. We were basically playing ourselves.

Before the game it was announced that Elliott Moore was standing down as captain, the timing was abject, exposing a fragility in the squad less than an hour before kick-off. If you weren’t concerned before, then why not now? The responsibility for managing fines for not wearing flip flops in the shower had been passed on to Cameron Brannagan and Sam Long. How very normal; joint captains, how does that work? If a player needs bringing into line, but doesn’t like the authority of one captain, then wouldn’t you just go to the other? If they both agree on everything, as the old saying goes, then one of them is redundant. It’s fuzzy thinking. Presumably there are reasons why no club in the universe has two captains, have we now become so devoid of ideas, we’re hoping to create alchemy by rubbing the two together?

Marcus McGuane and Matty Taylor aside, the team looked like the one you imagine Karl Robinson had been fantasising about at the start of the season; Baldock up front unpicking the defence with scientific precision, Browne powering down the middle, Wildschut tearing up the flanks, Moore and Findlay marshalling the back line. We’ll ignore the creaking, feel the quality.

Each player, playing to their potential would have scythed through most of the division, but when they were at their maximum, they would have been beyond us, playing at a higher level. This is a team of fading hope, you could play a party game to guess who’d get injured and destabilise everything again. It’s not just that, it’s the optics; another player walking off injured before half-time feels so fragile.

Who had nineteen minutes, Sam Baldock? Immediately prior to Baldock’s departure, we looked more likely to score, hitting the bar and driving just wide; it’s hard to know now what difference that would have made if one had gone in. But, when Brannagan conceded the penalty, confidence crumbled. Before the game, Marcus Browne stands in silent prayer, Cairon Brown hops as he crosses the white line onto the pitch, they’re both looking for a sign to give them good fortune. If you’re suspicious, then losing Baldock and the penalty were the signs that crush anything remaining of our brittle super-ego.

In a rare moment of lucidity, Sinclair drove down the left, Sam Long playing him onside, and Aaron Collins converted for 2-0. After that we weren’t so much chasing the game, as searching for our lost soul. 

If there was a plan, it wasn’t evident, James Henry was brought on to bring some brains to the operation, which worked a bit, but you can’t un-zombify the living dead quite that easily. My god, his goals may have dried up, but we miss Matty Taylor’s guile, what kind of self-harm was it to let him go?

There were no tactics to speak of, no structure or gameplan to get right or wrong. The ball pinged around, players ran into crowds of blue shirts, losing the ball and trying again with the same result. Karl Robinson, stripped of his exuberance and authority, lacking the sage advice of the calmer heads around him looked on hunched and broken, the abuse tumbling from the stands directed at one person who cannot escape until the referee decides to end it all. It’s brutal, and I wish it didn’t happen.

Nobody was expecting some barnstorming come back by the third goal, it had been a display of park football; no lack of effort, no evidence of quality. 

It’s beyond Karl Robinson now, he can just jab at the machinery in the hope he might find an on-button from somewhere. He knows its stopped working and is now lost in his own purgatory – people rarely quit jobs out of principle, in football or elsewhere, they just suffer until something else comes up. It’s hard to imagine Robinson loving his job, he just hasn’t got anywhere else to go.

We, like him, are stuck, I cannot see a path where Robinson stays, but to replace him now doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. It hasn’t worked before, but his role is the only change available to the board. We need to change mode, we need to change the narrative, we have to move beyond discussions about Robinson’s future – most likely through his removal – and become hard to beat, taking a point rather than three if it’s too much of a risk. Survival mode: ugly and organised. Highly principled ‘proper football’ won’t blast our way out of trouble.

The advertising boards blinked into life as the car park emptied – Derby County next, oh good. Look on a bit further – Cheltenham, then Sheffield Wednesday, Bolton Wanderers and Portsmouth at home. Oh god. By the time we meet Accrington on the last day of the season who knows what state we’ll be in? The date of that game? 6^thMay – the date we were relegated from the Football League. It’s surely time to change.