Many years ago, I went to a corporate party at the Ministry of Sound when it was considered the coolest club in the world. Me and my friends were, if not big clubbers, at least club-curious. We were quite excited to see what all the fuss was about.

This being a midweek corporate party rather than a proper club night, things were fairly tame but drinks were free and the company tolerable. 

We stationed ourselves just above where the DJ was playing an endlessly smooth blend of house music. It was hard to tell what he was doing to affect the music; he’d periodically change the vinyl, but it rarely seemed to align with obvious changes in the music.

At one point I looked down as he reached for one of the up faders, he pushed it forward and a trumpet motif from the track he’d just cued up fitted perfectly into the mix before he flicked the fader down and it disappeared. He’d bring in little fragments of the track until it was fully in the mix. Most people wouldn’t have heard the motif coming, it just seemed to appear from nowhere.

Amidst the pre-season hyperbole, like the DJ bringing in that subtle motif, Liam Manning has briefly brought into the mix some caution about the system he’s working to. There would be mistakes, he said, and we’d concede goals. He didn’t want to scare anyone, but he seems to know the system is flawed, it’s almost deliberately built in. We need to trust the process and, if we allow its development, the benefits will be significant. The problem is that his warnings were so subtle and deep in the mix, it’s been hard to spot, and we’ve rushed to predict that we’d routinely slay all that come before us.

Of course, even with a heavy defeat to Bristol City there are a tonne of caveats, who knows how strong either teams’ line ups were? We were away from home against a team in the division above. In the past few years, we’ve been their prey – they’ve signed four players in recent years who are amongst the best that have played for us in recent times. 

The divide between the two clubs is not insignificant, we might expect to sell our best player for £2 million if we’re lucky, they’re worrying about a fee ten times that for theirs. But they’re also one of those clubs sitting in the mythical space at the edge of the top 30. If we have aspirations to reach that level, you might hope we’d tickle the sides of being competitive.

We weren’t. If Saturday was a wake-up call, then this was a humbling, they simply swept us aside, all Liam Manning’s subtle warnings were writ large. He seemed to know this might happen, perhaps he could have been a little less coach-ey – sticking to principles even at the expense of the result – and a bit more manager-ey – making compromises to secure some kind of result – some substance over style – but he might also reason that the short-term gain of a Championship scalp wasn’t worth it in the longer term.

If we were to reach the play-offs, as many predicted, that would be a thirteen place improvement to our league position last season, which has probably always been a stretch. Two away games, including one against a Championship side is hardly a balanced evidence base, but some humility and focus won’t go amiss now.