During the summer, the main thoroughfare through our village was suddenly closed due to a broken water main. A construction site was created and diversions put in place. It resulted in one truck blocking a funeral when it got stuck trying to take a tight corner by the church onto a near single-track road. 

The Facebook group lit up, the chaos! The inconvenience! The incompetence! Nobody commented that the burst water main was just one of those mildly inconvenient things that happens periodically. There was a sign which said the work was estimated to finish on a particular date. ‘Don’t hold your breath’ said one person with all the confidence and cynicism that entitled Facebook septuagenarians seem to possess.

One morning, it was all gone, in fact there was no sign that the work had been there at all. It was finished three days earlier than the estimated date, remarkable given the number of dog walkers and retirees that stopped to engage the workmen for twenty minutes to answer their questions about what they were doing and when it would be fixed (ignore the sign, ask the hard working Latvian migrant who patiently answers your question in near-perfect English, then complain that he’s not doing his job because he’s a bloody foreigner). There was no Facebook mea culpa – no apology at the scepticism. It turns out you could have held your breath after all. 

There’s a bloke near us at the football who enjoys a similar misplaced cynicism. If an opponent attacks, he’ll groan ‘Oh, here we go.’ Even if it comes to nothing. Every cross into the box is announced as ‘1-0’, even if it drifts harmlessly out for a goal kick. Apparently ‘we’ll come to regret that.’ if any chance is fluffed. Despite being objectively wrong at least 90% of the time, he retains an admirable confidence in his own clairvoyance. 

As Cameron Brannagan placed the ball on the spot for his first penalty, the pivotal moment of yesterday’s win over Exeter, apropos of a man trying to shoehorn an anecdote into polite conversation he turned round and said; ‘he’ll be gone when he gets that 56 pounder’. It was like me trying to interject into after-dinner chat that former assistant manager Ray Graydon’s wife owned a cattery, and that Jim Hunt thought she had a ‘delightful personality’, which, given this was in the 1980s could mean anything from being pleasant company to having particularly voluminous breasts.

I laughed, which is my go-to defensive position when bowled a conversational googly. ‘I’m serious’ he said ‘he’s been after that fish for years.’

Could that really be true? Cameron Brannagan’s entire Oxford career has been a sham, a ruse to land a giant carp? I mean, he does like fish. What if, while standing over the ball, he’s not thinking ‘that keepers mauve shorts don’t go with his pink shirt’, or ‘I should probably stick this in the old onion bag’ but in fact he’s consumed with thoughts of over-sized cyprinids. 

Then, of course, he rolls the ball home and the bloke in front begins to form his latest blundering opinion. ‘About time, it should have been 7-0 by now’ he said. It seems that Brannagan’s obsession with the 56-pounder can wait for another time.

Back in the 1980s we had a great team, but as charming as it was, the dilapidated Manor was not a fitting home for it. During the 2000s we had a new, albeit unfinished, stadium, but no team. During the 2010s we had a team again but said stadium had fallen into disrepair. Back in January we got the green light from the council to finally enter negotiations to buy a site for our new proposed stadium. That evening we were beaten by Wycombe and then didn’t win another game for sixty-one days. We are not a club that is used to having it all.

When the council announced its intention on Tuesday to lease us the new site, I approached the Exeter game with caution. The good news couldn’t keep coming, could it? They were second, but I think we naturally under-estimate them, viewing them as a small club and writing their success off as being down to a brand of neanderthal football that we could simply pick apart.

In fact, and this is something that is seldom mentioned, we have become a team and a club that plays what’s in front of us. Rather than declaring, like a spoilt child, that it’s our right to have a nice stadium, we’re listening to the concerns about green belts, badgers, wildflowers and improbable nuclear accidents and addressing them. Likewise, we treated Exeter like a team in second place, not an over-inflated Conference side. 

When that mindset is established, the execution becomes more straight forward, the opening goal seemed so simple, Brannagan’s penalties were drama free, when Josh Murphy came on, he didn’t skulk around waiting for the game to realign to his taste, he got stuck in, his role was to help us see the game out, a necessary and unglamorous thing, but one he applied himself to. Oh, god, we’re talking about behaviours again, aren’t we?

It’s still early in the season, but it’s hard to see where the drama, arrogance or complacency that might derail us will come from. Even if this does become a season for the ages, it’s difficult to imagine it being one full of classic scrapes and legendary comebacks. Likewise, the stadium; we’re not throwing our weight around like both Robert Maxwell and Firoz Kassam did, we’re approaching it like grown-ups (which is interesting, because its opponents have become more child-like). Maybe the crisis will come on or off the field and we’ll spin out of control, or perhaps we might actually become a club who can have it all. And then, who knows? Cameron Brannagan might even land his 56 pound carp.