Towards the end of last season, there was an outbreak of a very specific brand of Englishism in football. Sean Dyche went to Everton, Roy Hodgson re-joined Crystal Palace, Neil Warnock returned to Huddersfield, and Sam Allardyce was airdropped in to save Leeds’ season. These were pragmatic football people, proper managers not afraid to give players a kick up the backside and get the ball in the mixer. Not like the multi-lingual, roll-necked sophisticates who ruin the English game with their passing and healthy diets. Their re-emergence was celebrated as a return to common sense by the likes of Richard Keys and Andy Gray who have previously been victims of the woke mob just because they happen to be legendary banter-lords.

Curiously, Karl Robinson, a man who has spent the last few years talking progressively about developing the whole player and, more recently, pleading for his job by espousing his team’s excellent xG, managed to get himself wrapped up in it all becoming Big Sam’s assistant at Leeds. If this was GBNews, Karl Robinson was Laurence Fox, opportunistically jumping on a bandwagon only to find it was heading for the dumper.

Steve Evans is from the same school, he might even be from an era before the likes of Dyche, Allardyce and Hodgson who are smarter than their reputations allow. There will be a time when people will look back on Evans’ career with bewildered admiration. People will question how someone like him could have been in the game for so long, how he got away with it.

I don’t know if I admire or loath him. He’s sustained a privileged career despite an odious nature and criminal conviction, you have to be impressed by his ability to survive, even if you don’t like how he does it. His girth is a pretty good indication that he’s not one for thinking about the long-term; he’s a realist, and he consistently improves teams. In that sense he’s right to stick to his methods even when The Science has moved on. 

The big fear about the outbreak of old-school Englishism and the ongoing existence of Evans, like the relative success of GBNews, is that they might actually be right. Perhaps the modern way of over-thinking, over-principled things is ruining our lives and we just have to preserve the status quo regardless of the consequences.

Look at the xG table for last season in League 1, Shrewsbury were ten places worse off than their actual position, Port Vale eight places higher, Plymouth weren’t in the promotion places but we were the kings of misleading invented data points finishing seventh in the xG table twelve places better than we finished in the real world. At best you can say that as a measure it is highly suspect, at worst it’s complete horseshit. Perhaps the people who focus on getting balls in the box and scoring real goals have got a point.

Given our predicament last year, there were calls to draft in a pragmatist to shake things up and get the short term results we needed to stay up. Instead, we got Liam Manning, whose CV includes time at something called the City Football Group the Abu Dhabi based holding company of Manchester City and a portfolio of other clubs from around the world. It’s not exactly the same as starting your career as assistant coach at Halesowen Town and working your way up, is it?

The fear, of course, is that what Manning has acquired from his experience is the ability to look good in sportswear and a grasp of PowerPoint animations. What would happen when his four-dimensional chess brain met Evans the neanderthal lower league hunter gatherer? It’s like a quantum physicist being interviewed by Richard Madeley and Madeley winning the argument about the Copenhagen Interpretation and wave-particle duality by mocking the scientists trousers. 

At some point this season, I want to go and see Oxford City in the National League. It still blows my mind that they’re in the same division as the one we struggled in 13 years ago. I remember when we were promoted feeling that the relative sophistication of League 2 was a notable step up and, League 1 even more so as we faced teams who’d been in the Premier League relatively recently. For a while we scrambled to find our feet, but gradually it felt more comfortable. So far, while we’ve scraped into the play-offs a couple of times we haven’t reached a point where it feels like we’re outgrowing League 1.

The Stevenage game offered a different insight into where we’re at; this season we’ve proved that we’re more competitive, but this win is the strongest indication yet that we’re beginning to ease away from the ‘lower leagues’. We’re not scraping points away from home or being strong armed out of games by teams whose ambitions are to survive by any means necessary. The investment in a more enlightened way of thinking is paying off.

Evans’ post-match interview complained about his players not being ‘real men’, a few isolated unfortunate moments on which the game turned (I say a few, the list was so long it amounted to about 40% of the game) and that our success was simply down to vast sums of money invested in the squad. In other words, his problems are nuanced whereas our solutions are a blunt instrument, which is quite the pivot. It’s true, our budget is likely to be significantly bigger than Stevenage’s and that we have far fewer excuses should we fail. Having that budget and applying it effectively are two different things. 

In the past, I’ve looked at fixtures looking for when the sticky patch will come, for the first time in many years, I can’t see when that is. In the past I’ve looked at the squad and looked for areas where an injury or suspension might leave us vulnerable, and I can’t find it. It’s not arrogant to say that promotion and the title are very much on.