Many years ago, I worked with a bloke called Dave. Dave was very intelligent, I know this because when I asked what kind of music he liked, he said ‘Intelligent Techno’. If you don’t know what that is, it’s like regular techno with less high-vis utility workwear and more control over your eyeballs.

Dave explored the insides of his consciousness with drugs, challenged the outer reaches of his education, ending up with a degree from Cambridge, and stretched the limits of technology and modern commerce by working for Google when it was still two men in a lock-up with a pile of Encyclopaedia Britannica answering people’s questions over the phone (note to self: I think this is how Google started, check before posting).

Dave also liked Progressive House, which is like regular house music that has progressed a bit. And what that meant was layered melodic electronic music which sacrificed immediacy of songs, lyrics or even hooks for flowing tonal depth and texture. And I didn’t even use ChatGPT to write that.

A superstar of the Progressive House scene was the DJ Sasha, in 1997 he played at the dance festival Tribal Gathering, it promised to be an epic nine-hour set so myself, Dave and a few friends went along.

Being thicker than Dave, my music tastes are a bit more immediate. So Dave set himself up in Sasha’s tent as the set started and I went looking for something more route one; big samples, breakbeats, bowel shifting bass, chips, that kind of thing.

Over the next few hours I’d pop back into Sasha’s set, on one occasion during a particularly big breakdown, I found Dave asleep at the side of the tent. On others he’d be dancing wildly and occasionally he’d be found swaying in euphoric rapture.

Sasha, however, seemed to me to be playing the same record continuously, one blended into another, I could see him removing vinyl from the turntable without any discernible change of melody. 

The most impressive thing was the degree of control, he didn’t overreact if the crowd thinned or went quiet. He wasn’t about to slam on Come On Eileen by Dexy’s Midnight Runners to fill the dancefloor. We were on a journey to another place, it would take time and patience.

It was simultaneously impressive and at times a bit dull, but there was little doubt that those who stuck with it got their rewards. There would be moments which would create a peak, the journey in between those moments could be intriguing, sometimes it seemed like it was going somewhere and then didn’t. The more intriguing it got, the more you trusted it, the more you were drawn in. Dave had the intelligence to understand that his investment in the whole set would pay dividends.

Real success takes time, and being clever enough to understand that is at the heart of intelligence. Take Cheltenham Town, last night was their eleventh consecutive game without a goal. They currently crave that briefest moment of glory when the ball goes in the net; it’s everything for them right now. None the less, it will be a fleeting moment, it will make no difference to their longer term predicament. Goals need to become points, points need to accumulate enough to avoid relegation, and that’s just to survive, their super-short-term goal of scoring is immaterial.

For us, a season usually involves some batches of good form, some batches of poor form and a few choice moments – away victories, last minute winners, maybe even some cup wins. If we can string that form together for about half-a-season, we have a chance of the play-offs but to secure automatic promotion or the title, the short bursts aren’t enough, we have to sustain our form and performance for an entire season. Like Sasha’s set, it’s a journey that needs to be paced across the entire duration.

For all the romantic farrago over ‘Tuesday under the floodlights’, midweek games are usually dry affairs, going in anticipation of a thrill ride is a mistake. There was little prospect that Shrewsbury Town would be anything more than just another game that most of us would forget. It’s difficult one to square off, but what it became one of the most anonymous thrashings you’ll ever see and was all the more satisfying because of it.

To create the form that wins the league, we need to fill the peak moments with productive lulls, which is what Shrewsbury felt like. We can’t afford to throw away points just because Tuesday’s are a bit flat and boring and we’re all a bit tired. 

Last night we showed total and absolute control, enough forward drive to win comfortably, enough constraint not to blow ourselves out. We were in control of the ninety minutes and how that contributed to our broader ambitions. When Ruben Rodgriguez was replaced by Josh McEachran over more attacking options, it didn’t just feel like we were saving Rodriguez and Murphy for Saturday, but that we were banking the three points for May. It would have been tempting to lose our discipline, chuck on a couple of attacking players in to lighten up an evening which was drifting, 

It’s a version of football which is largely alien to us, performances which have a clarity to focus on the bigger picture and the whole journey. Satisfaction comes from executing a plan, not relief that we’ve scraped home unscathed. We’re so used to a world in which scoring a goal or winning a game comes as a complete surprise, being satisfied at how comfortable it was is an emotion we need to get used to.