It may have taken 18 years for an Oxford manager to be recognised as Manager of the Month, but when Liam Manning finally picked up the trophy in August it didn’t take long for someone to start waving the joss sticks around and start talking about the award being haunted by some kind of super natural a curse.

Is there a curse? Or is it that over a month – a relatively short period – you’ve got to be nearly perfect to be the best in the division. Once you’ve reached perfection, there is only two directions you can go, continued perfection – which becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on – or down. Managers of the month are not being hit by a curse, but by an inevitability called regression towards the mean – a return to a normal state. The question is not so much whether you fall, but more by how much.

One of the abiding images of last week was Tory candidate for Tamworth Andrew Cooper stropping off the stage during Sarah Edwards’ by-election victory speech. His eyes dart around the room as he struggles to confront his limitations and process his humiliation. Eventually, his body takes over and he exits the stage. 

Cooper had been filmed with an unnamed woman before the election walking through the streets boasting about being the next Tamworth MP. It was, it seemed, his right, an inevitability.  

The world has given a lot of capital to people like this in recent years. A general disinterest in local politics allows people to swing into positions of relative power with little more than their own hubris. It’s true on all sides of the political divide. Relatively talentless people appear to make great gains through the status of being an election official. But, if they believe that this is because of some innate ability, when they do regress towards their mean, their fall is spectacular and shocking – not least to themselves.

It’s particularly prevalent in the Tory party right now; weird given they stand for a ‘conservative’ party – one which you’d think might advocate a degree of stability. But you see it everywhere, like the kid at school who bought themselves an old BMW 3 Series while you were knocking about in a Renault Clio. They put themselves on a short term trajectory that can’t be sustained.

Karl Robinson was an advocate; during his tenure we managed to break a host of records both good and bad. For all the good times, and there were many, when the wheels fell off it was spectacular. I remember once during a bad spell towards the end of the 2021/22 season when we fell away from the play-offs, he said that tiredness happens first in the mind, then in the body. He’d over-egged the season and was paying the price, now the fall was underway, he was trying any kind of witchcraft hocus hocus to buck the downward trend. Eventually Robinson just couldn’t beat the maths.

Things have changed markedly; under Liam Manning we seem to have an eye on the long-term. I suppose, given our stadium plans, the culture around the club is evolving that way. The idea is that while others will have their moments, when their world crashes, we’ll still be steadily moving forward.

At least that’s the aim, what we might lack is someone to break the pattern when things aren’t going quite as well as they have been. People are still excited by inspiration particularly in tough times, which explains why some gave so much credence to people like Boris Johnson.

Blackpool are a team well versed in the ways of League One, they’re less likely to panic under pressure. As they did in the second half, they have the ability to keep applying pressure until something breaks.

When a system comes under pressure, it’s helpful to have a wildcard player with the ability to break the pattern and do something significantly different is very helpful. Modern managers are less excited by this because they’re schooled in the mantra of ‘trusting the system’. These players don’t use the system, Danny Hylton – not a Michael Appleton signing – is the obvious example from 2015/16. When things were sticky, there was always a chance he’d conjure up something.

Tyler Goodrham and Stan Mills both have the potential, but do they have the maturity? Greg Leigh is playing that role at the moment, but surely given the rest of his career history, we’re not expecting him to sustain his current goalscoring form. It seems unlikely that we’ll try to find someone with a counter-cultural feel, for all the Danny Hyltons of the world, there are plenty of Gino van Kessels and Djavan Andersens.

It’s not absolutely essential, League One promotion is attritional; the best sides we’ve seen in the division have a relentlessness about them – Rotherham in 2020, Blackpool in 2021, Plymouth last year. They don’t have big peaks and troughs; they keep going like a traction engine.

Before Blackpool, we’d won five league games in a row, nine in ten. That’s near enough perfection. As frustrating as a last-minute equaliser always is, in the wider scheme of things there has to be a lull, the key is to not let it become a crash.