Apparently the naming of storms aims to raise awareness of their impact to encourage people to think about their response. If you simply refer to something as ‘a storm’, it seems few people take much notice and any reminder that it’s another example of the impact of climate change is liable to drift into a culture war cul-de-sac. The solution is to anthropomorphise the weather for people who appear to be able to function in the twenty-first century.

But the name is important. Jocelyn (the latest in the sequence) is the name of your mum’s friend. The one you’ve never met and when you ask who she is, your mum says ‘Oh, you know…’ as if that helps. The one your mum tells benign stories about like ‘she used to babysit for you when you were a baby’ or ‘you used to play in her sandpit’. Jocelyn is the person who sends you a Christmas card with £5 in every year, even though you’re in your thirties and you classify cash as litter more than money.

Jocelyn is not her predecessor Isha – Monday’s storm – Isha is a wild shaman-like character you once met during your gap year in South America. Isha fed you a hallucinogenic serum extracted from a tree frog which sent you into a hypnotic frenzy which could have lasted three minutes or six weeks. All you have are shards of memories; the wailing, the sweaty gyrating bodies, the grotesque masks, the flames of a campfire licking the acrid humid air. Isha changed you that night in ways you’ve yet to discover.

After the frenzy of Storm Isha, it was easy to under-estimate Storm Jocelyn. Where Isha’s wild fantastical maelstrom grabs the headlines, Jocelyn’s jumper with a rainbow on and chat about Claudia Winkelman’s fringe is not to be taken lightly. 

From the shelter of the stands, her presence was only really evidenced by the light raindrops swirling in the bright floodlights like ethereal murmurating starlings. The stark halogen bulbs bleach out the imperfections of the pitch, so everything looked calm and normal. The corner flags gave little away, they never do, sometimes they blow in four different directions at the same time. The stories they could tell. As the storm intensified towards the end of the game, they fell limp. Apart from one, which gallantly indicated strong south-easterly gusts which should have discouraged long raking diagonal passes towards Finn Stevens, but didn’t.

Let’s face it, nobody wanted to be there. If a crowd is 30% down on recent averages, it’s reasonable to assume that the enthusiasm for the game was reduced across the board. It had to be played at the margins, the winner being the team that could find enough of their top speed for long enough to make the difference. 

That relied on being able to play in between the gusts blowing rain into the players’ faces. The whole game became concentrated into a fifteen minute period of relative meteorological calm in which Barnsley harried and pressed. The mental overload resulted in errors, several dangerous balls into the box and near misses. Eventually, inadvertently, Sam Long steered a dangerous ball beyond Cumming into his own net. 

We would now need to beat both Barnsley and the worsening conditions.The only hope was that a pocket of opportunity might present itself in the second half as we push towards the East Stand, the marginally more favourable direction to attack. 

At half-time, the concourse started to look more like a refugee camp, full of septuagenarians gratefully nursing their hot drinks and contemplating how long it might be until they too feature on the scoreboard of commemoration that marked Oxford United’s fallen. The low disconsolate murmur felt like we were three down rather than just one. Somehow, as well as the actual goal, we seemed to have conceded a couple of oppressive psychological goals which put the game out of sight.

There was a rallying, of sorts, but we looked like a team with its wings clipped, screaming for the pace of Mills, Browne, Edwards or Murphy to unsettle the Barnsley backline. The fine needlework of Goodrham and Rodrigues doesn’t work so well when Mother Nature shows her hand. Ultimately, we were no more than knocking on the door like a demoralised market researcher trying to find an 18-24 year old male working in the built environment to answer questions about their facewash preferences. Harris went close but only Cameron Brannagan managed to kindle his frustration, cannoning one off the bar. Had either gone in, we’d have been looking back on a point well won in difficult conditions.

But, it didn’t come and it kind of felt like it never would be as close as the scoreboard wanted to suggest; we didn’t look close to equalising.

Once again our heads have bumped against a familiar glass ceiling. There’s a small division of teams straddled across the lower end of the Championship and top of League One which we’ve spent several years unsuccessfully trying to penetrate. Because it spans the divisions, we don’t acknowledge it. We’re at the top of the next group, the League One regulars, with a bit of luck and a well timed run we might occasionally finish in the play-offs , but it seems inevitable that the headwind caused by the company of the cartel – Derby, Peterborough, Portsmouth, Barnsley et al – will again prove too much. 

For all the deep investment in the club and the long-term benefits that will bring, a shorter, sharper injection is needed to break the cycle. We’re broadly a well-run club constrained by its surroundings. Like a frog in a pan on the hob, we’re blissfully unaware of how lucky we are in that respect, only when the heat rises, will we lament the loss of these cosseted times. 

We can, of course, settle into the routine of enjoying the wins against those below us, there’s enough there to make our time here entertaining. We could just accept our fate when facing the larger teams. To break the ceiling, we need something different; something dynamic, something which is ultimately counter-cultural. Without it, we’re too predictable; suffering a corporate groupthink, doing things the right way, signing players who fit a mould. It makes us solid, but it doesn’t necessarily make us strong. 

Without breaking a few things we just become one of the many and results like these become as predictable and underwhelming as Jocelyn’s £5 Christmas present.