Thankfully, I was distracted on Saturday during the defeat to Bristol Rovers due to seeing Depeche Mode in London. I don’t particularly like being out of communication during a game, but by the time we set off into town we were already two goals down and the inevitable was all but confirmed with three-quarters of the game still to play. I was secretly grateful that there was little doubt which way the game was going, even if it was the wrong way.

The opprobrium was well under way as we left, and I’ve no doubt deepened further as the result was finally confirmed.

Like Marcus Browne, you don’t get to see Depeche Mode play very often, age and success have slowed their output and the general ambivalence towards them in this country mean their world tours rarely exceed a handful of dates in the UK.

I first saw them in 1990 and have seen them in every tour since. I wouldn’t pretend, now deep into their fifth decade as a band, that they represent the cutting edge of music. In fact, I’ve noticed an obvious pattern in their sets over the few tours. They will open with two songs from their new album, before embarking on a section of well-regarded recognisable singles from their back catalogue. They break for a couple of slower tracks before returning with another album track, then it’s banger, banger, banger right to the end: Enjoy the Silence, Never Let Me Down Again, Personal Jesus, Just Can’t Get Enough. Everyone goes home happy.

The point being, they know a vast majority of the fans are there for the hits and not their painstaking artistry. Years ago, songs were re-worked for their live shows, now they play them largely as they were recorded. We allow them to pretend they’re edgy and modern. Fans, can pretend they’re young and cool regardless of the plethora overweight bald men in quarter-zip fleeces that suggest otherwise.

This represents a social contract between fans and band, an unspoken, knowing bond – everyone is happy to sign up, despite its flaws. Over the years, that contract has changed; in the early 1980s they were a teenage pop band before morphing into a kinky, clanky industrial, Berlin, leather sex machine. We all accepted Martin Gore’s leather skirts without having to actually be spanked by a dominatrix or have electrodes attached to our nipples ourselves

The 1990s saw a shift to becoming an enormo-stadium behemoth where everything was huge, including the amount of skag Dave Gahan was injecting into his sinewy arms. Fans bought into all that; it was the right thing for the right time. Now we’re all old and need a bit of certainty and less hassle in our lives. By accident or design, the band have carried the fans with them.

If I look at Oxford now, that same social contract needs to exist and has, to some degree, broken down. Teams lose games and they have bad performances, and wins cover a multitude of sins, but some of the strands that bind the club together have frayed. 

What does that mean? These abstract ideas need to be converted into real things. Take, for example, the red and black kit that we wore against Rovers. It’s a throwback to the 1995/96 promotion season. The design carries a quality of ‘if you know, you know’, a nod and wink to an enjoyable shared experience from the past. But you can’t pull that trick too often and the exact same stunt that was pulled within very recent memory. It felt clunky rather than smart, not a decision of someone who understood the club, more someone who’d looked at a graph to draw their conclusions.

Similarly, the club’s social media output is formulaic and distant – the recent signing of Will Goodwin was accompanied with more than ten social media posts, replicated across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter (and probably others). I worry about three tweets promoting our podcast.

The week is punctuated by pictures of training sessions (working hard, strong arm emoji), matchdays might as well be the same content reposted (the boys have arrived, fist-bumps going into the changing rooms). Thinking of the days of Sarah Godding, our social media had personality, it was a fan, it was one of us.

We see the same distance in club communications, for example, the recent message from Tim Williams applauding the club’s success in ‘matchday activations’. I don’t mind that particularly; nonsense business jargon taken seriously is always funny. But he also announced Chris Hackett as Des Buckingham’s assistant (or at least that he will continue to assist him, which is slightly different, broadly correct and fundamentally no change from what we already knew.) That sent hares running that then needed to be stopped. There was the announcements about when the planning application for the stadium would go in. But it hasn’t.  

Des Buckingham has tripped up a couple of times reassuring the fans that new players were imminent. The appointment of a football analyst – not normally a big deal apart from for the super-nerds – seems to be in a muddle as they’re both working behind the scenes and working out their notice at the same time.

I think the desire to communicate is all done for the right reasons, but the fans want reassurance as much as they do stone cold deliverables. I think Williams and Buckingham both come over well when they speak, but the content of what they say rings hollow. I even think, if you look hard, you can see what Buckingham wants do with his team if he had the right players. I think I’d prefer it if the club were to recognise that the departure of Liam Manning – himself still transitioning from Karl Robinson when he left – was a wrench they hadn’t anticipated, and that this season’s focus moved from promotion to another transition. It set us back a bit. Few fans could have complained, it’s not as if the club was at fault when Manning left.

Re-establishing that trust, the social contract, will help re-set expectations. Nobody enjoys a defeat, let’s not pretend the goal of a social contract between club and fans will mask a poor performance. But, if we can agree and accept where on the path we are, then we have a firmer foundation to build from and those difficult periods become easier to manage.