A derby needs to be about more than geography; if it was, then Wycombe would be a bigger derby for us than Swindon, yet we would never to accept this as a conceit. There must be an unresolved, or unresolvable, tension. Class or religion can help because those tensions live within each person daily and are less about the injustices of each other’s behaviour, and more about the cultural system we’re all born into. 

Each match should be a way of trying and failing to resolve whatever the division is; it’s a proxy war played out on a football field. But what happens if that fuel no longer exists? Do you keep performing like some kind of Sealed Knot re-enactment? Can you let it die? And even if you let it die, would it? Is a derby rivalry immortal?   

Thames Valley Police were determined to let the legend of Oxford v Reading live, forcing the game to kick-off at lunch time and promoting that they had acquired an alphabet soup of additional powers to cope with the inevitable chaos. These don’t promote good behaviour, your average hooligan isn’t likely to take notice of a Section B Dispersion Order or whatever, so it was always unlikely to deter any trouble. It does, however, allow the police to get their retaliation in early should anything go wrong.

The club declared the game to be ‘plastic free’; I still don’t know whether that was a genuine attempt at promoting a more sustainable future, or a nod and a wink to the supposed Reading fakery. Apart from some wheelie bins with photocopies of players on the lids, there was little to suggest the former. If it was the latter, then the club’s communication is currently so out of step, it felt like a wannabe nerd at school, desperate to be recognised by the cool kids, smoking fags and stealing sweets from a newsagents.

So, the tone of confrontation seemed to be the shell around which Saturday’s game was wrapped. There had been rumours of Reading fans getting in the home ends, a genuine harking back to the 1980s, which meant side-eye suspicious looks at any group of unfamiliar young men pushing their way through the turnstiles.

Beyond this, though, the thin veneer belied a rivalry struggling for a purpose. Even before the two-decade hiatus in actual games, for nearly twenty years before that the rivalry has been asymmetrical with at least one team being in steep decline or ascent. The last home league game at The Manor between the two clubs was in our calamitous 2000/01 season, nearly a quarter of a century on, while their current financial implosion means they have plenty of other things to be dealing with than us. Tennis balls, mostly. And then, of course, there was the Thames Valley Royals debacle, which was actually a unifying period in which both sets of fans agreed that they had a right to mutual independence, it was like an amicable divorce agreement. 

Despite its troubled state, there was a fair degree of tension in the air as the Kassam filled, a lot of it created by the armada of police vans and officers with their thumbs in that anti-stab jackets thinking about dispersal orders and overtime payments.

The atmosphere was better than it has been for a long time, we couldn’t sit in disdainful silence when the neighbours were in town, so we had to put on a show that balanced with their spirited noise. Plus, the aesthetic was good - our yellow and their blue and white hoops. As games go, it at least seemed to start in the right spirit.

The game kicked off and, thankfully, the pace matched the mood, being some notches beyond that of the soporific first game this season at the Madjeski and our recent games at The Kassam.

A lot channelled through Stefan Negru, it doesn’t take a bank of analysts to know that he was playing out of position, so Reading tried to put pressure on that side and got some early joy. But, despite the marginal territorial advantage, there was little to threaten Simon Eastwood. 

On half an hour, Negru sent Tyler Burey away, whose rangy menace has shown promise. He quickly consumed vast swathes of the pitch to send in an overhit cross which Cameron Brannagan knocked back for Harris to turn in for the opening goal. 

It should have been enough of a platform to win comfortably; our ability to wilt as games progress is more than matched by theirs. But the clock seemed to pass slowly, not because – as the best games do – it had absorbed us into an elastic netherworld where time is no longer a concept, but because neither team seemed to have the will or quality to make it such an occasion.

Into the final quarter of an hour, we were seemingly content to jog to a satisfactory conclusion when Andy Yiadom seemed to stumble across a tear in the fabric of time to weave past three or four Oxford players who looked on admiringly. Negru tried to mop up, but the self-styled ‘proper defender’ chose not to find Row Z of the South Stand and was robbed by Kelvin Ehibhatiomhan, who’d been on for just two minutes. The winger marauded towards the by-line with Negru in his wake. The only consolation was that Ciaron Brown avoided the satisfaction of Sam Smith turning Ehibhatiomhan’s cross in at the far post by turning it in himself.

Far from setting up a grandstand finish, the game petered out, we wilted at the same speed as they did. How long you can sustain your effort as a unit is ultimately the difference between promotion and mid-table this season, and the truth is that we can’t keep it up, so to speak.

The reaction afterwards was largely performative, there were some calls for Buckingham to be sacked, which is beyond absurd. Injuries are often an excuse levelled by managers, but that is the reality he’s currently dealing with, he’s had absolutely no chance to make the changes he wants.

In the end, this was a game of two teams more pre-occupied with themselves to be worried about each other. Thames Valley Police triumphantly announced that they’d arrested four people on relatively minor disorder charges. That represented the biggest win of the day, which tells you all you need to know about the game and the rivalry.