A few years ago, writing these posts, I began to realise that how I was feeling personally influenced how I saw the team’s performance. If I felt tired, then invariably I would see the players as tired, like wearing a green visor and seeing everything green.

This was particularly true on Tuesday nights, people are rushing home from work, they’re a bit tired, a bit distracted by the fact they’ve got work in the morning, maybe even slightly anxious about driving in the dark or walking the streets late at night. The mood is different.

On Saturday I was trying to figure out what my normal time to leave the house was, this shouldn’t be difficult to work out given how long I’ve been going to football, but I couldn’t remember when it was. Scrolling back, I realised that we hadn’t kicked off at home in the league for 10 weeks, and that game – against Burton – was itself the first 3pm kick off for seven weeks. Over that period, we’ve had six Tuesday games, one lunchtime kick-off and a Friday night. This season we’ve had as many games on a Tuesday night as on a Saturday at 3pm.

I’ve said before, for me football plays an important role in the circadian rhythm of life. It straightens me out after the wonkiness of the working week. It’s like a cure for travel sickness, the week churns you up, but for a couple of hours, you can focus on one thing and one unifying common goal.

While your sniffy know-all will go on about this being the modern game and how we’d better get used to it with the new TV deal kicking in next year, I can’t believe this doesn’t have an effect. There are probably 9,000 people, including players and staff, all assembling on a Tuesday night bringing different moods and energy levels to the game, there must be an accumulative effect.

Would a Saturday afternoon kick-off against Leyton Orient make any difference? Would it provide some kind of explanation for some of the difficulties in recent weeks? 

To some degree, yes. There were a few more children around, a bit more of a bubbling atmosphere walking up to the stadium. People had a bit more time to catch up with friends. The crowd had more energy, there were songs coming from the East Stand to counter the buoyant Orient following. 

Broadly, there was a lighter spirit, for all the romanticism of playing ‘under the lights’ there’s an ‘I’m missing Bake Off for this’ asymmetry on a Tuesday night – a feeling that the week has been disrupted by the game. The team should entertain to make it worthwhile.

Saturdays are a bit more unifying, this is just what we do and we do it together, like a club. The reward came after twenty minutes, Tyler Goodrham’s back heel from Ruben Rodrigues’ cross was celebrated like the satisfying conclusion to a training drill. 

Orient are a good side, mixing play-from-the-back orthodoxy with a League One urgency and directness we’ve lacked in recent weeks. Once they’d brought us to heal, often by dragging a player to the floor by their collar, the pressure began to tell. 

I don’t think we eased off, we didn’t ponder so much, but we do seem easily flustered. A couple of soft tackles and some ultra crisp passing led to their equaliser. 

Is it fear? Confusion? An attack down our right led to their winner. They simply swept past us. We may lack options at right-back, but Sam Long’s had a torrid time since returning from injury and a lot of problems have occurred down that side. 

But that just plays to the scourge of modern discourse, simplism. We are led to believe that life can be explained by one unifying law – common sense. We’ve even got a cabinet minister in government dedicated to it.

In a complex world, we want simple solutions. We trust that our car will keep us safe as we blast along the motorway at 70 miles an hour, we avoid thinking about the 30,000 components that need to work in perfect synchronicity for that to happen. Without simplifying things, we’d quickly go mad.

When our football club doesn’t work, we look for the simple answer – Tim Williams, Des Buckingham, Sam Long, the fans. But this is a complex problem, the solutions need to be multifarious.

Calls for Des Buckingham to be replaced are a nonsense. Liam Manning didn’t win for his first seven games, but we accepted he was rebuilding. Des Buckingham came into a winning team, but was that harder because he couldn’t make an impact? He had nothing to fix, so why break what’s working? Did thing need to break, or at least transition, to give him the mandate to do more than simply steer the team from game to game like an interim?

We don’t know that Des Buckingham is the right man for the job, or whether he has the capability, but after four months it’s not possible to conclude that he isn’t. We are, still, in the play-offs, and nobody was talking about removing the manager when Karl Robinson and Liam Manning were in a similar position.

The atmosphere amongst the fans isn’t as good as it could be, but has this run of Tuesday nights drained our energy more than we’d like to believe? I think there’s more we can do to make matchdays entertaining, but a return to a Saturday routine will help a lot.

And is Tim Williams just a bean counter who doesn’t care? He brought in Liam Manning and a backroom team, so that can’t be completely true. It wasn’t Williams’ fault Manning left. Are the club’s funds and focus distracted by stadium issues? Perhaps. I think there’s a blandness to the club’s communications currently, a lack of humour and creativity, but that might be a consequence of so much effort being focussed elsewhere.

Complex problems require complex solutions all clustered around one grand vision. If that’s to become a top 30 club, we need a top 30 stadium, team, manager and fans. There’s a lot to do and we’ve all got to do it, over-simplifying problem, looking at it through one lens will inevitably fail. Firing the manager or sending aggressive tweets at the club’s hierarchy might make us feel good, but it doesn’t deliver a solution.