Grant Ferguson, Tim WIlliams and assorted others sat behind a long trestle table covered with a slightly skewed, unkempt tablecloth; a reminder of why we were all here. The lack of attention to detail at the Kassam Stadium, the willingness to do enough and no more than enough is a standard we’ve learnt to accept but want to escape. On that we’re all united.

There seems not much else united about United, there weren’t just arguments about having a forum, there were arguments about who should promote the forum and whose forum it was. The club seemed unwilling to acknowledge its existence despite taking part. It was an odd stance to take, maybe they don’t have an emoji for ‘plenary discussion’. 

Williams et al looked like a group of old school friends who’d decided, for the banter, to have a golfing weekend in North Korea and found themselves arrested on a spurious espionage charge. Williams even read from a pre-prepared statement, he was fine, his captures were treating him and his friends well. 

A lot of focus was on the nebulous concept of ‘communication’, ‘we have communicated’ Williams communicated at the start. It seems he sees it as a mechanical, transactional necessity, rather than something to stir emotions and create engagement.

Then talk turned to the new stadium, everything is in ‘stacks’ these days, there were talks of ‘debt stacks’ and ‘funding stacks’, at work we talk about ‘technology stacks’. Businesses are just stacked full of stacks.

The problem with forums is that they’re attended by people who go to forums. A discussion about debt animated the boomers who’d been brought up to believe you only spend what you have. They weren’t, it seemed, Williams’ kind of people. He seemed to be cracking, analogising that the levels of debt the club were about to take on was no different to a mortgage for your house. It was a good point, where do these people think we’re going to get £130m from? We’re not owned by Uncle Scrooge from DuckTales with his swimming pool of gold. 

It went on like this for a while, but when WIlliams said he bored himself doing the Five Minute Fans Forum on the radio, suddenly we had a connection. He was bored, I was bored, we were bored together. Stadium funding is boring, there’s only one thing more boring than stadium funding and that’s questions about stadium funding. Particularly when those asking the questions barely understand the topic they’re asking about. It’s a race to the bottom. 

The people running the club are boring people, but it’s just what we need. Flamboyant boosterism won’t build the stadium. Historically, Oxford must have the most hostile local authorities in the country when it comes to its local football club. Apparently to have a new stadium we have to justify why we want to leave the one we’re currently in. Nobody asks you why you don’t like your home when you buy a new one. Only religious cults interrogate you about your deeper intentions and insist on commitments to higher principles before accepting you into their community.

Thank god there was a game to cleanse the pallet on Saturday. Blue Light Day was a welcome innovation, way back during the pandemic I suggested that we should have an NHS day to thank those who risked their lives to look after others. It’s only taken four years, but here we are. 

The ambulance service brought some quadriplegic dolls to practice saving lives on, the police brought some horses they use to save lives, the fire brigade brought the big trucks they use to save lives and the army turned up to show off the machines they use to kill people with. It’s all yin and yang, I suppose but why were they there? I’m no military strategist, but if an army goes into battle with blue lights flashing and sirens blaring it certainly feels like that would be a tactical disadvantage.

They did bring a marching band though and I’m a sucker for a marching band at football. They rattled their way through all the usual classics, including Sweet Caroline and a Daft Punk medley. It drew more from the French house pioneers’ commercial oeuvre, I’d have preferred a couple of deeper cuts, but I guess it’s hard to play Daftendirekt or Crescendolls on a tuba.

Then things got weird, a guard of honour was formed by some military teenagers and the ball was presented by a soldier of some kind. The blue light professionals, we were there to celebrate, were nowhere to be seen. Who knows, we may have been in the middle of a military coup. If the junta can get the stadium through Cherwell Council’s planning processes, I’m all for it.  

The band had one last task and we uncomfortably murmured our way through the national anthem. The club are obsessed with military pageantry and with every passing year it gets more elaborate, someone somewhere classes this is as fun.

The game itself worked to a familiar template, we plodded through the first half, gently kicking Cheltenham’s corpse to see if there were any signs of life. In recent weeks Matty Taylor has turned them into a functioning League One operation, without him they were toothless.

We should, of course, have taken the game to them, but instead we moved the ball at a glacial pace searching for a gap in their defensive unit, like someone whose locked themselves out of their house, trying to see if there’s an open window they can climb through. We didn’t think we’d get through, so we didn’t really try. 

I’d like to say we huffed and puffed, but the way we play doesn’t even look that difficult. Eventually Josh Murphy picked the ball up on the edge of the box and fired home for the opening goal because it was something to do.

The second half was end to end, in the sense that we’d have the ball at their end and gently moved it backwards towards ours. Only Cameron Brannagan seems bothered by this state of affairs, everyone else seemed content to snooze their way to the final whistle. In the South Stand Upper, we could watch the horses eating hay, so it wasn’t all bad.

Apparently we haven’t yet learnt that 1-0 is a dangerous lead and that you’re vulnerable to being hit by the odd sucker punch. Sure enough, with ten minutes to go they equalised with a trundling daisy cutter past Jamie Cumming. Nobody seemed terribly cross about it, such was its inevitability.

As we prepared to accept our fate, something odd happened, we sprung to life doing unusual and creative things – Ciaron Brown went up front, Dale Owen attacked down the right, it looked like we wanted to actually win after all. And, you know what? It was working, suddenly we were getting corners, Greg Leigh nearly headed the winner, then, as the clock ticked into the game’s final minute, Owen strained every sinew to pull a ball back from the by-line, his cross arced into the crowded box and Leigh headed the winner. And the people, they were happy. I imagine Tim Williams got out his notebook and made a note to investigate further. The club were so shocked, someone forgot to change the scoreboard.

I don’t want to see through the fourth wall of the football club, I’m quite happy to let Tim Williams build his funding stacks, I don’t want to earnestly sing songs about a god I don’t believe in saving a monarch I think is an unnecessary artifice that’s not really worth abolishing. I just want to go to the football and enjoy the spectacle, the risk taking and experience the explosion of joy when it all comes together. Don’t talk to me about funding stacks and give me more fun stacks; get those right and we’ll all be happier.