I have all the main TV outlets for football. If I wanted, I could watch at least one game every day. And yet, outside a major cup final or international, I don’t think I’ve seen a full game of football on TV for at least five years. 

Watching games on TV is no longer an event experience, it’s ambient, no more appointment TV than a re-run of QI on Dave. It doesn’t really matter when it’s from, the context in which it happens or its conclusion, TV football fills time in between other things.

If the best players and teams in the country are available to you every day and still leave you cold, it’s baffling to think why Sky chose Bolton versus Oxford as their prime live offering on Tuesday night. Imagine not being us and what your visceral response might be to seeing that fixture on your planner.

It’s hard to imagine anyone outside a very narrow demographic looking at the TV listings and thinking that was what they wanted to consume their spaghetti bolognese to when Arsenal v Porto or Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr were alternatives.

The point, I suppose, is that Sky can boast comprehensive coverage of English football. It’s like Netflix claiming they have thousands of shows including The Crown! Stranger Things! Squid Game! and Tiger King! When 90% of it is old, obscure, cheap and unwatchable. Bolton v Oxford is just there to bulk out the offering and justify a marketing claim.

None-the-less, the perception of being under a magnifying glass, being exposed to the opinions of everyone else is daunting, particularly with our record on TV. Anyone damaged enough to watch us exclusively on television would have marked us down as inept long before last night’s cavalcade of catastrophe.

No rational Oxford fan would have been looking forward to it, Bolton are one of the best sides in the division, they were at home and we have been teetering on the edge of some kind of collapse for weeks. Now we were going to be exposed and analysed by Sky and its pundits, including Steve Evans and Michael Appleton. What could possibly go right?

The signs were ominous long before kick-off. As the pundits ambled away pre-match, they cut to the team warming up, jogging between a set of cones in formation. Each player seemed to be wearing a different combination of our training kit, we didn’t seem to have any coaching staff, it shouldn’t matter, but we looked ramshackle, closer to a park side than a relentless winning machine. 

Let’s not dwell on the game, you could always watch it on catch-up if that’s what you’re here for. It became a greatest hits of things that can go wrong in a football match. Jamie Cumming made his third major error in three games, Greg Leigh was unfortunate to deflect one in, but beyond that we were just outplayed. We looked disorganised, disinterested and dismal. 

When they had the ball, they went forward, which seems like a good idea, we should try it. Not only do we seem incapable of doing that ourselves, it seems to be a complete surprise to our defence when other teams do it.

Apart from one reckless flying challenge from Cairon Brown nobody seemed terribly concerned about the collapse. Nobody was pushing each other into position, there were no snatched conversations between players about what they were supposed to be doing, come on fellas, we’re on TV, the world is watching.

The cameras would cut to Des Buckingham in the hope that they might find humanity in our humiliation. He looked distracted, like he’d received a troubling text during a meeting about budgets. He stared into the middle distance, we don’t know what at, maybe he was lost in his thoughts, maybe he saw someone in a coat that was precisely the colour he wants his living room to be, neither can be confirmed.

We can trawl over how we got here, but the more important question is where we go now. I’m not an absolutist, I don’t think getting rid of the manager is always the most obvious answer. Occasionally football fans will take to phone-ins or social media and claim that in any other job if you make a mistake or under-perform, you get fired. This clearly isn’t true, people make mistakes and under-perform all the time, firing them is the most extreme action available and only tends to happen when all other options have been exhausted. 

But, something has to change. When Des Buckingham first arrived he was asked what his approach would be. We were second after one of our best starts to a season in our history; he said he would continue the good work of his predecessor. It was a relief to hear, you’d think and hope he wouldn’t have to do much, we have plenty of experienced professionals capable of continuing to do what they had been doing.

An adjustment in our form wasn’t unexpected, injuries didn’t help, patchy form and loan recalls exacerbated things. Perhaps it was wishful thinking to believe that continuity was an option. 

But Buckingham still seems to be in continuity mode, a caretaker for a manager who isn’t coming back. He’s always been portrayed as a globetrotting enigma, when he finally returned to the club, that perception seemed to bewilder him. Maybe he didn’t read the Oxford Mail in Mumbai. When someone asked who his favourite Oxford players were, he said Matt Elliott, Joey Beauchamp and Paul Moody – like Alan Partridge claiming his favourite Beatles album is The Best of the Beatles. I don’t think he is the Oxford fan cum globetrotting enigma we’d like him to be, I think it’s time for him to be himself.

Many managers under pressure become unlikable, he’s not that. It’s desperately sad to watch his struggle. It may even be part of the problem, the players can’t be completely absolved of blame, they’re good enough to be better, only they are truly in control of their effort. But, do they lack the fear, discipline and inspiration that the best managers seem to exude?

We can argue about whose fault all this is and the truth is, it’s everyone’s. One benefit of last night is that it proved unequivocally that things aren’t working. It could be the equivalent of Michael Appleton’s 5-1 TV disaster against Cambridge, the end of the beginning. The Manning era has passed, the continuity era has gone. It’s an opportunity for Des Buckingham and the club more widely to take action, stamp their authority on this new era, grab the steering wheel, take control. If Ruben Rodrigues isn’t performing, change it, if Mark Harris isn’t scoring, change it, if Marcus McGuane is below par, change it. 

The play-offs haven’t felt like a realistic goal for some time, but the achievement of that, or not, shouldn’t be the metric we’re measuring against. Like Manning, when he arrived at the club, he saw we needed to simplify and establish the fundamentals – clean sheets and defensive unity will give us something to build on. Buckingham will need a marquee win or two during this run-in to give the fans hope moving into the summer, but we have to see some progress and even a broad sketch of some kind of plan.