After Tuesday night’s debacle at Bolton, at times the week felt like we’d been recovering from a big family row. Things got said, people did things they regret, things happened that can’t unhappen.

In the immediate aftermath of a row, everyone’s treading on eggshells and not always successfully. The club tried to revert back to its normal behaviour, posting pictures of the players ‘working hard’, ‘preparing for Saturday’, when they were apparently ‘focussed’. They even tried to throw in the odd ‘all in it together’ post, which, when you’re still seething, feels like they’re suggesting it’s you and your negative attitude that’s the source of the problem.

I found myself preparing to engage with my keyboard like I was a concert pianist about to smash out a particularly passionate rendition of Rachmaninoff concerto: ‘ON YEAH? THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU PREPARE PROPERLY FOR TUESDAY THEN?” or “FOCUSSED? NOT MUCH FOCUS AGAINST BOLTON WAS THERE MATE?”. Luckily, I’m not someone who actually engages with angry social media commentary, but plenty do and I can see the temptation.

Of course, it might be that the club are genuinely frustrated by the fans’ negativity and that they are working hard and they are focussed. They might think we are, to some degree, at fault. They might even be right, a bit. There might be similar thoughts between individuals within the club. The potential for a new row is high.

Eventually, even the snipers recognise that it isn’t worth sniping anymore. We’ve exhausted all avenues of the argument, there are unresolvable wrongs that we have to move on from. To keep raking over the same old stuff, knowing there’s no hope of resolution is pointless, despite everyone seething below the surface, reluctantly we have to enter an unspoken contract to say that it’s time to move on.

At times like this, all you can do is pretend things are normal and let nature take its course. Danny Wallace’s book F*** You Very Much, investigates rudeness. In it he talks to scientists who’ve identified that a single moment of rudeness can agitate in our brain for days and we’re more likely to be rude to others as a result, so it’s contagious. Likewise, the anger surrounding the listless performance against Bolton live on TV is likely to keep rumbling long after we expect it to.

So, it takes all our energy to avoid doing anything that might reignite the conflict. Every mundane exchange is highly charged. If you eat together as a family after a row, you’ve got try and make it feel as normal as possible, even though every molecule in your body wants you to throw a plate at the window and storm out.

If anger is contagious, it’s not surprising that not everyone was ready to let Tuesday go, but ultimately that’s what they needed to do. Collectively at least, we had to swallow what we really wanted to say and find a path to back to normal. 

And so to Port Vale away which is, perhaps, the least inspiring fixture of the season. There’s not a lot to recommend them as a club, no great history or reputation to put a dent in. Any town lunatic enough to elect Jonathan Gullis as their MP is pretty much a lost cause, there’s no joy in kicking a rotting corpse.

But, in some ways it was just what we needed. There was no compulsion go to the game so lots of fans could have the weekend off, the players could focus on getting something out of it without the glaring eyeballs of thousands of Oxford fans, waiting to leap at their throats at a moment’s notice.

It gave Des Buckingham a little more headroom to take control of the situation, bringing in Bodin, Goodwin and Bennett to freshen things up. It was less important what the changes were, or why, more that he did it, allowing him to apply a bit of managerial authority that’s been missing. In truth, the risks were relatively low; expectation pretty much hit rock bottom on Tuesday and Port Vale are in a wretched situation – so it would have been hard to weaken us to the point where we’re no longer competitive against them.

But it worked; the result, the manner of the result, the clean sheet, the relative lack of drama. Time will tell as to whether it represents some kind of turning point, beating a team second from bottom who haven’t won in 2024 is not the benchmark by which we should be measuring ourselves. We just needed to get something on the board.

Ultimately, it was a bit of a spaghetti bolognese of a result, not something that will blow you away, but something that nobody can complain about. After the tumult of Tuesday’s result, you have to say it’s just what we needed.