There’s a bit of a 90s revival going on. We have a Labour government, we’re back in the Championship, Oasis are reforming. For the nostalgics, these were heady days where you drifted through life with a carefree spirit. You could stand in a field at a Levellers gig and declare your individualism by singing ‘there’s only one way of life and that’s your own’ while 20,000 other people did exactly the same.  Or you could defiantly scream ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ because Rage Against The Machine told you to.

For all our defiance, we are compliant people. Last week on the Elis James and John Robins podcast episode called The Dance, Robins discussed, at length, the Oasis ticketing debacle. Without going into huge detail (I recommend a listen), his point was that the market value of tickets are actually set by touts who charge the maximum rate people are prepared to pay. For marketing and PR reasons, Oasis can’t justify setting market-value prices. The idea of surge or dynamic pricing is that the band will get closer to the real value of the tickets when demand goes up. For all the complaints about £300 tickets – that’s the price people are playing and, in the end, you have to decide if you want to pay a tout or the band. 

Likewise, as fans, what we say we want and what we’ll tolerate are very different. The fans and club are working in different spaces. Since we’ve reached the Championship, there’s been a shrugging acceptance of changing kick-off times, even if it means your pre-match lager still tastes vaguely of cornflakes. We complained about additional memberships, but we bought them. Tickets for next week’s game against Bristol City are £35, and we’ve sold over 2,000 of them.

The club appeared to announce on Saturday that we were going to wear our purple third kit against Stoke. Perhaps they realised there aren’t many games before Christmas where we can legitimately wear it or maybe the Indonesian influencer market isn’t as buoyant as they thought. There were more than a few understandable grumbles at the apparent break in tradition, but we accepted it. 

Then, was there a pivot? The club suddenly announced that it would double as a goalkeeping kit. With Stoke wearing salmon pink, perhaps us wearing purple invoked an ancient bylaw that football should never resemble a Prince convention. Whether this was planned or not, isn’t relevant, it was another bungled, garbled communication and yet, despite this, we accepted it. 

With two wins announcing our arrival as a competitive entity and Stoke’s role as perennial Championship survivalists, the game promised few surprises. The visitors’ ambition to climb beyond this level seems to have withered and in its place is a perpetual and mostly unfounded paranoia that they’re on the brink of collapse. At one point they even broke into a song about medicating their defeats with alcohol, which must have been encouraging for their players.

With them committed to standing still and us still building a buffer to avoid instant relegation, the first half was characterised by deep attrition. On the BBC website this week there was an analysis of the lack of goals from outside the box in the modern game, the product of the curse of xG and the Guardiola-isation of English football in which inspiration is replaced by control. At one point, with the ball at Elliott Moore’s feet, the game stopped completely, reaching almost total stasis; in the modern oeuvre, it was perfection. Two sides were engaged in an eternal press. Des Buckingham thought it was some of the best football since he arrived.

Perhaps it was the force of the compression; as the two sides clamped together, almost becoming one, a liminal space opened up, a netherworld in which dual states occur. The answer to the impasse came both because of and despite Cameron Brannagan’s injury. A ferocious block tackle left him writhing on the floor. A self-confessed machine, Brannagan has talked in the past of his philosophy of taking on his opponent. It’s an interesting idea, much less daunting to take on the man in front of you than the whole team and its reputation.

Except, in this case, he’d reached absolute stalemate, the tackle put him out of the game. Enter Ruben Rodrigues, inexplicably wearing a headband – another modern phenomenon we’ve learnt to accept where the club can be casually opaque about injuries. Maybe he was celebrating National Steve Foster Day (which is obviously in February, Rubes, DUH!).

Rodrigues’ introduction applied a small dose of serendipity to the paralysis, a homeopathic drip of his cavalier spirit. Suddenly we were moving again, Stoke’s beefed up unit floundered while he kept moving, bamboozling, hoodwinking. He danced through the defence and found El Mizouni with an acre of space to neatly tuck the ball away.

For a period, there was space and movement and, although we started to tire, it wasn’t at a faster rate than our opponents. Vaulks and Ebiowei helped maintain the tempo while Stoke’s substitutions saw them visibly shrink. Presumably the plan was to replace brawn with pace to exploit our tiring backline but when they found some space on the right in front of their fans, you could tell from the lack of animation in the stand that nobody expected it to end in a goal.  

As the game crept to its conclusion, only the ghosts of Tony Pulis and Rory Delap maintained any sense of threat. Each set piece brought an anxious sigh, but they’re not that team anymore and Moore and Brown mopped up their hopeful balls with metronomic precision until the final whistle.

Maximum points from our opening three home games can be seen as a buffer for future struggles or a platform for something more ambitious. Overall, it continued to set the tone; we’re not here to sightsee but to participate; while that has come as a surprise to many, we’ll certainly accept it.  

While you’re here…

Why not have a listen to the latest episode Oxblogger Podcast, in which we declare that Mark Harris is not a natural goalscorer and hatch a plot to keep Tyler Goodrham forever. Plus, we reminisce about the League One years, from Ricardinho to Robinson.

And if that’s not enough, sign up to the Oxblogger Newsletter here.