It’s easy to get paranoid isn’t it? I’ve known people who think they’ll lose their job whenever something goes wrong and then retro-fit every conversation they’ve had to their imagined narrative. I even know people who’ve fallen out with friends in anticipation of their friends doing something mean to them.

There’s a great book called Saturday 3pm by Daniel Gray which picks out the little joys of going to football – seeing a ground from the train, watching both physios running onto the pitch at the same time, walking through an old turnstile. It’s an exploration of whimsy which is all built around the idea that Saturday afternoons are a magical place in which the world changes for a couple of hours. 

I went into the game against Middlesbrough with a creeping sense of paranoia. We are now in a world where a Saturday 3pm kick-off is a novelty, this was only our third traditional home game this season; just 37% of all our games have been 3pm starts. It’s the gulag kick-off of the Championship, far from enjoying the routine and tradition, my lingering question was – are we not good enough for TV? Did the football overlords look at this fixture and conclude it was such a mismatch that no good could come of it? What did we do wrong? 

The foretelling of Middlesbrough had grown throughout the gaping hole left by the international break. This seemed a bit strange to me; modern-day Middlesbrough are from Championship central casting, a team that makes eight place finishes their own. Let’s face it, nobody has ever actually met a Middlesbrough fan in real life, I can only assume everyone in the North Stand were crisis actors hired for the day.

But, for all the folklore surrounding Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United – The Class of 92, the polymathematical Eric Catona, Roy Keane’s charming psychosis, Michael Carrick seems to be emerging as the Keyser Söze of the era – the understated genius pulling the strings. The growing consensus was Carrick’s Middlesbrough were different.

Saturday heralded the arrival of Storm Burt and with it, the retrieval of the Big Coat from the cupboard. For the traditionalists, this is football as it’s meant to be; awful. As we sat down in the South Stand and listened to the audible hiss of 2,000 insulated coats deflating, it felt strangely reassuring. 

The club warned that the car parks would be busier than usual due to the arrival of The Big Three. Yes, Cameron Brannagan, Matt Phillips, Przemysław Płacheta were all welcome returns, but they couldn’t compete with the lure of Paddington 3, Gladiator 2 and the Wicked movie at the Vue cinema.

For those of us who prefer our entertainment to be held in a multi-hazard weather event,  for all the foreboding, the opening moments settled the nerves. We patiently moved the ball along the backline as Middlesbrough set up their high defensive line and occupied no more than a fifth of the pitch. 

The density in midfield meant it was like trying to fire a hole in a piece of halloumi with a pea shooter. None-the-less, whether real or imagined, Brannagan’s return seemed to give the midfield a bit more movement and control, taking the pressure off Will Vaulks and allowing Goodrham and Rodrigues to be more offensive.

As I quietly sneered at the naivety of someone eulogising about Greg Leigh behind me – whose accent betrayed the fact they were not of these shores – Leigh latched onto Elliott Moore’s lunging cut back to make it 1-0. Mark Harris should have made it two, but nobody quite believed he was going to score, least of all Harris. We seem to be at ease with his mid-season goal droughts because we’re banking on them being cast aside in the New Year. Still, these early breakthroughs meant the pre-match fears slipped away; we’d take a point, but three looked achievable.

And at this point, my friends, things fell apart. 

First, Elliott Moore raced after Ben Doak with the irreversible conviction of a man sprinting from a pub in a panic after remembering he was supposed to pick up his two-year-old from nursery four hours ago. 

The challenge was so surreally pointless, Moore’s rashness so out of character, it was hard to even fathom that it was real. The home fans drew on their deep muscle memory of Moore’s usual recovery tackles and assumed it was a corner. The referee, under no such illusions, pointed to the spot. Latte Lath – coincidentally my go-to Starbucks order – dispatched the penalty past Jamie Cumming.

The next seven minutes was like having the traumas from your previous life as a 12-year-old Victorian chimney sweep resurfaced by a therapist. The Championship experience some of us feared was exposed to us in increasingly dark and sinister ways. It became a dystopian hellscape in which every attack resulted in a goal. Their third, which looked miles offside in real life, was clearly onside on the replay; TV, it seems, is more real than reality.

The second half hardly brought renewed hope, Latte Lath completed his hat-trick because it seemed impolite not to reward his display with the match ball. ‘This could get embarrassing’ said someone near me. It already was.

Boro were like sherpas who’d found a new mountain pass after the ice had melted for the summer; turn left at Sam Long, when you get to Ciaron Brown shoot low and into the corner. Each goal was identikit, and yet there was nothing we could do about it.

There won’t be too many games where Moore, Brannagan and Harris will be substituted, but it illustrated the surreality of the situation. Dane Scarlett threatened to make the defeat more palatable, but his goal was mere respite before their final onslaught levelled us.

In some ways, the result may have done us a favour. Losing 6-2 at home is so out of character it can be looked at more as a novel datapoint than a trend. Many have accepted that this would happen at some point, few were angry. The stands may have been empty at the final whistle, but the players can’t blame the fans for wanting to get away in the same way the fans can’t blame the players for occasionally being outclassed.

There are more navigable games on the horizon – Sheffield Wednesday, Cardiff, Plymouth. While this is all well and good, with a visit to Chris Wilder on Tuesday and Millwall’s orc army arriving next weekend, we’ll need to need to find a pathway through those which avoids turning nagging paranoia of not being up to this into reality.

While you’re here…

I’ve written a book about Oxford’s rise through the divisions in the 1980s. It’s published by Pitch Publishing and is coming out at the end of January. It’s the detailed story of Oxford’s rise from the appointment of Ian Greaves in 1980 through to the Jim Smith era of mergers, championships and giant killings right through to winning the Milk Cup and playing in the First Division.

If that sounds up your street, you can pre-order it here.