We’re often reminded of the romance of Tuesday night football. Not a game goes by without an emotive photo of an empty floodlit stadium accompanied by the message ‘under the lights’; it’s supposed to be a place where magical things happen. 

Yet, despite this, it’s quite clinical. It’s easy to criticise a decision to ‘force’ Oxford fans to make a six hour round trip in the middle of the week to watch us play in Sheffield but it’s a deliberate strategy to schedule these games on a Tuesday. The logic is that fixtures requiring long distance travel are more likely to be for exiles, die-hards and lunatics. A Tuesday night crusade is a badge of honour and nothing will stop them clearing their diary to make the game. 

Casual fans are less likely to travel distances regardless of whether it’s a Tuesday or Saturday, so overall, the impact on attendances is minimal. 

This calculation is particularly true with the introduction of iFollow and Sky Sports Plus. With this access there’s no reasonable logic to go to a game 140 miles away apart from abstract ideas like dedication and commitment. 

This comes at a price; where live football is a visceral multi-sensorial experience and we’ve learnt to accept live TV football as a form of high definition entertainment in primary colours, Sky Sports Plus is football at its most transactional. 

This isn’t a criticism; it’s expensive to put in different camera positions and the microphones needed to enhance the sound of the crowd, or to pay for more presenters and analysts. It’s easier to invest in marketing and, for once, over-promise and under deliver; let’s face it, our decision to watch Oxford isn’t determined by Jamie Mackie analysing our wingbacks on a giant ipad.

Perhaps it was appropriate for them to host our visit to Bramall Lane. Sheffield United are unbeaten at home and haven’t conceded since the 17th August. By contrast we have one win in eleven and have just conceded six at home. Nobody expected anything more than a routine home win.

Sky handed co-commentary to Darren Ambrose who sounds a like the singer from the Lighthouse Family.

In the opening minutes Ambrose said that Sheffield United’s objective for the first half was to get ‘a few goals’ and then relax. He might as well have been describing Chris Wilder’s weekend taking some garden waste to the tip and dropping off a bag of old clothes at the charity shop before settling down for an afternoon in front of the snooker. This wasn’t a competition, it was a routine.

We often spend live TV games complaining about bias and the ill-informed commentary, but nobody could really complain about Ambrose’s assessment. This sort of game is beyond analysis, it is what it is. We can pontificate about positional play, injuries and who is in and out of form, but the reality is that the gap is too big. It’s like trying to explain why a Bugatti Chiron is faster than a Kiwifruit. It just is.

It stands to reason, Sheffield United’s reward for being terrible in the Premier League last year are parachute payments totalling £150m over three years whereas we receive exactly nothing extra for our successful campaign in League One. If you don’t have a calculator to hand, that’s £942,000 a week or £134,000 a day more than we get for the honour of achieving the third lowest points total in Premier League history. If that doesn’t seem fair, it isn’t.

Any attempt to frame the Wilder v Buckingham encounter as ‘master versus apprentice’ was overshadowed by the reality; we brought a choc-ice to an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. The relative talents of the managers wasn’t the defining factor here.

It was somewhat reassuring that the atonal melancholy remained undisturbed when after 10 minutes we admired Jack Robinson’s long throw getting knocked on by Harry Souter to Tyrese Campbell, who squared it to Callum O’Hare to make it 1-0. That’s a lot of Sheffield United given that we had ten players in the box with Dane Scarlett just outside standing in the ‘D’.

The second, at least, gave us assurance that no miracle would be forthcoming giving us plenty of time to accept the result. Gustavo Harmer played through a space the size of the Mariana Trench to free Campbell to make it two. The third from Jesurun Rak-Sakyi was either a well constructed goal or a defensive farce depending on how charitable you’re feeling.

Welcome to the Championship? Truth is the dividing line between the Premier League and the second tier is a fiction, the real split is somewhere around 7th or 8th in the Championship. There’s a chasm between those top teams and everyone else; stalking amongst us are teams which are just too big and too well resourced, the gaps are almost unbridgeable.

The good news is that the teams we do need to be ahead of at the end of the season will most likely be beaten by the likes of Middlesbrough and Sheffield United as well. It means that the games between the teams in the bottom half of the table are the ones that mean anything significant.

At least it’s reassuring to think that success for them this season will be the reward of another year of pain in the Premier League whereas we should be able to enjoy our rewards if we survive.

First, though, we need to find our way to safety and to do that is to navigate the precarious path between writing these games off as meaningless and the arrogance of assuming an easy game come along and that we’ll win it. We need to accept these games for what they are, but prepare for them as though we want to compete, this isn’t an easy logic to square off.