Look, you’ve probably come here for something to lighten the mood after last night, right? Bear with me.

I’m currently reading Beyond The Wall, a history of East Germany, a book that aims to dispel the myth that post-war communist Germany was a drab, grey, miserable place to live. 

Yes, East Germany pumped their female athletes with so many anabolic steroids some of them had to change gender and the Stasi secret police were an all-powerful, all-pervasive, brutal murderous regime, but the truth is that living in the Democratic Republic was actually OK. Living standards were good, employment was full and there was a meritocratic system through which you could progress in life based on hard work and talent.

But, after getting to a place of absolute stability and safety, the population grew bored. Some East Germans found their life so tedious in their comfortable, moderate utopia they actually chose to go to Russia to work on gas pipelines in the Urals. Which is not as fun as it sounds.

While some people tend to attract an omnishambolic lifestyle, lurching from one mess to another, we all ultimately crave stability. But there’s a reason why middle-aged men have midlife crises; getting there is one thing, being there is a whole other ballgame.

All the footballs were on television on Tuesday. Somewhere deep inside subscription TV was the new self-saucing Champions League which now has a format that allows Manchester City and Real Madrid to play each other every week in perpetuity. It’s like those mythical school sports days right-wing loons talk about where everyone wins all the time. If you missed it, don’t worry, there’s a second leg soon and the system is probably skewed to allow both teams to progress to the final in May regardless of the outcome.

Elsewhere, there was the Vertu Trophy… say what now? That’s what used to be the Bristol Street Motors Trophy… say what now? You know, the Leasing.com, The Papa Johns, The Checkatrade, The Johnstone’s Paint, The Auto Windscreen. Anyway, that one.

Meanwhile ITV were showing Exeter City versus Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup. It was Tuesday night, but apparently it’s still the weekend Cup-land with the fourth round fixtures stretched out like pizza dough. It looked like a decent ding dong although it took me a while to realise this was the fixture we sacrificed so that we could focus on …

This… mogadon football. I’m trying to resist the drift into mid-table Championship complacency; if we finish in 16th this season, it’ll be a major achievement and, to prevent us from slipping into a relegation fight, we’ve got to see it through to the end, even if the likelihood of survival is now very high. This probably means we should be satisfied with a featureless goalless draw with Derby as it’s one step closer to our overall goal. 

The truth is, establishing ourselves in the Championship means accepting mediocrity as success. The Championship is like facing a force ten gale; it takes a huge amount of effort just to stay still. The result was not so much a point gained as two points taken off a potential threat. For that, we should be satisfied. 

We don’t want to descend into the ‘appoint Wayne Rooney’ lunacy of Plymouth or Birmingham last year nor do we want to bankrupt ourselves trying to keep up with Leeds and Burnley. But, the reality is that surviving relegation on the last day of the season would probably be more exciting than securing safety in late March after a series of uninspiring away draws.

But, that’s what Gary Rowett is here to do, and who’s to blame him or the club for making that our goal? It’s not our money or our job that’s on the line.

Establishing ourselves is like the difference between investing in secure Premium Bonds rather than cryptocurrency, the gains may be more moderate, but the risk of bankruptcy is much reduced.

But, my goodness it comes at a price, Derby are now in a post-Paul Warne era so Pride Park was supposed to be a cauldron of positive energy. Instead they looked like a team that needed a jolly good lie down, exhausted by Warne’s all-action, high pressure football. It didn’t take long for their remaining confidence and energy to ebb away when they came up against our resolute resistance. 

Not that we were there to entertain anyone, there was no lack of commitment on our part, but we didn’t even try to play free-flowing attack-minded football. Essentially we were there to frustrate, while they were already frustrated.

The commentator, always a treat in these games, was Joe Rawson. He’d already fixed a narrative in his head – Derby were the established Championship side and therefore the aggressor, we were the struggling lightweights desperate for points. Rawson couldn’t rewire his thinking in real time and effectively said we’d snatched a valuable point in a fight for survival we’re not in while Derby were pinned back despite currently being the worst team in the devision.

Derby fans too might do to adjust their thinking towards the realities of their plight, there were audible groans for each misplaced pass, they’d too fallen into the ‘teams like Oxford’ trap.

We offered little, despite Rowett’s insistence that he’d like to have seen a little more attacking zeal from us, it seemed a view taken more in the abstract than the specific. Yes, he’s have liked to knock in two or three goals, you know, for the fans, but only in a theoretical risk-free world. You suspect unlike less successful managers like Paul Warne and Karl Robinson, who drive their sides into the ground chasing vaporous dreams, Rowett is pretty comfortable with getting in and out without too much fuss. 

As a result, life in the Championship is becoming increasingly comfortable. It would take a major collapse and a significant resurgence from others to be drawn deep into a relegation battle. All of this should be a cause for celebration given the expectations of the season and where we were at Christmas, but it does leave a nagging thought that there is a price to pay for such comforts.