There are things we see every week in football which are a complete fiction – foul throws are never punished, half-time entertainment is never entertaining and mid-table safety is never safe. 

Mid-table is portrayed as a gravity defying bubble. Looked through the prism of the relegation zone, it’s nirvana, from the play-offs, it’s an eternal damnation, when you get there, it’s neither. 

The perception is that if you’re mid-table, the prospect of achieving anything meaningful is remote to non-existent. When I’ve spoken to friends about Oxford’s prospects this season, they’ve shrugged their shoulders and told me we’ll be fine because we’re ‘safe’. 

We haven’t been a team that’s strived for mid-table for years, but I can’t remember a time when we’ve been in that range and not had either a nagging fear of going down or a growling frustration that we should be achieving more. Mid-table isn’t a safe haven, it’s a transitory phase.

This season I’ve tried to adopt two mindsets – the first is that from day one we’ve been in a relegation fight. The second is to look at the table like an outsider would. When we were nine points clear of relegation and neutrals shrugged their shoulders at our fears, I tried to adopt that same perspective.

But do I know too much or the neutrals too little? They won’t consider our struggles with goals or our difficult run-in. Equally, they don’t fret over our lack of options at left-back or strength up front, they objectively look at the table and assess our prospects based on what typically happens in similar situations.

After Norwich and Coventry, it felt like a wedge had been placed in our slide. Hull felt like an opportunity to capitalise and steer our supertanker into calmer waters.

We’ve got used to midweek Championship football on Sky; gone is the romance of ‘games under the lights’; in its place a sense of underwhelm, financial shortcutting and contractual obligation. 

There was, at least, the familiarity of Robyn Cowen in the commentary box. We’ve had an Oxford fan, Simon Watts, on the microphone previously, but Cowen is distinctive as the voice of Women’s football in this country. It doesn’t take much to discover she’s also an Oxford fan. With her neutrality on trial, I half expected her to theatrically stumble over her pronunciation of Hidde Ter Avest just to prove her impartiality. But, her BBC schooling runs deep, so a sense of balance was maintained throughout. 

Not that she was under any pressure, she must have been aware that for many viewers she was ‘Robyn off the Dub’ but unlike when she’s on England duty, there’s no pressure to reflect the cultural zeitgeist. She was never likely to need the masterful poetry of “Dream makers. Record breakers. Game changers” for this one but maybe she had “Perennially goalless, creatively listless, offensively clueless” taped to her commentary booth just in case.

The first half wrote its own story, Hull had the better possession, we had the better chances. Our evolution into a set-piece monolith makes sense, but pragmatism is draining. When Elliott Moore headed narrowly wide, Cowen and her co-commentator Andy Walker seemed so consumed by ennui the chance was like two neighbours discussing the mildly diverting novelty of seeing a parrot fly over their house. 

Gary Rowett said after Norwich that his switch to a back-three had been driven by a need to do something different. He’s right, famously, doing the same thing and expecting different results is a sign of madness. For Hull, he switched back to a back-four and brought in Ruben Rodrigues, Stan Mills and Matt Phillips . We even adopted a daring white shirts and shorts with yellow socks combo.

Change is good but it helps if you have an idea of what that change is supposed to achieve. Perhaps inevitably, the first half finished goalless, but what seems to be increasingly the case nowadays, what was happening elsewhere changed our stagnant picture. While we drifted ineffectually, elsewhere goals were going in. It was like being shelled by a demoralised drunken Russian conscript. You didn’t know where the next one was coming from, but it was devastating when it killed your granny.

And the problem on Wednesday was that these shells were dropping with unerring accuracy; Stoke and Plymouth were leading, compounding the impact of Tuesday’s wins for Derby and Luton.

The second half continued in the attritional tradition. If we were feeling the malignant threat of the darkening clouds gathering around us, it didn’t show. A point would do, and it seemed, Hull were happy to oblige.

Then the metaphorical parrot flew overhead again. Occasionally Michal Helik shows the awesome power you probably sense when a blue whale briefly surfaces next to your fishing trawler. Channelling the glacial majesty of Matt Elliott, the Pole connected with Matt Phillips’ corner and guided the ball into the goal disturbing a family of dormice who’d set up home in the apparently abandoned safety that was the back of the Hull net.

We were leading, the truth of mid-table spoke again, through the flotsam and jetsam and the ebb and the flow, the decree was that we are still good enough.

In context, holding out against an impotent and dispirited opponent seemed entirely possible. We just had to dig in. But while we were still fetching our spades from the shed, Joe Gelhardt danced through our defence and equalised. Oh well, maybe a point isn’t so bad.

Then, just three minutes later, Gustavo Puerta forced himself inside, teetering along the touchline like a circus high wire act. Emboldened by his unfettered progress, he travelled so far and with so little challenge, I was beginning to think the suspiciously odious chicken sandwich I’d for lunch was making me hallucinate. 

All season we’ve been looking for a player who can take chances in front of goal, we just hadn’t anticipated it might be Jamie Cumming. Following his howler and penalty save against Coventry and his last minute block against Norwich, Cumming now seems to be instigating some kind of insane goal/save tit-for-tat trade war with himself that would make Donald Trump proud. Collecting Puerta’s cross, he adjusted his feet and instinctively guided the ball beyond himself for 2-1. Mark Harris stared at his boots quietly asking them why they wouldn’t do that. 

It’s hard to say whether the remaining 14 minutes were brave or foolish, like a trappist monk in a brothel, we seemed to gain more freedom but had little idea what to do with it.

The good news is that this isn’t over, it would be insane for us to give up now. Collectively the team’s below us have won six times in the last 24 games. It’s just that four of those have happened since Saturday. Perhaps that signals a tidal resurgence or maybe it’s a quirky data point. What is clear is that we’re not in the bosom of mid-table and perhaps we never were. Instead, we’re in a raw dog relegation fight with opportunities for points running out.

While you’re here…

Florence Park Talks brings you a celebration of Oxford United literature as we bring you Mad Dog and The Glory Years… Live!

26th March, Florence Park Community Centre, Oxford, 7.30pm.

Book your tickets here.