Americans will celebrate anything, which is odd given their evident descent into a moral abyss. Last week, the Boston Red Sox finished third out of six in their division at the end of the regular baseball season. Despite this moderate performance, they somehow qualified for a wildcard spot in the World Series play-offs. The chances of them advancing to the championship are remote to say the least, but it didn’t stop the algorithm serving up pictures of them spraying champagne in their changing room while wearing t-shirts bearing the legend ‘OCTOBER BASEBALL’.

The mere act of playing baseball in October in America is like passing into a mythical time, it’s the threshold on which success and failure pivots. I like it as a tradition, it’s something that can translate into the English football season.

The increasingly co-ordinated calendar means each phase of the season, serves up a different vignette, each with its own character and complexion. 

The games before the first international break are a prologue; the show before the show, welcoming everyone back from their summer holidays.

Once the transfer window closes, the season accelerates to its cruising height. It’s only in October, when you start to feel a chill in the air, that the season finally starts to feel real.

Midweek football is frequently romanticised, but its arrival has a dark and sinister side. For all its seductive qualities, its real purpose is to attack you from all sides like a gang of hoodlums beating you with socks full of snooker balls.

The whole point of the season is suddenly revealed; the light footed dance through the opening weeks is replaced by an unrelenting attritional war against the unforgiving schedule. There’s no more entertainment, the goal is simply to survive the onslaught. It feels like we should be doing some kind of macabre dance to announce its arrival, like the Mexican festival Día de los Muertos – The Day of the Dead.

Want to feel pain? We’ll give you pain. The opening day of this hideous spectacle was the visit to QPR. Fittingly, Rangers marked it by charging our fans ruinous ticket prices. Perhaps they assumed that if you’re the kind of person sadistic enough to attend a midweek away fixture, the price you pay to do so isn’t really going to determine whether you go or not. 

With two games in a week, there was plenty of debate about how Gary Rowett would manage his squad. Could Will Lankshear bury himself physically twice in such a short period of time? Would Sam Long and Ben Davies alternate? Should he play Jack Currie or Greg Leigh? What would happen to Brian De Keersmaecker and Filip Krastev when faced with real English football? But equally, if we made changes, would we be too weak?

In the end, Rowett held firm, making no changes at all. A surprise and a bit of a risk, maybe not for this game, but certainly for the visit to Watford on Saturday. QPR, on the other hand, blinked, making five changes. Maybe their draw with Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday suggested that things needed freshening up. Or, maybe their manager, Julien Stephan, looked at us and compared it to their visit to Bristol City on Saturday and decided we were the easier option and that he could win with a weakened side. That suits us fine, the longer that thinking goes on, the better it is for us. But, chill, Julien, mon ami, Bristol City are a doddle.

Sky positioned the fixture as a resurgent home team facing visitors who are finally being found out. I get it, there’s lots to like about QPR, I particularly admire a stadium which won’t conform to the norms of modern television. All the action down the right wing was practically an aerial shot.

Accordingly, the cadence of the commentary tried to suggest that Rangers were constantly upping the ante and building pressure that would eventually see us buckle. In truth the game was unremarkable, Rangers offered the aggression you would expect of a home side, but we never looked unduly troubled by it. We had no reason to push for all three points and were happy to protect the draw and probe only when it was safe to do so. It wasn’t negative, it was just satisfyingly disciplined.

This is one of the things that gives me encouragement for the season, there’s no sense of panic. Teams who end up being relegated often spin out of control under the pressure of trying to stay up in a blizzard of fixtures. At its heart there might be financial problems, managerial aberrations or just blind panic. The key is that when you come face-to-face with the grim truth of the season, that you approach it with a pragmatic calm and not be scared by it. That alone can be enough to navigate the roughest sea and find a place of safety.