The international break isn’t an opportunity to clear the calendar to focus on the thrill of international football. This last one was better than most with the Republic of Ireland’s last second madness against Hungary only being beaten by even more lunacy for Scotland against Denmark. England’s qualification has long been perfunctory and their ‘perfect’ campaign did nothing to change that. If anything, it should be a sign of how wrong international football has become.

I welcome the break, stepping off the treadmill of our league programme knowing that I don’t have to put the remaining scintillas of energy I have onto a gamble I’m likely to lose every weekend. Yesterday, someone on Sky said ‘don’t worry, there isn’t another break until March.’ MARCH? That’s 25 games, eight midweeks, it’s like the prospect of a long dark night having your face pecked by murderous crows. Where’s the relief? Where’s the humanity? 

For the club too, the break is supposed to be an opportunity to re-set, hunker down and have a jolly big think. That’s particularly true for Gary Rowett, who, we assumed was sat in his favourite armchair staring into the middle distance ignoring his family’s offers of tea while he ruminated blankly about the merits of reverting to Rowettball or continuing his current quest.

I’m not sure that Rowettball really exists, I’ve used the phrase plenty of times without being able to put my finger on what it is. Yesterday after Cameron Brannagan was replaced by Will Vaulks we won a couple of throws which were perfectly positioned for a long sling into the box. Vaulks jogged over expectedly, but both times the throw was played short before he could get there. That’s not very Rowettball, is it?

The Rowettball doctrine is that you win set pieces and create chances from there, as though those goals are worth less than ones from open play. It’s always used in the derogatory. Nobody ever talks about Pepball or Tuchelball to describe a relentless winning machine.

What Gary Rowett is really faced with is trying to keep up with the modern game without the tools to do so. That means money, mostly, but it’s also not appearing to have enough influence over recruitment. Even yesterday after the game he said something about not having enough strength in midfield throwing in a jibe about ‘because last summer we signed about fifteen strikers.’ like he’s having to deal with nerds playing Football Manager on their PCs.

It’s interesting, because that deliberate over-exaggeration is the kind of thing you hear in the stands. If the South Stand Upper got their way and we took off every player that someone shouted ‘get him off’ about, we’d be left with about three players on the field by half-time. Someone near me insisted that Luke Harris be removed after his ‘stupid’ challenge on Alfie Jones in a tone which suggests he should never play for the club again. The same person was happy to drink in the joy of his goal a few minutes later. The same goes for Shemmy Placheta.

Pragmatism is also a phrase that gets thrown about, Jerome Sale often caveats it when he says it – ‘let’s call it pragmatism’ or ‘pragmatism, if you like’ – like he’s holding an old lady’s handbag while she pays for stamps in the Post Office. He doesn’t want anyone to think he owns it, perhaps because he doesn’t really know what it’s supposed to mean.

It is pragmatism, but often the term is used incorrectly when referring to Rowett’s approach. It’s more about dealing with what’s in front of you, rather than entangling himself into the fabric of the club. That’s partly about self-preservation, when you’re embedded as deeply as, say, Chris Wilder is in his gilded prison at Sheffield United, it’s hard for any other club to recruit him without some suspicion that he’s not fully committed.

Rowett’s pragmatism is that he’s particularly good at not getting drawn into the quagmire of a club, he sees it for it is rather than what it should be. This season he’s moved the squad on from one dimensional survival mode into something richer. If you compare fixtures this season to their equivalent last season, we’ve only come away with a worse result twice – Sheffield United and Stoke – where we’ve improved on last season’s result five times – Coventry, Bristol City, QPR, Derby and a far better performance against Middlesbrough yesterday. 

The problem he faces is that we’ll always be playing catch up, scrambling to keep our head above the rising tide. There’s no sure-fire solution, there was a mad scramble for Tyler Goodrham to return, and when he did, he was good and solid but never looked like really leading us to another level. Each week Rowett has to throw the dice in the hope the combination he comes up will be enough. He joked at the end of his interview with Nathan Cooper that he thought the players could go again on Tuesday but threw in that ‘I might be completely wrong about that’. 

And that’s true, every combination available to him – and to every fan in their role as fantasy parallel universe football manager – comes with a degree of risk. All the while, as Rowett alluded to after the game against West Brom, many clubs try to solve their problems by changing their manager. We’re the lowest placed side not to have done so, so it’s not unreasonable to think that a change could come if a panic sets in.

But it would also be wrong – to change or to panic. While there were times yesterday where Middlesbrough whispered around us like a mysterious dark spirit from a horror film just out of sight and beyond reach, their threat in front of goal was limited by our discipline and commitment. Our goal threat at least matched theirs, which wasn’t much, to be honest, a product of the conditions as much as anything, I suspect.

Adi Viveash, currently doing a Craig Short/Derek Fazackerly kindly uncle thing at Middlesbrough while they secure another manager, is considered by some as the brains behind their success this season and the success of Mark Robins-era Coventry. But he’s returned some moderate results while in the hot seat, maybe because, as much as he can clarify and strategise, he doesn’t have the elusive quality of a manager to sometimes just be a bit more, well, pragmatic.

So, maybe Rowettball is just football, and pragmatism is dealing with what’s in front of you. The only certainty that we have, going into the next twenty-five games, is that things will change constantly. Injuries, form, signings, good fortune, bad fortune. Sometimes we’ll come up short, and others we’ll do what we did yesterday and deliver something solid and necessary. And maybe, who knows? At the end of the season, that may not be enough, or maybe it will. Pragmatically, we’ll just have to deal with it either way.