First, let’s do science. By the time we faced them last night, a run as extraordinarily long and bad as the one Norwich were on was always much closer to ending than it was to starting. After seven home defeats, even if we’d turned up with our strongest side and played at our very best, at some point they were going to accidentally stumble their way to points. That’s just entropy and the chaotic combination of factors that contribute to a result going your way or not.

Perhaps it was our first Saturday/Tuesday combination of league games of the season, three days after losing Cameron Brannagan and having to grind out an energy zapping draw with one of the best sides in the division in driving rain that just took enough out of us to not perform as we sometimes can.

And maybe the fact it was moved to Tuesday to accommodate our Friday fixture against Ipswich which lost us 24 hours of recovery and travel time that we really needed. Maybe them being 4-1 down to Birmingham with 35 minutes to go on Saturday allowed them to concede that result and conserve just enough energy to come into the game a tiny bit fresher. 

Whatever the reasons, the circadian rhythms of the two sides were misaligned enough to cause a change in fortunes before anyone starts talking about selection or tactics, it’s like the mismatched libidos of an old married couple, when one is up for it but the other can’t be bothered to take their socks off.

The result isn’t terminal, nor was it a must-win. Yes, it was two relegation threatened sides, and yes tonight Sheffield United and Portsmouth face each other. Two games which will most likely re-order the overall relegation picture. But there’s still a long way to go. 

More broadly, an away point against any team in the Championship when you’re us is important regardless of who it’s against. Last season we drew with all three relegated sides on the road and survived with a degree of comfort. Assuming Norwich and Sheffield Wednesday are two of those sides this season, we’ve already improved on that. We just need to find another one that isn’t us. Which is still a very big question.

But perhaps we made it harder for ourselves than we needed to. Vaulks coming in for Brannagan was understandable and necessary. Mark Harris replacing Will Lankshear may have simply been a question of who was fresher. But Harris hasn’t scored for eight months, and Nik Prelec has shown he’s capable of occupying defences in a way Harris doesn’t. For a side that apparently signed ‘fifteen strikers in the summer’ it looked like a regressive move. Equally, Ter Avest replaced Shemmy Placheta, instantly blunting our attacking threat. Placheta may be frustrating, but he can also be a menace.

Any one of those decisions could have been justified on several grounds, but the combination suggested an attempt to either protect players in preparation for Ipswich or to frustrate Norwich and exploit the toxicity that clearly exists around Carrow Road. I got a similar sense at West Brom, with Ryan Mason under pressure, we set up to niggle away at their insecurities first. 

Gary Rowett suggested as much after the game, he talked about timing his substitutions to exploit their frustrations once the game had stupefied (which is not how he phrased it, admittedly). The problem was that by the time that happened we were already a goal down and chasing the game.

Let’s face it, conceding goals is something we’re not immune to as much as we’d like it to be different. I’d question whether the best option is to sit back and to frustrate them and pick away at their confidence. A bit more attacking intent may have done a better job even if it left us a little more exposed at the back – not that they showed much confidence going forward early on.

It was more than just team selection; with Vaulks around we’ve got a threat from long throws, yet on more than one occasion, he lined up to send it into the box before playing it short. We did something similar with at least one free-kick which was asking to be put into the box. It was cleverer than we were last season, but ultimately less effective.

It was all too cute, too forensic, trying to pick away at their insecurities and weaknesses rather than focussing on what we have. By the time we had the players on the pitch to pose a genuine attacking threat on the field, we were already a goal down and had absorbed a tonne of pressure. When it came, deep into injury time, the equaliser was another well worked goal which was frustrating because it shows what we can do. The approach we take allows the margins to become so fine that it’s too easy for something to go wrong and scupper it all.

Is it necessary to be quite so regressive in these situations? I get it against Middlesbrough or Millwall, teams who can pick you off if you’re too open as we saw against Stoke, but a strategy of frustrating the frustrated, jimmying away at a problem that already exists, rather than creating a new problem is like blowing a hole in a wall, then trying to blow up the hole.

‘What a game!’ claimed the Sky commentators at the final whistle as they tried to find a narrative like they were scraping the last peanut butter from the jar. It was one the least ‘what a game’ games you’ll ever encounter. 

The camera panned around the fans, Oxford fans were seen laughing hysterically at our good fortune, Norwich fans consumed by the soul crushing last minute goal. A friend of mine uses a phrase ‘don’t stamp on his flower’; we’d stamped on theirs and drilled it into the ground with our heal. That in itself might be the biggest bonus of the night – to have something tantalisingly close ripped from your hands is psychologically damaging.

The narrative, maybe, was a little deeper. More than once, Gary Rowett has complained about our uneven recruitment in the summer, he already knows we’re at a disadvantage financially in this division. He’ll know more than most that you deal with what you’re given, but perhaps his biases are influencing his thinking. We’re trying too much to over-compensate for our weaknesses and find clever ways of solving the problems it serves up. It’s like we’re an over-protective parent who hasn’t realised that their insecure, awkward child has grown up to become a functioning, capable adult.

We may still have flaws, we always do and always will, but the truth is, we tend to be better when we think less and do more. Maybe we need to accept that we’re a Team Like Oxford and simply focus on being a Team Like Oxford.