We’re constantly looking for signs that our club is going to be OK. Traditionally we look at goals, results and league tables, in the data obsessed modern age we’ve gone more meta looking at expected goals and in-game statistics.

I’ve often wondered if it’s possible to find hidden meaning in football shirts. Beyond the obvious commercial benefit, kit designs presumably have a deeper psychology invested in them, offering the potential to unearth the hidden and subconscious. 

Watford, in recent years, have struggled to settle on which combination of their traditional red, yellow and black they should call their own. This season they’ve gone with red and yellow stripes but in the past have tried hoops, a predominantly black look and even a rising sunrise motif. Is it any surprise that the same erratic indecision seeps into their choice of manager?

Cardiff switched from their traditional blue to red while going through a period of turmoil with their Thai owners. Next season Salford City will stop cosplaying Manchester United and re-introduce their original orange shirts; an attempt by their owners to distance themselves from the ‘Class of 92’ now they’ve all entered middle age? 

By contrast teams like Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Real Madrid position themselves as immovable institutions, immune to the howling winds of change, rarely playing with the fundamental principles of their kit designs.

Away kits also offer further scope for analysis; West Brom often go with yellow and green, to draw deeply from their history, QPR frequently turn to red and black for similar reasons. Beyond these traditional combinations, the scope for analysis is endless. 

I’ve always felt designs with lots of flourishes are a cry for help. It’s like a divorced dad turning up to the PTA Christmas party after a month on the Mounjaro, looking like Gareth Ainsworth in tight jeans, cowboy boots and his shirt unbuttoned to the navel. On one level it’s about showing how great things have been since she left you, on another, it’s a desperate over-compensation.

In recent seasons Oxford have kept things classic; part of a wider goal to embed professionalism into the club. The outrider this season, is the lesser spotted light-blue, ‘oxidised copper’, third shirt, which has had a fated life so far. 

Its launch was unconventional, being revealed minutes before the players appeared in it from the tunnel at Hull in August. That, in itself, was a risk, we’d only won two away games in the Championship in 25 years. You might as well have held a match to its manmade fibres.

It got worse, we conceded inside two minutes and eventually lost in the last minute. The performance all-but ended Elliott Moore’s Oxford career. Luck may not have any relationship to shirt design, but you’re not going to risk it just in case it does, are you?

We haven’t seen it since.

I quite like it, the colour combination is unusual and the design isn’t overworked. It’s the kind of shirt you can wear on holiday without being the kind of peanut who wears football shirts on holiday.

But it was never going to work on the pitch; for one, it’s bold and if you’re going to wear a bold shirt, you’ve got to be good most of the time. It’s too breezy to fully reflect the angst of the season and it uses a summer palette for a sport mostly played in the misery of a cold, wet winter.

We might want to be an oxidised copper kind of club, one that skips through life as if unaffected by the gravity of reality, but we seem a long way from having such a spring in our step. 

Instead, we’ve reverted to our bad-boy all-black kit for our alternative shirt needs. Now we’re in the depths of winter and the guts of the season, it feels entirely aligned to where we are today. 

At the start of the season, we talked boldly about establishing ourselves as a Championship club and not dallying with the relegation places. That overlooked the fact we’ve only had three transfer windows in which to transform ourselves. Gary Rowett has had two, of which one was immediately after he arrived.

There’s been a gradual recalibration of the season since August, a slow realisation that the early predictions were too bold. As much as we’ve invested and improved, others have invested and improved at least as much.

Not everyone is as accepting, last night’s draw with Blackburn underscored many of the frustrations. Last year we looked at most games as a stretch challenge, every point (and some defeats) were viewed as moral victories. This year we’ve gone into games expecting certain outcomes; Norwich? Win, Swansea? Win, Blackburn? Win. Anything less is a failure.

Another way to look at it is not to have expectations which are too precise. Even poor Championship teams are going to be good or lucky some of the time. Equally, some of the good ones will be rubbish. For us, each point, wherever and however it’s claimed, should be cherished.

Any draw on the road should be welcomed, even if something more expansive might have brought more (or less). It wasn’t pretty, it seems we looked at the opposition and weather, expected it to be gnarly, and set up accordingly. In truth, I’m more reassured that we seem to be focussing on getting results rather than playing perfect football, even if it doesn’t offer the aesthetic we’re looking for on a Tuesday night.

Look beyond our own bubble and you’ll find clubs of all colours declaring themselves to be in crisis. Portsmouth fans in particular, are beginning to turn on John Mousinho now they’ve slipped into the bottom three. Spiking Mousinho is the one thing they haven’t tried since they arrived in the Championship, so the pressure on him will grow with every poor result. Adding Pompey to Norwich and Sheffield Wednesday and we just might have our first relegation selection of the season. More importantly, we’re not part of it.

We’re less than what we want to be and more than what we were. The recalibration will put pressure on our collective, fevered mind, it will pull and contort it. Some will want more, others will be satisfied with what we have. This is what the season is designed to do until someone buckles and breaks. The trick is for it not to be us.