For a club so ingrained in the folklore of Oxford United, QPR represent something of the Grim Reaper of our modern Championship experience. Our first trip to Loftus Road last season was widely viewed as the defeat which sealed Des Buckingham’s fate. Then for the return fixture, there was another hack of its scythe; their 3-1 win put us on what we thought was the brink of relegation. This season they’ve helped serve up two doses of turgid slop making us question whether we want to even be in the Championship.

Teams don’t tend to dwell at this level; some have lofty aspirations to suckle on the gold-tipped udders of the Premier League. Others are scramblers, desperate to retain their status and suckle on the less gilded udders of those above them, if that mental image isn’t too disturbing.

But, QPR dwell. If they were a lower league side, they’d be a Peterborough or Gillingham. Let’s be honest, we’d love to reach the lofty heights of Championship dwellers, gently roaming the plains in search of ta cave to sleep in or a plentiful oasis of flora and fauna to chew on; a life disturbing nobody, just existing.

As I got out of the car last night I was unexpectedly buffed by a foreboding gust of wind. After a day of unremarkable, grey January weather, the night was turning, like an ethereal beast was awake. By the time we were in the stadium, the rain was cascading down, the raindrops swirling in the beam of the floodlights. It didn’t feel like a Championship game, more like the midweek visit of Accrington or Port Vale from the days before these days.

Were the relegation gods being summoned? Beckoning us back to the desertlands? 

The Baxi lightshow was back, waved like a crucifix to dispel the demons around us. As a show, it’s surprisingly effective, although the sound system strained as Prodigy’s Voodoo People spewed out at double time. It was like the stadium was rejecting the injection of razamatazz like it might a transplanted kidney.

The pitch was showing signs of saturation long before kick-off. Pools of water glistened on the surface of the pitch as the players warmed up. At kick off, QPR lined up five or six players to attack the long ball they planned to bazooka down the right wing. It was like someone had been watching an old episode of Rugby Special from 1975.

The gods gripped the game tightly, knuckles whitened, tactics and technique were squeezed out. If the ball was played along the ground, it held up in the sodden turf, when it was launched into the air, it would be caught in the swirling wind only to be dropped in a time and place that was of the choosing of the beasts.

If we tried to be direct, the ball simply took off, like throwing a paper aeroplane into a hurricane. By a tiny margin, QPR dealt with the conditions slightly better. The wind in their faces, the ball slowed enough to allow some functioning, sentient thought into their play. Otherwise, it was little more than forty-five minutes of running and kicking.

At half-time I glanced at my phone. Disjointed, rambling, incoherent, I wasn’t sure why the country’s finest political commentators were watching the game. In fact, Donald Trump was hosting a press conference. We’re in a world where the analysts are trying to draw something rational and meaningful from something undefinable and without logic. The analysis is macro and strategic, but how far are we from simply admitting that it’s a mad old man farting out whatever pops into his brain? 

Likewise, our instinct is to extract meaning from something where there is none. Was our performance poor? How could we improve it? What influence could any changes make? Nature is a powerful thing with a vast arsenal with which it can kill us; dementia, decline or Damoclesian weather systems. It was just doing its thing and we were succumbing to it.

The second half wasn’t much better, although we were. Occasional breaks out of defence felt like we were running up a pitch twice as long as it should be. In this contorted reality, as the game went on, the distance from box to box stretched out further. 

Matt Bloomfield introduced Jamie McDonnell, another from the latest batch of Ed Waldron’s coterie of signings and the one which has garnered the most excitement. Waldron is an engaging character, but he’s like a cat that brings in dead birds as a present. Want a defensive midfielder? He’ll get you five. McDonell barrelled around as advertised, destroying and disrupting, like a million pound Dannie Bulman. You cannot help but be impressed, if there was justice, he’d have been man of the match.

While our midfield is now bolstered, our defence is quietly crumbling; Elliott Moore has gone, Ben Davies has never quite arrived, Michael Helik was withdrawn because he ‘felt something’ – Sam Long and Ciaron Brown feel like the British army at Rorke’s Drift against the Zulu hordes; firing their muskets into an unstoppable avalanche.

In the last moments, Rangers flashed a cross across the penalty box as Rayan Kolli slid in, in a split second the vortex of relegation opened, but when he failed to connect it closed again. We’d stared briefly into the abyss; what’s worse, the fear or the reality of relegation? 

The end was like waking from a fevered dream; as consciousness returned, we pieced together the horrors, dismissing the hallucinations, ultimately we’d achieved nothing, but we lost nothing as well. A night to forget.