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Match wrap | Peterborough United 1 Oxford United 1

It was never going to be anything other than monumental, we’d reached a point of complete singularity. The path to progress was binary, the margins had eroded to nothing, there was no tomorrow or next week, we either did or we didn’t. All the ifs, buts, and could-have-beens, the weren’ts and weres coagulated into a mass as dense as a neutron star. Now it needed to pass through a hole the size of a pin prick.

For me, the churning nerves started during the latter stages of the second leg between Bolton and Barnsley. Bolton had been cruising before Barnsley started to fight back. They failed, ultimately, but it revealed another side to Bolton, one who weren’t inevitably going to be crowned at Wembley. If Barnsley can give them a fright, a team embroiled in a psychodrama of their own making, then maybe we could too. And if we could give them a game, then maybe beating Peterborough meant something.

The scramble for tickets and an ill-planned work meeting meant I had to watch the second leg on TV. There were many reasons for wanting to be there, but one is that anxiety requires a host and when there’s nobody else around you have no other option but to internalise it while the world around you stays normal. At least when you’re part of a collective whole, anxiety is a new shared normal.

Inevitably, TV needed to invent a narrative for the game, it’s not bias, though it’s often mistaken for that, it’s just they have a need to present something coherent to a largely disinterested nation. Peterborough was the thread they chose to follow; their venomous attack – the most potent in the division – and how resolute we’d need to be to withstand them.

John Mousinho, in the studio, embarked on a particularly elongated analysis of our defensive shape, and the flaws within it. This would have been fine if it had been based on a premise that was remotely correct. We don’t have ‘four across midfield’ nor ‘two nines’ (or was it two tens? or a ten and a seven?). Civilisations collapsed in the time Mousinho got through his ambling. The sage of League One had set the narrative.

Darren Ferguson had it all figured out too; patience would be enough, he said, with that we would eventually bow to their pressure. The story seemed pre-written, it now just needed to be told.

But, it wasn’t just Mousinho’s tactical analysis that had misread us, there’s a renewed realignment across the club, we are no longer pointing fingers at each other, we are all facing the direction we want to go. The displays off the field, the performances on it, the owners who help bind it all together, we are all aligned.

The early exchanges did little to challenge the agreed position, Peterborough came to apply a constant, unrelenting pressure until we buckled. And when we buckle, they reckoned, the floodgates would open. The commentary team purred their appreciation, satisfied that the things would conclude satisfactorily. There is nothing better than to be proved right.

But we absorbed the pressure, broke up the play, if we needed to, we conceded awkward, niggly, technical, tactical fouls. In plain sight, we were dismantling the agreed narrative. Each narrow miss or block seemed to fragment them a little more; the frustrations grew, the fans became tense, chances were snatched at.

On the sidelines stood Des Buckingham, impassive, unblinking. He’s a nice guy, measured and level headed, he’s been schooled in the right way. Beyond the steely gaze, there was a deep sense of satisfaction. Elliott Moore admitted the gameplan hadn’t been to absorb that much pressure, it hadn’t been the intention for Cameron Brannagan to head Josh Murphy’s deep cross back across the goal in the first leg either. Buckingham reached beyond the textbook and brought about an inventive street-smarts not even the arch cat fighter Karl Robinson had been able to unlock.

In the commentary box, to his credit, Don Goodman began to shift; Peterborough had all the possession, but their narrative was fragmenting. They controlled the ball, but we controlled the game.

And then we conceded, a deep ball to the back post, Harris outmuscled by Knight who executed a neat finish into the net. That should have been it, their story had been reconstructed, all they needed to do now was complete it.

London Road ignited, flares were hurled onto the pitch, the breakthrough had come, the party had started, the job was all but done. The ‘borough players needed to surge while we were rattled, while the fragments of doubt fermented. Instead, they were forced to wait. A steward with a litter picker discarded a flare like he was disarming an undetonated bomb.

Their delay killed their momentum. We regrouped, the pattern returned. Our defending was resolute and niggly, occasionally it stepped over the mark, but not too much, just enough.

The delays clearing the flares added a few minutes to injury time, in that time we won a free-kick right on the edge of the box. It looked dangerous but really it was too close. If their wall stood firm, Brannagan would have nowhere to put his strike. An organised wall and a clear mind would send them into the break with the lead and surely the tie.

Brannagan’s drive was true and fierce, Burrows flinched, a momentary lapse, the ball cannoned off his arm. Penalty. The narrative was turning, slipping through their fingers. Brannagan’s spot kick was a formality.

We gained the initiative by conceding the initiative, Buckingham’s team had unlocked the most elusive treasure, a Plan B. Block, head, re-set, waste time. They had all the possession, gaining territory inch by inch, but it was predictable. If we could hold our shape, they offered no surprises.

Their advances were slow, our blocks became more resolute, a strand of hair came loose from Ciaron Brown’s man-bun, the dark lord was in his element. When they did penetrate our defences, Sam Long scrambled the ball off the line to safety.

The whole team were in simpatico, the noise of the Oxford fans weaving through any gaps. The menacing Ephron Mason-Clark attacked down the right, Knight caught his cross in full flight. Cumming, quietly heroic across both legs, making difficult things look simple, extended full-stretch, parrying the ball away. It looked spectacularly comfortable. He and Moore embraced, they just seemed to need someone to hold, just for a moment.

Injuries were taken and fouls shared around, there’s beauty in the ugliest things. We were doing to others what is frequently done to us. Mason-Clark lunged at a final, desperate throw to the back post, it was beyond him. It was beyond them.

We’d passed through the pinhole by breaking up the narrative and reconstructing it in our vision. At times it was grotesque, the antithesis of The Way Things Should Be Done. The clinical and analytical was cast aside and in its place came selflessness, togetherness, relentlessness and resilience. Behaviours, they call it.

The fans, the staff and the players celebrated together, we go to Wembley as one.

Match wrap | Oxford United 1 Peterborough United 0

Sometimes, there isn’t a beginning. You follow the thread, it divides into new strands and becomes entangled in others, until the ends of some meet the beginnings of others and the waft and weft combine tightly until there is no beginning and no end, just an indefinable whole.

On Saturday, it was impossible to know where we were, let alone where we’d come from. Nerves jangled in the background. But there was a roller-deck of seemingly infinite possibilities; what did we want? What would it mean? Would a handsome victory set us up for a monumental humiliation in the second leg? A crushing defeat dash our hopes on the reality’s ragged rocks? A narrow loss or win resolve little? A draw nothing at all.

And even if we do prevail, do we really want this? Do we want our delusions expanded to an uncontrollable amorphic size simply waiting to be swatted into gas. Beyond that, a season in the Championship of furious struggle. Do we want this?

The anxieties, though real, were shooting off in multiple directions, but it was hard to place them. For the 2010 play-offs we had to win, it was of existential importance. The campaigns 2020 and 2021, in the context of a pandemic, felt more like we were grappling to re-gain some agency in our lives; playing the games was enough. This season’s different.

With the whole of Saturday to negotiate before the game, there wasn’t a template to follow. Some tried to extend their 3pm kick-off routine; a quick drink and catch up with friends stretched from a couple of hours to five or six. Others, like me, tried to squeeze a normal day in, but I was still time-checking whenever there was a discussion about going off plan.

“I don’t want to be THAT GUY, and I know there’s still six hours to kick-off, but if we do go to that cafe, we might not be able to get to Sainsbury and have a barbeque before I have to go. And I have to go.”

In the end, I was a bit early, the contingency I’d added, plus the secret other contingencies that I ladled on top weren’t needed. The patchy parking – some cars too close, some gaps too big – betrayed the tetchiness of the day.

Despite the size of the occasion, a sell-out is a sell-out, we know from experience that there’s a place for everyone to park and time for everyone to get into the ground. It’s the behaviour that changes in games like this, everyone else has the same idea about getting there a bit early. Once at the ground, the inadequate armada of burger vans, shoved aside to make way for Sky’s trucks, pushed the queues into the streams of people walking the stadium. Everyone was ‘soaking up the atmosphere’, which isn’t something you do for the visit of Port Vale or Burton. We all feed off each other’s nervous tension. You expect it to heighten the frenzy, but it does the opposite, it creates a dense unnerving calm.

Usually snatched conversations were elongated, do you know which rejuvenated indie rock singer has been training with the club? We walked some more and bumped into Gingermoods and Jonny Biscuits, fresh from their ill-advised afternoon in the pub. Some of their new pub mates weaved past. The mood was buoyant, not anxious or expectant, there was no sense of danger or foreboding. We all have this curious intertwined life, wound round the spindle of the little club that plays this daft game; it just makes us happy and content.

In the end, we didn’t get to our seats until ten minutes before kick-off. The stands were full, the handle of the pre-match routine began to crank. From the North Stand, a giant flag appeared, in the East Stand others unfurled while all around balloons, placed in every seat, were inflated. Real people did this for others to enjoy without any recompense. It’s community action, in action. It’s bewildering to think that some have the arrogance to want to deny it.

Football in May is truly beautiful, the sun shone, bathing the stadium in an ecclesiastical light, it was warm enough for short sleeves so the dashes of yellow burnt brightly across the stands. Old shirts were everywhere; the 1996 promotion season, 2007 in the Conference, 1992 ‘TV distortion’ away kit, even a 1983 Jim Smith vintage pinstriped beauty. Proof of a rich and deep history. Those who choose to belittle or deny football’s impact on creating, sustaining and enriching communities, can’t see the evidence in front of them because they choose not to.

The teams appeared, the noise was cacophonous, banners extended, the flags wafted gracefully, almost in slow motion, while flames burnt a heat haze into the scene. Balloons cascaded from every side of the ground. This wasn’t the tightly organised displays of the Ultras, it felt more organic, bannermen of the clans raising their standards aloft. It was positively medieval.

From here, we had to extract a game of football. The oddity is that it almost seems the least important part of the festival. It’s the epicentre that creates a centrifugal force, but the closer you get to it, the less interesting it is.

Buoyed by a torrent of nervous energy, the game zipped by, carried by an unstoppable momentum. But through this we controlled the game; a few weeks ago we’d torn Peterborough to pieces in an almost comical abstraction of what football actually is. It wasn’t going to be like that again, despite Josh Murphy looming in on Jadel Katongo, revitalising the PTSD he’d suffered in our 5-0 mauling.

They call it vivo exposure therapy, where you calm the senses by flooding them with previous trauma. Murphy flooded Katongo until he found a way to cope with a series of petty fouls. Others followed suit, neither side were ready to open up, the onus was on us to attack while they were happy to obfuscate; just physical enough to have an impact, not enough to grab the referees attention. There was a mutual respect, a taught tension. The ball kept moving, but with both teams well drilled, real progress was hard to find.

Half-time came with just a minute of injury time, a tribute to the quality and spirit of the game. The crowd had lulled a little, that early energy wasn’t inexhaustible. The second half continued in a similar vein, though there was a pressing need to take some advantage, Peterborough were happy to absorb the growing tension and recycle it into their own forward movement.

Despite looking a little on the back foot, after eight minutes Josh Murphy forced a corner, inevitably off Katongo, leave him alone Josh, he’s only young. Murphy casually scooped a ball off its plinth, set it in the quadrant and swung a deep high cross seemingly to nowhere. Only Cameron Brannagan seemed to sense the flight of the ball from the moment it left Murphy’s boot, a master of revitalising lost causes, he strained every sinew to guide it back across goal. It looked like a hopeless attempt to keep the ball alive, but it dropped from the night sky and two yards out Elliott Moore rose to guide it home.

Noise cascaded from every corner, a fevered turmoil binding the emotions and bodies in the crowd. Ten thousand people, bound by a quirk of geography and deep shared experience accessing a new level of awareness. A profound rich tapestry of emotion.

Moore set off on a directionless run, pupils dilated, a blizzard of elongated arms and legs, leaping, punching the air, it was like watching an armful of snooker cues being thrown down the stairs. When he eventually stopped, others hung off every limb. It was like Buckaroo or maybe a metaphor for how much the squad relies on him.

The remaining 35 minutes were blurred, we seemed composed, but the taught, strained tension between the sides remained. Eventually, we tired, substitutions couldn’t relieve the pressure. We retreated into a compact shape allowing them to set up camp closer to our goal. With no outlet, the pressure ratcheted up, until Cumming was forced to save smartly at his near post to keep the lead intact.

But we were defensively resolute, led by Moore, and his henchman Brown, while Stevens and Bennett repelled the threats on the flanks. The whistle went, a loud primal roar filled the air. A banshees wail of triumph, though nobody thinks this is done.

But through the paroxysm, came a siren; all we want is something to cling to, something to hope for, a beacon of light to follow and trust. You might not like football, you might not like Oxford United, you may be sceptical about a new stadium for the club, but on nights like this, you can surely see that basic human need?

Match wrap | Exeter City 1 Oxford United 2

There are quite a few ways in which I don’t resemble a duck, but there is one way in which I do. Ducks are terrible at maths, if they lead a gaggle of four or five ducklings to a river, they can generally keep track of them all. If that number stretches beyond nine or ten they have no way of knowing how many ducklings are in their charge – they just have ‘many’. Stragglers beware.

I’d become quickly overwhelmed doing the calculations for simply attending the game at Exeter; we’d talked about going down if it was a coronation of our promotion. Those dreams evaporated mid-season and mid-table looked the most likely prospect – we weren’t going down for that particular wake. A late rally made things meaningful again and a play-off decider was on the cards. When we beat Peterborough, it looked like the play-offs would be decided against Stevenage and Lincoln and that Exeter would be a dead rubber. There were simply too many calculations, so I stuck to my favoured conclusion – an unequivocal ‘maybe’. By the time the whole thing resolved itself, all the tickets had gone.

Even so, for it to be ‘one of those days’ things had to go our way. We’d needed to win, except in the circumstances where we didn’t, we would need to rely on Lincoln dropping points, or Barnsley or even Blackpool. Frankly, who knew anymore?

Beyond that, Exeter, despite their mid-table finish, were on a good run, but had nothing to play for. Lincoln were playing the champions, undeniably the best team in the division, but what effect would a couple of weeks in the pub have? And they’re resting six regulars you say? Great. Barnsley, at home to Northampton, are in some kind of death spiral having imploded by firing their manager.

The artistry of a league table is its ability to conceal its truth until the very last moment. After nearly 2,500 hours of football, played for 10 months, from Carlisle to Exeter, the conclusion is determined in the final moments of the last act. It’s a piece of Victorian engineering which competes with anything created by Brunel, Stevenson or Telford.

But there were still too many permutations, it was positively Boolean – ‘Oxford win BUT Lincoln lose AND Barnsley drop points THEN Oxford make the play-offs’. On and on it went, a deep rabbit hole of possibilities. My mind closed off, I disappeared into the abstract and nebulous; we couldn’t do it, not because we couldn’t do it, but because it was too complicated.

The usual fantasists and dreamers had travelled west, a compulsive yellow wave driven by something beyond the numbers. It’s another beauty of the league table – it means everything and yet, at the same time, it means nothing at all.

Being in the moment would be crucial, in the past I’ve been caught out by the iFollow delay, goals have been signalled by the buzzing of someone’s phone moments before the ball has gone in on the screen. Devices were put away, so for the next couple of hours, we would live on iFollow time ‘GMT +90 seconds’.

The screen came on, Exeter’s halfway line camera points at the off-centre Adam Stansfield Stand making it look like the pitch is on the wonk. Fitting really, nothing was normal anymore. Elliott Moore and Joe Bennett returned to the starting line-up, it felt like Des Buckingham, forever the sensible grown-up in the room, wanted the bigger boys in control. This wasn’t a nihilistic pursuit into the hands of fate, we would control the controllables. Damn you Des and your quiet thoughtfulness. He didn’t even want to know what was going on in the other games until the hour mark, although he later admitted he’d been lying, in doing so, he finally admitted he was human.

We opened with a sharp purpose, a clarity which we so rarely see. It reminded me of playing Rushden in the Conference play-off semi-final, or the final against York when we controlled the moment. Last year we faced with a must-win at Forest Green while ifs, buts and maybes swirled around like autumn leaves in a hurricane, perhaps the five players involved that day could draw on those experiences. As much as we wanted it to be over and to force the outcome, we had to allow the drama to come to us. Our patience, which has sometimes manifested itself as ponderousness, needed to be used to our advantage.

The focussed intensity brought early chances, Ruben Rodrigues should have opened the scoring before Mark Harris pressed Pierce Sweeney into a mistake in the centre-circle and set off towards goal. A smart finish made it 1-0, Harris’ 19^th goal of the season; imagine what he could do if he was a natural goalscorer? The players gathered to congratulate him, but there was a steeliness. This wasn’t done yet.

With Lincoln drawing with Portsmouth, it was all working out. Jerome Sale calmed the stormy seas of optimism by assuring us ‘there’s a long way to go’. It was like standing on a sea wall watching a tsunami on the horizon.

I felt myself recoiling, grief is the price you pay for love; having not expected it, I now thought we could do it. But, if I wanted it too much, the pain of the loss would be too great. I wasn’t thinking of trips to Peterborough or Bolton or Wembley, I was thinking about how we’d recover from this devastating failure. This doom-ridden cave is my safe space.

But while I retreated, the team advanced. Ciaron Brown nearly made it two before Murphy danced into the box and was sent sprawling. Penalty. It’s clearly easier to be in this maelstrom than to watch it.

I can’t figure Cameron Brannagan out; dedicated professional? Street fighter? Thoughtful technician? Homebody? Raging with toxic masculinity? Fish obsessed? The self-declared ‘machine’ drilled in the spot kick. Whatever he is, we’re lucky to have him.

Attention switched elsewhere, Lincoln were drawing and that was enough. Eight minutes of injury time shifted time again. Lincoln were now a few minutes behind us, not only was I on a 90 second delay because of iFollow, destiny was two or three minutes behind that. Time was no longer functioning properly.

Whether the results elsewhere had crept into the dressing room and the enormity of what was happening had started to seep in, we started to concede territory as the second half opened. Perhaps there was an added incentive for Exeter to make a proper mess of things for us. Either way, the plates began to shift, while we were still resolute, everything was happening in our half.

Then it struck, the tsunami hit landfall, as Exeter probed down the right there was news from Sincil Bank. Penalty to Lincoln. The BBC switched audio, we were confronted by sensory overload of watching Exeter attack while listening to Radio Lincoln describing the penalty 250 miles away. The cadence of the commentary matched the drama visuals, even though it was describing something completely different and made no sense. The numbers, the calculations were meaningless. We were in two different timezones and two different locations all at the same time.

Daniel Mândroiu, scorer of the dubious penalty at The Kassam which had set this nonsense up stepped up. The astral influence of fate rested on his shoulder. The beneficiary of gross injustice 10 days ago placed his foot by the ball and inexplicably it gave way, his other foot swept through and connected with the ball, but it was too straight and cannoned off the keeper. As the sound faded back to Nathan Cooper, the Lincoln commentator could be heard saying ‘… and that could be Lincoln’s season done.’ We were gone before we could ask more questions.

We leapt around the living room while an idle dog walker glanced in to see what the commotion was about. Our veins throbbing and heads pulsing, we returned to the screen, the ball was in the back of our net. They’d scored; I don’t know how, but they had. Nathan Cooper assured us the players hadn’t been distracted by our distractions, but I don’t know what to think anymore.

We were in a sea with no tides, the rip curls and undercurrents could drag us below the surface, or a gentle sea breeze could help us to drift harmlessly to the beach. Fate was packing its kitbag and handing itself over to something beyond fate. It was all very meta. We’d been indulged but marginalised by Liam Manning’s cold execution, then expected too much of Des Buckingham moving his family half-way around the world to pick up where his predecessor left off. But now, we were all there, wherever that was, in that moment. In the stands, on the radio, ninety seconds behind on iFollow, we were at one with nature; it’s taken months, but we were all suddenly in the same emotional space. Stick that in your spreadsheet.

Now, every edge was a knife edge and it was just where we wanted to be. The clock started again, Portsmouth scored and Lincoln’s threat subsided. Another in injury time confirmed it. We were, I think, safely in the play-offs. The final whistle went, celebrations were wildly cautious, it was all very Des Buckingham. The BBC switched to Radio Lincoln, but things were also happening at Barnsley, Northampton had equalised and we’d gone up to fifth. For a few moments nobody knew what was happening.

All the calculations and permutations, the underlying stats, the high presses and low blocks. The grinding rationality of stadium planning, the interminable discussions of contracts and transfer windows, the steaming poisonous fatal abyss that a season in the Championship would bring and still, despite best attempts to bring certainty and riches to those who deserve it least, football’s spirit rises again. And with it, so do we.

Match wrap | Oxford United 1 Stevenage 1

Last night at half-time, Alan Judge, Trevor Hebberd and Jeremy Charles were introduced to the crowd in celebration of the 38th anniversary of our Milk Cup win (or specifically, thanks to Sky, the eve of). As the three ageing men, who now wouldn’t look out of place looking for tile adhesives in B&Q, lined up for a photo, a few people around us reflected on our the memories of that day.

The memories of the 20th April 1986 still feel closer in time than last Saturday’s 5-0 win over Peterborough. Last week, for those of you too young to remember, there was talk not just of reaching the play-offs, but of who we might want to meet. Obviously, we wouldn’t want to play Peterborough again. Having just beaten them 5-0, we surely wouldn’t be able to do that a second time. And then there’s Bolton who we wouldn’t want to meet because we’d lost 5-0 to them and we wouldn’t want that to happen again. Neither a handsome win nor humbling defeat gives us a direction of travel, it’s the very definition of living in the netherworld.

When Sky Sports announced they wanted to be part of a League One play-off drama they’d ignored all season, it set up a three game, six day home-stand which lived in the netherworld. On one hand, three home games in six days was the perfect opportunity to cement our play-off place, on the other it represented a brutal schedule of increasingly high stakes under which we could easily buckle.

But, the team and fans responded, making one huge effort to pull away from the tractor beam of our existence. The fans turned up in numbers, the balloons, streamers and flags transformed the Kassam. The players responded against Peterborough, but were knocked back against Lincoln thereby setting up the showdown with Stevenage.

Despite our abject record on TV and the frustrating defeat to Lincoln, there was uncharacteristic optimism, the stands were full, Peter Rhoades-Brown announced live on TV that we were live on TV as the players came out (alright Rosie, play it cool), the streamers and balloons cascaded from all sides. The decision to extend the display beyond the East stand was inspired.

The reason we were sacrificing our Friday night was because Sky thought this would be a showdown to decide the final play-off place. If you think about it, we’d have been excited by that prospect anyway, the neutral would still struggle to be moved by it, so really we were only there because of Sky’s desperate need to be involved; they’re the unpopular rich kid at school who only gets invited to parties because they bring the expensive presents.

Of course, it hadn’t panned out that way – Stevenage have been falling away for a while and last week Steve Evans abandoned ship for Rotherham. So it was just us facing our demons and a largely unknown quantity in a Steve Evansless Stevenage.

There can only be one thing more terrifying than facing a Steve Evans team, and that’s facing one still possessed by his spirit. What would we face? All the usual gamesmanship? The agricultural (and annoyingly effective) football? Or a team stripped of their spirit, released from their captures, traumatised by their experiences, still in awe of the sheer scale of his gilet?

While we started well enough, the truth is, in the netherworld you don’t test these things. Living in a bubble, we opened at the same pace we always do, we probed but didn’t penetrate. Marcus Browne, a true netherworld player was looked sharp, which usually means he’s not far away from injury. A couple of early attacks with menace foretold the story of the half.

Rodrigues’ pass broke the Stevenage backline freeing Browne to race into the box, the keeper bulldozed through him, penalty, surely? The referee theatrically ran towards the offence, when he found the good light for TV, he indicated a corner. The linesman, who presumably thought the flag waving displays around the ground were for him, forgot to look at the offence and offer an opinion. It was such a bizarre decision, fans reached for their phones to check they hadn’t missed anything. They hadn’t, for the second game in a row, our destiny was being determined by a bad penalty decision.

But, this is life in the netherworld, we live and die through marginal decisions that we don’t mitigate by creating a buffer. The penalty decision almost certainly denied us a goal, if we were a team that created chances and scored goals consistently, we could be confident these decisions don’t have big consequences.

The problem was compounded minutes later, benefitting from a muddle on the left and a couple of deflections, Kane Hemmings made it 1-0. The response was solid, forcing the Stevenage keeper into a handful of half-decent saves, before Rodrigues was dragged to the floor for the penalty. It was outside the box and seemed to come from a light touch, but such is the way in the netherworld. Cameron Brannagan converted and it was all-square.

There was still half-an-hour to go, only one team had anything to play for, but the siege didn’t quite materialise. A couple of breaks from Josh Murphy should have brought the winner, but equally we could have conceded. We lacked a ruthlessness, an unquenchable desire for success. Murphy’s first chance, he was all alone, at least with his second he had an option to square it to the only player willing to join the attack – 34 year old James Henry. Were we blunted by the six day schedule or just being drawn back into the netherworld’s liminal space where fate masterminds your destiny?

Into the final minutes, the objective couldn’t have been clearer, we needed a winner, we couldn’t just ‘take a point’. But, rather than push them back, we played like it was the thirty-sixth minute of a game in October. We maintained a sensible balance of risk and reward, moving the ball across the back line, waiting for an opening. Time slipped by further and into injury time, and still nothing, held back by an unknown force. Why not let loose? Why not take a risk? I’m not looking for a Plan B, I’m looking for an unrelenting desire to win and only Cameron Brannagan seems prepared to take the risks to make that happen. He gets criticised for his long range shooting, but at least he’s shooting.

The whistle went, there was an eery silence, have we blown it? One game will now decide that, whether it’s in our hands or not is yet to be determined. Frankly nobody knew what had just happened. But this is where we’re at, and where we’ve been for a while. Another season in League One seems most likely, behind Shrewsbury we’re the longest serving team in the division. Our two play-off campaigns in recent seasons were determined by a last minute goal from Josh Ruffels against Shrewsbury in 2020 and a capitulation by Portsmouth against Accrington in 2021. Our destiny determined by marginal moments that could have gone either way. We have players who can thrill and frustrate – Josh Murphy has been wonderful in recent weeks, but how do you judge his contribution over two years? Ciaron Brown is an aggressive, committed defender, but we still concede soft goals, Mark Harris has eighteen goals this season, but doesn’t seem to have a relentless desire to get on the end of crosses and score goals.

It’s not those individual players, it’s the squad and the collective mentality. And it’s not just the squad, it’s the club. We’ve been like this for the last few years. We need to find a relentless consistency that means individual decisions or errors don’t impact us, we need to take risks that give us more chance of reaping rewards. Until we do that, we’ll always be at the behest of things we can’t control. In some ways, we’ve been like this for a generation, we live in a permanent temporary home, always waiting for the next thing to get sorted – a manager, a player, a stadium, an owner. It doesn’t need to be that way, look at Lincoln, look at Stevenage, look at Wycombe, look at Coventry, Plymouth and Luton. These are all teams that have succeeded despite their circumstances, we can’t always wait for the bigger picture to resolve itself.

So the defining week of our season ends with one win, one draw and one defeat which ultimately defines nothing. That’s Oxford United, trapped in the netherworld.

Match wrap | Oxford United 0 Lincoln City 1

There was always going to be a correction.

Amongst the waves of optimism crashing joyously over the Kassam on Saturday, I had one small nagging doubt. Like Chief Brody in Jaws, spying an ominous fin cutting through the water amongst the holiday makers, there was one thing I couldn’t ignore.

Don’t get me wrong; Saturday was no accident, it was a performance of the highest quality against a very good side in a fantastic atmosphere. Because it was unusual, doesn’t make it fortuitous.

After Peterborough, we’d won three games, scored thirteen goals and conceded none. No team wins every game by four or five goals. No team can avoid conceding for weeks on end. For every action, there’s a reaction, every goal against Peterborough would raise an alert with Lincoln about our attacking threats, every pass would soak more fatigue into Josh McEachran’s muscles. At some point, all these things would conspire to bring this run to an end.

In order to make the play-offs we needed our three win sequence to extend throughout our remaining three league games. Then, to succeed in the play-offs we’d need another three positive results. So, to be successful and get promoted, we needed to conjure up something close to a nine-game winning streak against the best teams in the division. To do that, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.

So, there had to be a correction. There was hope that it would be at a time of our choosing, perhaps at Exeter, secure in the knowledge we’d be in the play-offs, we could rest some players and switch the magic form machine back on for the play-off campaign. There was even some discussion about who we might want to face – probably not Peterborough because we’d beaten them 5-0 recently, or Bolton because we’d lost to them 5-0 recently.

There’s a lot said about navigating the play-offs – teams are seen to have an advantage if they have a late run or go in with momentum. But, let’s pause and think about that – a late run is drawn from middle distance running and the tactic of sitting towards the back of the pack before bursting through at the end. Do teams, by choice, reserve some of their form earlier in the season so they can time their run at the play-off places at the end? Did Lincoln, or indeed us, drop points deliberately in order to spring a surprise late season attack? Seems unlikely.

In physics, momentum is ‘mass in motion’, it implies that a force is being applied. But the force being applied to push a team on isn’t physical, it’s not momentum in the literal sense. These are metaphors for one thing – confidence.

With confidence you try things you might not otherwise. Confidence is the difference between Billy Bodin chipping the keeper from twenty-five yards and him heading for the corner flag to protect a lead. It’s an assuredness in your ability; Cameron Brannagan is immensely confident, he feels able to shoot from distance on a regular basis knowing he’ll fail most times and succeed occasionally.

Lincoln came into the game off one defeat in seventeen. They knew their meat and two veg, short back and sides 4-4-2 worked despite their result against Wigan at the weekend. They had the confidence to defend deeply and in numbers, occupying the great plains of space Josh Murphy enjoyed on Saturday.

I have a sneaking admiration for teams like this, who ignore orthodoxy or established best practice and find a system that suits them. Lincoln may not play progressive football; but they’re very good at what they do. They’re comfortable and confident in their own skin, not something we always enjoy.

This well established confidence gave them licence to be patient, without a point to prove, they focussed entirely on ensuring that whatever they did, they did with purpose. Equally, our risk versus reward model did what it’s supposed to do – we created a couple of chances while conceding a couple of chances. Our confidence from Saturday coupled with their confidence made for a tight and intriguing game.

By remaining steadfast they opened the door for us to become frustrated by our lack of progress, they allowed the occasion to pull the game apart. They knew that as time went on we’d want to take more risks, the crowd would become agitated and mistakes would create openings. The decisive opportunity came within seconds of the restart, the referee, seemingly caught out by their break, rushed into making a judgement rather than a decision. We looked on the back foot and certain to concede, when Rodrigues lunged into the tackle it looked like it might be a penalty, which was enough for the referee, even though replays seem to show that clearly it wasn’t.

From there, by having to go on the front foot, we were on the back foot. As we probed, they overloaded the game with niggles – Browne was battered, Brannagan was introduced and seemed to enter an interminable argument with Ethan Erhahon. Petty fouls forced the referee into a series of marginal decisions, each one making the next more significant and difficult. This all ate time and built tension, the crowd got frustrated and we lost focus. Lincoln stayed resolute, confident they didn’t need to contribute anymore to the game in terms of entertainment, confident that they could run the clock down and still be heroes. We were caught in their trap and could have few complaints.

So the correction has happened, the penalty decision was harsh and perhaps we deserved a point. The response seems fairly measured, nobody is completely surprised that it happened, even though we hoped it wouldn’t. What’s critical is how we respond and how we retain the confidence we’ve established over the last few weeks. Our response is a choice; we might as well enjoy it, it’s not going to get any easier.

Match wrap | Oxford United 5 Peterborough United 0

I was reading about The Falling Man recently, an iconic photo of a suited man falling head first to his death following the 9/11 attacks. In a split second he appears completely at ease and calm despite the horror he’s just witnessed and the inevitability to come.

One psychologist speculated that, in that moment, rather than a sense of terror, he may have felt euphoric, completely free, controlled by nothing more than gravity. Our lives are determined by so many things that give us very little agency or certainly about what might happen to us, perversely, in his final moments, The Falling Man was in complete control, absolutely assured about was coming next.

On Friday, I had a sense of fatalistic giddiness, the outcome of our week was beyond my control. I was happy to hand myself over to fate. The meaning of success or failure was less relevant than the prospect of catapulting into a week without fear. I hadn’t contemplated a near miss or complete capitulation, but even those prospects made me excited for what was ahead.

Walking to the ground was surreal, there was a man in a fluorescent singlet and matching headband in Gillians Park loudly playing Eastern European soft rock through a Bluetooth speaker while he pumped iron on the outdoor gym. Then a child went past in a small electric car being driven by his dad using a remote control. Something had changed, the world had become lopsided.

Peterborough fans arrived in good numbers and good voice, fresh from their Wembley win and a regulation thrashing of Port Vale. There’s something ominous about them – their manager Darren Ferguson has an association with the club going back seventeen years, their owner Darragh MacAnthony has been chairman for eighteen. They’ve won four promotions and two EFL Trophies. They’ve spent thirteen of the last sixteen seasons in the third tier. They are the quintessential third division assuredness. Unrelentingly solid. They are very much second toughest in the infants.

The teams stepped into sunlight, balloons cascaded from the East Stand, streamers and flags fluttered in the light wind. The stand was alive with movement. It looked good, it felt good. The season had been so grey and introspective, suddenly we’d raised our sights to the prospect of something more worthy than feeding our own self-pity. For once, we’d grasped the occasion. This time, we seemed to get it.

While we suffered the body blows of losing Cameron Brannagan and Elliott Moore, Peterborough stepped onto the field wearing a kit which Brinyhoof described as ‘someone’s left a red pair of pants in the white wash pink’. It wasn’t the pink, it was the washed out shade, the lack of commitment, their sturdy reliable DNA, nearly twenty years in the making, seemed somehow weakened.

Even their kick-off seemed slow, playing along their backline at a snail’s pace, a familiar pattern, ‘modern football’ I sighed quietly. Mark Harris traced the ball like an old man keeping an eye on some noisy kids, checking they weren’t dropping vapes in his garden. Perhaps they were trying to establish some control, but they seemed unwilling, or unable to stamp their authority.

Perhaps they thought they’d play through us; bypassing Josh McEachran and pressing on our shaky defensive line. Maybe they thought they could strike at will. Maybe they’d failed to see the real threat in the plainest of sight.

But McEachran stood strong, he was the platform, intensely metronomic, simple and straight forward. He wasn’t Brannagan, there would be no balls sprayed across the midfield. He would do the right things all the time. And in doing so, he unleashed hell.

Josh Murphy’s form was hardly a secret, on Friday he featured in The Mirror talking about his rejuvenation. Goals, chances and assists have come like a tidal wave in recent weeks. It wasn’t long before he was introducing Jadal Katongo to what a night in Murphy Town was really about. It’s not just his raw pace, as devastating as that is on its own, it’s his reaction speed and acceleration. I’ve only seen that in a few players at The Kassam, and they were wearing Manchester City and Arsenal shirts. He’d show the ball to Katongo, entice him into challenge, but as the defender committed, skip past him whippet quick. If Katongo sat back, he’d would simply run at him forcing him to retreat. Unplayable is over-used in football, but that’s what he was.

After a few minutes, Des Buckingham switched Murphy and Dale Owen over – an old Jim Smith trick – after a renewed battering he switched them back, Katongo and Harrison Burrows, the other full-back and Wembley hero, were probably looking at the scoreboard wondering why time had stood still. We hadn’t reached twenty minutes.

Eventually Katongo succumbed, swinging in with a panicked challenge to bring Murphy to the floor in the box. His protests seemed to be less about the legality of the challenge, more that it just wasn’t fair to have a player of that ability in League One. Harris made it 1-0.

Ten minutes later, their brittle confidence crumbled to dust, eroding like a sandcastle at high tide. Apparently, when you see something, your brain captures the information in front of you and sketches out what you’re seeing, your brain then fills in the details with logical fragments from your memory bank to make a fully formed picture.

So, when the Peterborough defence, casually played the ball along their backline under almost no pressure before their keeper delicately chipped the ball to Murphy to head into an empty net, my brain couldn’t calculate what had happened. I had no stored memory of that pattern of play, even moments after it had happened, I couldn’t describe it to you.

Seven minutes later, we were off again, Goodrham accelerating out of defence and rolling the ball into the path of Murphy to run at Kotongo, there was only one outcome as Rodrigues slid home the cross. For forty-five minutes, Murphy had been devastating, completing his journey of redemption – ‘the best player in League 1’ – a typical Robinsonian understatement – was the best player in League 1 and maybe beyond that. He didn’t need his talent bullied out of him by Robinson, or frozen out of him by Manning, he needed something more subtle. Jason Burt, Chief Football Correspondent at the Telegraph, and closet Oxford United fan, described it as one of the best performances he’d ever seen. Ever. By any footballer. Ever. Ferguson replaced Kotongo at half-time, presumably to protect his wellbeing.

I knowingly predicted a fightback in the second-half, or at least a tightening of the game, but we’d pierced into the very soul of Peterborough’s DNA, a DNA years in the making, a DNA which has them comfortably sitting fourth in the table, a week after they’d won at Wembley. They were carrion on the highway, we could play with them.

This was showtime, fluid, elegant and coherent, we grabbed the occasion, doubled down on our advantages, built on our gains. Roared on by a feverish crowd, Fin Stevens’ driven cross was met by Rodrigues with a diving header for number four, like Keith Houchen in the 1987 FA Cup Final. Not yet sated and into the last minute, Greg Leigh launched a long free-kick into the path of Billy Bodin, a quieter more disciplined member of the squad. The sensible thing would have been to go to the corner flag; that’s professional, that’s game management. But that was not this day, he steered the ball wide beyond the demoralised Peterborough backline and directed the fifth into the top right hand corner, a breathtaking finale and a carbon copy of Michael Owen’s goal against Argentina in 1998. It was like we were channelling the history of football.

Despite the worrying injuries and cramps, James Henry breaking down within a couple of minutes of coming on and appearing distraught, euphoria swarmed around a stadium which only weeks ago seemed lifeless and limp. The club re-galvanised after a period of tepidness and turmoil. The best ever performance at the Kassam? Probably. Our best league performance ever? Yes, maybe even that too.