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.

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?

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.

Most football stories are written backwards – the focal point is a career or club defining triumph from which a thread is drawn back through the months, years and decades to find its origins. The aim is not to describe the planned and accidental circumstances which brought about that win, but to create a clear undeniable pathway of destiny.

Many footballer’s autobiographies literally open with a chapter on the pivotal moment of their career, before reverting back to the cobbled streets of their childhood to retrace their steps. It creates a myth that these things are pre-written.

Perhaps it’s because we are increasingly a post-war generation – people who haven’t nor want to experience a war – that we’ve become less interested in these supposed pivotal moments in global or personal histories. There is now a preference for social histories, the history of the mundane, where there is no defining pinnacle. There are three books by Mark Kurlansky – Milk, Cod and Salt, which tell the stories of how these three run-of-the-mill things shaped our societies over many generations. They’ve probably had more impact on everyday folk than the battle of Agincourt. Most football stories, the ones that rarely make it into books or even anecdotes between fans, are social social histories. It’s The history of meandering nothingness, things which don’t really start or end, they mould and shape. The kind of history that ultimately defines a club like Oxford United.

When the rare, glorious moments come, you can sense it; in 2016, I was confident we’d be promoted even though the margin of error towards the end was virtually nil. It was a team that almost couldn’t fail. In 2010, likewise, promotion looked an inevitability from the early games, even if the gap we had to squeeze through was much narrower than in the Football League.

Of course, memory has edited out the blips – both seasons had big wobbles which could have derailed the end point. Instead, they merely created more theatre for the eventual triumph. In April 2016 we went through a sequence of one win in six, which just set up the final three victories that sealed promotion. In April 2010, it was one in eight before re-finding our form and storming through the play-offs.

But there was still a vibe that something was happening, something which is hard to detect this season. At the start of the season it felt like we’d found a promotion pace, then Liam Manning left and we seemed to be heading back our normal state of perpetual transition, then Des Buckingham started and the story took on a new dimension, now a few games in and a defeat to Peterborough and it’s hard to know quite who we are.

Buckingham was pitched as a continuity candidate, which is unfair because he isn’t. He may have some of the same schooling as Liam Manning, but to constrain him to being Manning 2.0 leaves him nowhere to go. He needs to be allowed to be Buckingham 1.0.

The challenge is that what he’s inherited, at least in terms of league position, was nigh on perfect. He just needed to be a coach that changed precisely nothing. I’d argue that that there was a degree of luck involved in getting to that position – we scored nine goals in four games between Stevenage and Blackpool, eight of which were scored by defenders. That’s not a normal cadence, although we take that kind of luck and Manning will rightly argue you create your own, it’s not the kind of sequence we can expect throughout the season. There were structural weaknesses in the squad, particularly as a goalscoring threat, that had yet to be fully tested.

Now is the time when we’re going to be fully tested. We’ve done the preamble and are now at the foothills of the middle section of the season, but it’s hard to know if we’re prepared for it. This is the section which rattles the bones – games are relentless or disrupted, injuries throw you to the left and right, the transfer window opens and you wait to see what you’ll lose or gain. Plotting and planning goes out the window, decisions have to be made in an instant. There’s a sequence in the podcast Karl Robinson did for the BBC where he’s discussing with his staff how they’re going to navigate a three or four game sequence with hotel stays (Robinson rules out one hotel because he thinks its haunted). You get a sense of how these decisions are closer to random guesses than objective opinion. Admittedly, that might be a Robinson trait.

Liam Manning never had to make these decision or face these dilemmas. His legacy is cast in amber, having negotiated only the calmer waters of the opening phase of the season. Now Des Buckingham is burdened with what comes next without the benefit of being involved in any of the pre-season strategising. He and we just have to hope we’re robust enough to withstand the roughest seas.

In a season that seems to be struggling for a narrative, it’s perhaps fitting that we now face a derby which has been in deep freeze for nearly a quarter of a century. In truth, we have no idea what it’ll be like when it’s thawed on Tuesday. They may be too pre-occupied with their own woes to really notice or may play with a freedom we don’t have. And the fans? Many will have no experience of a Reading derby, any vitriol will be, ultimately, performative, because there’s nothing for us to resent them for, apart from a vague notion of a rivalry we have little knowledge of. In a season without a central story, this is set to be a derby without one either.

Imagine a Venn diagram, in one circle there’s nothing, in the other circle there’s nothing, in the intersection there’s my knowledge of Peterborough. I have absolutely no concept of Peterborough; what it’s like, where it is, its history, who lives there. I have similarly little knowledge of its football team. Barry Fry, Darragh thingamabob (the owner), and Darren Ferguson, that’s it. They occasionally arrive from League One central casting, sometimes they even get promoted, but beyond that I know nothing.

So, when brinyhoof suggested a Thelma and Louise-style road trip to wherever it was we ultimately ended up, I took it. It’s not one of those away days where you end up in a soup of other football pilgrims at a service somewhere north of Birmingham, it’s a meander through featureless A roads. There’s the odd standalone McDonalds and a remarkably big shopping centre in Rushden, but we’re not navigating Route 66 here.

It felt like a long time since the Derby game, since then, a revolution has been underway. There was also a sense of nihilism – in my great end of season predict-o-rama, nearly 70% of you thought we’d come away with nothing. Going nowhere to get nothing had a certain romance to it. In fact, when a work colleague asked about my weekend plans I found myself glowing with pride telling him my plan was to go to Peterborough to watch a team that hasn’t won in eleven games. I suspect I’ll have HR enquiring about my wellbeing on Monday.

When brinyhoof bought our tickets, we debated whether we wanted top or bottom tier. We opted for top tier because it would be a better view. Having navigated a turnstile so small it was clearly designed for our emaciated, forebears suffering starvation from after The Great Depression, it turned out the choice was between cramped plastic seats and cramped wooden seats. Each one was moored by reassuringly rusted and sturdy metal bolts clearly driven into the terrace sometime before the invention of television. We folded ourselves into the space so small, being over six foot tall, by half-time, I’d lost all feeling in my foot due to a lack of blood supply.

Approaching the ground, you get a sense that Posh fans are reassured by the monotonous certainty of the matchday experience. Despite the reputation of its owners, the reality is more mundane. It is neither a progressive ambitious club, nor a failing entity, it is just there. There’s little sense of an ambition beyond staying in business. To punctuate the pedestrianism, three mascots navigated the pitch pre-match to bring some sense of fun to the proceedings. Two copyright breaching Bob The Builder types (presumably representing stadium sponsors Weston Homes) each had giant fixed stares and faintly sinister maniacal grins on their oversized foam heads. Students of the marketing profession will appreciate that this is a sure-fire way to get children interested in large scale housing development. 

They were accompanied by a threadbare rabbit mascot called Peter Burrow – imagine the stellar career someone’s had off the back of that moment of genius. This is not to be confused with their left-back Harrison Burrows who shows no signs of being lapin-like and is therefore no relation, despite being such a local we saw him walking home from the stadium after the game.

Incidentally, having looked it up, Peterborough’s cathedral can be traced back to a monastery founded by an abbot named Sexwulf (more likely Seaxwulf, but let’s go with Wikipedia’s typo), it beggars belief that the club haven’t developed a fun mascot called Sex Wolf dressed in leathers that louchely engages middle aged fans in some family-fun-filled half-time on-pitch dogging. Instead we had some kids chipping a ball into a skip.

Liam Manning said that the performance showed what they’d been working on in training. Defending from the front, protecting a point as a priority, he’s been clearing out the mental clutter of the latter Robinson era. There’s only so much he can achieve without the benefit of time or a transfer window, so team shape and attitude is where he can hope to get some improvement.

It worked, Josh Murphy who’s looked lost all season, seemed more content working as part of a whole. He no longer had to prove himself to be the best player in the division on his day or whatever it was Robinson called him. Yanick Wildshut and Kyle Joseph looked similarly more comfortable working hard for the team rather than than carrying it. Robinson had put half the team on pedestals in the hope it might inspire them, instead it seemed to fill them with dread and make them lose their minds. It was a newfound team-focus, a work ethic to achieve a collective objective over-writing the Robinsonian desire to blast our way out of trouble with moments of genius from the best players in the blah blah blah. 

In truth, it made the game rather featureless, we were low down in the stand so you could see the effort being put in, but the game lacked any urgency and there were only half-chances throughout. There was one moment when the Oxford fans became particularly animated, but the ball was being worked backwards from an attacking position, through the midfield and along the backline. A collective appreciation of being in the trenches together, solidarity renewed. 

It felt like we’re over the grieving of what we seemed to have lost this season, we’re beyond the anger of what caused that. We’re now settled to achieve a goal of avoiding relegation. It’s not the original goal, nobody who travelled to Derby on the opening day of the season expected it, but it’s our reality and that’s what we have to deal with.

Only in the last few moments, including eight gargantuan minutes of injury time, did anxieties begin to creep in. While we’d gone into the game anticipating a defeat, the point was now in our hands, players threw themselves into challenges as their minds screamed for them to stop. They refused to let this one go. The referee finally brought the game to an end, fans and players celebrated together like it was a win. A bit embarrassing really, but at the same time reassuring; a trip to nowhere, expecting nothing, but getting something, a good day out.  

I’m on holiday; a fact I directly attribute to Michael Appleton’s first season at Oxford. The whole thing was such a dreadful sludge, I decided two things; unless things improved, 2015/16 would be my last as a season ticket holder and, secondly, that I would stop organising the rest of my life around the fixture list.

The promotion season saved me from giving up my season ticket, but it was liberating to give myself permission to not to have quite so much of my time dictated by football. Most football is rubbish, most games are forgettable, we attend in part in the hope of seeing extraordinary things. This means, by definition, most things are ordinary. There’s little to lose when you sacrifice the odd game, you have to be particularly unlucky to miss something extraordinary. Caring a little less has its advantages.

With the exception of, perhaps, the League Cup games against Manchester City, I never go into a game thinking we’ll lose, even when we’ve been at our very worst, something convinces me to believe. But some games offer more optimism than others. Peterborough was never going to be easy; they’re a very good side, a win was never going to be the most likely outcome, a point would have been acceptable, a defeat, not exactly a shock. I didn’t feel I’d miss a lot.

However, in the context of our current situation, any loss was going to heap more pressure on Karl Robinson. Grant Ferguson’s programme notes before the game raised a few questions, when mentioned a ‘vote of confidence’. He can’t win really – if he gave a vote of no confidence, he’d have to sack Robinson, if he gave him a vote of confidence, speculation would be rife of what that would really meant. If he said nothing at all, then the vacuum would be with whatever predominant narrative was.

He did, and I think this is a mistake, reiterate how much everyone cares about the club’s situation. This has become a trope to mock Karl Robinson with. It’s something he brings up time and again, which is weird, because I’ve never seen any suggestion that commitment is a problem. More caring is not a solution.

So, what is the problem? Perhaps it’s the endless quest for the perfect full-back; ones we can’t quite afford forcing us to seek out loans and curiosity signings like Chris Cadden and Djavan Anderson. Maybe it’s that you can’t sell a ball playing centre-back from the heart of defence every season for three seasons and not expect to, eventually, run out of suitable replacements.

For a while, it’s felt like we’re a club that competes on the edge of the play-offs and who need a bit of luck or an injection of cash to go further. For two seasons we got that bit of luck, last season was perhaps a bit of an adjustment back to something more normal.

The thing is, we’ve been spoilt by those play-off campaigns. Achieving the play-offs has been materially more normal than missing out, even if, in reality, we were reliant on a last-minute goal and a pandemic, and then a strong run in and the collapse of Portsmouth to make the two post-seasons. 

As a result, last year felt like a backwards step and attracted the first rumblings of criticism, particularly around our comparatively poor defensive record. This year we feel like a more robust unit, but we’ve sacrificed our attacking flair.

Maybe it’s that Karl Robinson simply cares too much. That he’s been lured into listening to the fans’ frustrations about last season and our inability to defend. He’s responded by disposing of our attacking threat, perhaps he’s been a little over-relying on players the local hero Taylor and ‘the GOAT’ Henry to drag us through despite both being on the wrong side of thirty.

I’m not suggesting Robinson should ignore what others are saying, and I’m not criticising the fans for saying it; but perhaps we were always a bit more of a top-ten club than a top-six one. And that tinkering with what made us that has now left us wanting.

It was pointed out that at exactly this point in the lockdown season, we lost 2-1 to Swindon fell to 19^th in the table and still made the play-offs. That required us to do some extraordinary things including a sequence of eleven wins in twelve and an end-of-season run of six wins in seven. Plus we were all locked at home; our frustrations didn’t seep into ever pore like they do now.

A similar turnaround seems, frankly, unlikely, but improvements are possible. In the middle of November, there are some very winnable games against Forest Green, Port Vale and Accrington coming up, and that could give us a foothold. But, with Portsmouth and Bolton both away this week, Karl Robinson’s got to get there first.