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.

Towards the end of last season, there was an outbreak of a very specific brand of Englishism in football. Sean Dyche went to Everton, Roy Hodgson re-joined Crystal Palace, Neil Warnock returned to Huddersfield, and Sam Allardyce was airdropped in to save Leeds’ season. These were pragmatic football people, proper managers not afraid to give players a kick up the backside and get the ball in the mixer. Not like the multi-lingual, roll-necked sophisticates who ruin the English game with their passing and healthy diets. Their re-emergence was celebrated as a return to common sense by the likes of Richard Keys and Andy Gray who have previously been victims of the woke mob just because they happen to be legendary banter-lords.

Curiously, Karl Robinson, a man who has spent the last few years talking progressively about developing the whole player and, more recently, pleading for his job by espousing his team’s excellent xG, managed to get himself wrapped up in it all becoming Big Sam’s assistant at Leeds. If this was GBNews, Karl Robinson was Laurence Fox, opportunistically jumping on a bandwagon only to find it was heading for the dumper.

Steve Evans is from the same school, he might even be from an era before the likes of Dyche, Allardyce and Hodgson who are smarter than their reputations allow. There will be a time when people will look back on Evans’ career with bewildered admiration. People will question how someone like him could have been in the game for so long, how he got away with it.

I don’t know if I admire or loath him. He’s sustained a privileged career despite an odious nature and criminal conviction, you have to be impressed by his ability to survive, even if you don’t like how he does it. His girth is a pretty good indication that he’s not one for thinking about the long-term; he’s a realist, and he consistently improves teams. In that sense he’s right to stick to his methods even when The Science has moved on. 

The big fear about the outbreak of old-school Englishism and the ongoing existence of Evans, like the relative success of GBNews, is that they might actually be right. Perhaps the modern way of over-thinking, over-principled things is ruining our lives and we just have to preserve the status quo regardless of the consequences.

Look at the xG table for last season in League 1, Shrewsbury were ten places worse off than their actual position, Port Vale eight places higher, Plymouth weren’t in the promotion places but we were the kings of misleading invented data points finishing seventh in the xG table twelve places better than we finished in the real world. At best you can say that as a measure it is highly suspect, at worst it’s complete horseshit. Perhaps the people who focus on getting balls in the box and scoring real goals have got a point.

Given our predicament last year, there were calls to draft in a pragmatist to shake things up and get the short term results we needed to stay up. Instead, we got Liam Manning, whose CV includes time at something called the City Football Group the Abu Dhabi based holding company of Manchester City and a portfolio of other clubs from around the world. It’s not exactly the same as starting your career as assistant coach at Halesowen Town and working your way up, is it?

The fear, of course, is that what Manning has acquired from his experience is the ability to look good in sportswear and a grasp of PowerPoint animations. What would happen when his four-dimensional chess brain met Evans the neanderthal lower league hunter gatherer? It’s like a quantum physicist being interviewed by Richard Madeley and Madeley winning the argument about the Copenhagen Interpretation and wave-particle duality by mocking the scientists trousers. 

At some point this season, I want to go and see Oxford City in the National League. It still blows my mind that they’re in the same division as the one we struggled in 13 years ago. I remember when we were promoted feeling that the relative sophistication of League 2 was a notable step up and, League 1 even more so as we faced teams who’d been in the Premier League relatively recently. For a while we scrambled to find our feet, but gradually it felt more comfortable. So far, while we’ve scraped into the play-offs a couple of times we haven’t reached a point where it feels like we’re outgrowing League 1.

The Stevenage game offered a different insight into where we’re at; this season we’ve proved that we’re more competitive, but this win is the strongest indication yet that we’re beginning to ease away from the ‘lower leagues’. We’re not scraping points away from home or being strong armed out of games by teams whose ambitions are to survive by any means necessary. The investment in a more enlightened way of thinking is paying off.

Evans’ post-match interview complained about his players not being ‘real men’, a few isolated unfortunate moments on which the game turned (I say a few, the list was so long it amounted to about 40% of the game) and that our success was simply down to vast sums of money invested in the squad. In other words, his problems are nuanced whereas our solutions are a blunt instrument, which is quite the pivot. It’s true, our budget is likely to be significantly bigger than Stevenage’s and that we have far fewer excuses should we fail. Having that budget and applying it effectively are two different things. 

In the past, I’ve looked at fixtures looking for when the sticky patch will come, for the first time in many years, I can’t see when that is. In the past I’ve looked at the squad and looked for areas where an injury or suspension might leave us vulnerable, and I can’t find it. It’s not arrogant to say that promotion and the title are very much on.