Jerome Sale column: Oxford United start relegation fight
- Published
Oxford United, who are in 20th place in League One, have drawn their last two matches under new head coach Liam Manning but they haven't won a game since January
After being consistent challengers for promotion in recent seasons and an increased budget this year, just writing about the threat of relegation for Oxford United from League One is incredible.
But the threat is now very real.
In January and early February, when the season appeared to be going nowhere, talk of relegation seemed like spicing things up with false jeopardy.
Not now.
Time and tide are not on new manager Liam Manning's side.
He is trying to turn around a tanker going in the wrong direction.
It is more than 10 weeks since Oxford United, whose main job is to win football matches, actually won a game.
That is a quarter of the season - it is scarcely believable.
'The club got recruitment wrong'
Manning has not bounded in with Churchillian speeches and rallying cries.
Talk is cheap and this is a man who works to a process.
That could be valuable at a time when the temptation could easily be to flail around in desperation for an answer to the team's woes.
Manning cannot recruit until the summer, he has a lengthy injury list and his players are understandably short on confidence.
He must trust the process and Oxford supporters must do the same.
The signs were there in the first two matches which have yielded points on the road.
There does now appear to be a general acceptance that the club got recruitment wrong in the last two, maybe three transfer windows, although whose responsibility that was is disputed.
Come the summer a new head of recruitment, Ed Waldron, will work with the new manager and has promised to learn from and not repeat the mistakes of the recent past.
But it is Manning who has to try and steer the club to safety in the meantime.
Remembering 'The Team That Never Was'
Oxford fans usually come into their own when there is a purpose - fights for promotion or, as in this case, against relegation, for a new home or even for their club's very existence.
The call to arms is sounding again.
It is 40 years this month since the then Oxford United owner Robert Maxwell tried to merge the club with Reading.
We've revisited that story with our award winning 2013 documentary, The Team That Never Was, which you can listen to on our Oxford United podcast 'The Dub', here.
Perhaps we could have been looking around the nearly four decades old stadium in Didcot and thinking that the place needs some work.
Nothing really done to it since the capacity was extended to 60,000 after the second European Cup success!
Some of Maxwell's proposal was ahead of its time: an all-seater stadium, with easy access and with associated commercial development that could fund a competitive team.
It seems obvious now, but in 1982 when football was not fashionable and hooliganism was rife, such ideas were fanciful.
It was just the small detail about merging two existing clubs that let it down and I have never met anyone who marched through Reading or Oxford, or who staged a sit in at The Manor Ground in protest, who regrets their opposition.
You can hear every Oxford United match live on BBC Radio Oxford with Jerome Sale.
