Another day, another wreck on the highway. Wheels spinning, smoke curling, the whole thing sliding off the hard shoulder into the ditch. Total wipe-out. A horror show in Technicolor. Players who quit before the half-time whistle, players who lost the map, players who saw the mountain and turned back. We concede one and the soul just drains, like rainwater down a cracked gutter. Towel thrown into the ring.  Darren Moore’s out there waving his arms like semaphore in a storm, but no ships are coming. Didn’t expect a win, but didn’t expect the white flag either.

And what’s the story with Funso? Midweek whispers of a back spasm, Friday he’s on socials grinning like the cat that stole the cream, back fine, back strong. Meanwhile Jordan Shipley’s in ST4, bouncing with the Coventry heads while we’re getting our teeth kicked in up north. The circus is back, and the clowns are running the tent.

Fifteen played, three wins, that’s the bottom line. Three straight defeats, joint bottom, staring into the abyss and the abyss grinning back like a mad dog in the dark.

And yet for thirty minutes in North Manchester, we had it —we had revolt, we had rhythm, booting truth into the teeth of the big boys, rattling the bars of the football gods’ cage, wild-eyed and howling. Fire in the boots, jazz in the blood. Then Bolton scored and the dream cracked like cheap glass, shards everywhere, cutting deep. We chose despair. We folded, we flinched, crumbled like hash kissed by flame, rolled and smoked by Cissoko and Crozier-Duberry, those two sorcerers spinning spells in the smoke of our surrender, one-nil became two-nil in the blink of a broken heart.

Second half, we rearrange the deckchairs— George Byers and Jaheim Headley hooked at half-time. Why? God knows. George Hall and Ronan Curtis are on, flanking an increasingly frustrated looking Devante Cole, Garrity moves back into centre mid. Nothing changes. Croasdale and Paton appear midway through the half, but it’s all noise, no music. They’re past caring. Bolton hit three, then four, and the whole thing’s a funeral march.

I split on eighty-five. Couldn’t take the dirge no more. Many had already gone, drifting out, heads down, hearts empty. Another weekend burned to ash, another chapter in the book of ugly failure.

And where’s the buck stop? It stops at the smoky end of the bar where the gaffer sits, eyes hollow, soul heavy, Darren Moore, the man with the baton, the man who called the tune and now finds the band out of step, out of time, out of soul.

We wanted ninety minutes of wild jazz, chaos and courage, riffs screaming into the void, tackles like gospel, hearts on sleeves, and what did we get? A dirge. A dead sound. Hope abandoned.

So yeah, the buck stops with him. The conductor of this broken orchestra. Time to take the final bow, leave the stage, let someone else find the rhythm we’ve been dying to dance to.

Because this ain’t music. This is silence. And it’s deafening. Time to roll the dice, Carol.