For probably the 400th time this season, last night was a breaking point for me as Swindon Town took another spin around the drain.

A team as disaffected as the threadbare crowd that turned out to watch witnessed 78 Accrington Stanley supporters getting to enjoy themselves, all with only faint memories of what that feels like. For the second time this season, a team dressed like Argentina got made to look like them by the husk of a football team. 

The apathetic silence engulfing the County Ground does not sound like the bottom of the barrel being scraped. What should be rage feels instead like resignation that this will not be as bad as it gets. I still have to go up to Barrow this season and that ten-hour train journey is sounding like the appealing part of the day.

The 12-point gap to the relegation zone is still too vast for that to be a worry, as easy as it would be to doom monger on that front. It is still my firm belief that Swindon will appoint Gavin Gunning as the permanent head coach, but all of the windows they are looking in to make that official have another grizzly result sitting there.

With Swindon in a position where even an Olympic pole vaulter would struggle to get the club to clear the Beamish Line, you have to wonder how those in the boardroom are viewing this. An official attendance of barely above 6,000, the last time the club dipped below that figure was when Eoin Doyle breathed life into a title-winning season against Stevenage, but no flame-haired saviour seems forthcoming this time around. It is everything else that is on fire. This was a clear sign that season ticket sales will be dropping again next season, all eyes are on the programme notes for more disingenuous competitive budget talk.

This season is more or less guaranteed to be the worst this club has ever experienced and I don't mind because that combined with those attendance numbers are huge signs that things need to change. The only hope is that they are big enough to be seen from Australia. There is no administrative error that can account for it, and it is too loud for Phil King to laugh off.

The appointment of the next manager is both entirely critical and largely pointless. Four very different names have tried and failed to do anything but move things backwards since Ben Chorley left. All of them with pretty similar things to say about what needed to change, but none of their words were heeded. What is to make anyone believe that number five is going to change that? Even if someone could, would they choose Swindon? Lou Macari ended the ten-year decline that led to Ken Beamish, without the same hero then this won’t stop here.

In a club populated by people without a huge amount of experience in their role, a wily veteran seems to make sense, but you are not going to persuade one of the ones you want to come in and navigate this tempest. Is John Sheridan’s number still on the call history of the phones in the County Ground office?

An up-and-comer has usually served Swindon well and has been a strong strategy elsewhere, but is there a structure to help them figure things out as they go? They will just be Sam Darnold seeing ghosts with nobody around to assist.

I don’t despair for this season, I gave up doing that at Wimbledon, the problem is that the horizon remains as dark as the clouds above us.