Non-league football was in our rearview mirror but close enough so that four defeats to open our League Two campaign had supporters releasing a collective groan, in large part exasperated by our recent memories of the Football League’s hinterland.

Our owner had brought in new systems, a new hand at the tiller in Mark Ashton and a new manager in Michael Appleton. In fact, the only thing we didn’t have new that season was players!

Danny Hylton was the one new recruit when the season started, and many mistook his bustling, almost chaotic, style for lower league mediocrity.

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A manager under fire. An owner still eyed with suspicion and one league spot above non-league football that we knew all too well, could suck you in and drain years of your footballing life before you’d even realised that going away to Histon with a gate of a little over a thousand, isn’t as fun as expected when you get roundly beaten 5-2.

What we did have was a plan. Well let me qualify that, we had half a plan! The half that was on the pitch and directed by Ashton, implemented by Appleton and communicated back to supporters utilising social media and local media alike, had a plan.

As with most systems that have a defined plan and people in place to make it happen, there was a confidence by those at the heart of it that it would come good.

They held their nerve, we held our breath, and while never troubling the top half that season, we began to see the fruits of their labour. The rest as they say, is rather lovely history.

I did say it was half a plan though, and while things were rather well thought out in regard to success on the pitch, they were anything but that when it came to Oxford United’s most pressing problem, the stadium.

We faced the financial realities of League One and the realisation that we would never be able to unlock our potential in a stadium we didn’t own, created little revenue from, and had no control over.

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Fast forward 10 years, and we are five games into our first season back in the rarefied air of the Championship. It is often quoted that it has been 25 years since we were here last time, but this is a very different Championship to the one we left.

Again, we have a plan on the field, and again our owners and those entrusted with our future kept their nerve after a slow managerial start. Again, we had a plan, and again history and heroes were made.

Today we sit on the edge of the play-off spots and the stadium, which has been the venue and root cause of so many of our shortcomings, is being turned into a fortress. Almost more importantly, we have a plan for the stadium.

The plan has been methodically researched and implemented by owners who have done this before in another city notoriously hard to build in. They are building something that will be tied to the club for the next 250 years and offer us a security and sustainability that many only dreamed of.

It’s early days but our little club is more than competing in a league packed with big teams and stand on the threshold of fixing the perennial problem of the stadium that cannot be named.

It is very good to have a plan. It’s even better to have two.