Many a poor Poppies performance over the years has been described as hopeless but it was never more so than yesterday. Against opposition who are rumoured to be on the brink of administration or worse, there was only one team that looked like dead men walking and it wasn't the outfit in lurid green.
We were literally hopeless, in the sense of lacking any hope. The fans felt it, the players felt it. Not many games go emotionally downhill from a minute's silence, but this one managed to. This is how it feels when there is nothing to play for. Not playoffs, not promotion, not even survival - nothing.
The feeling is taking hold that unless there is some imminent breakthrough in talks with Ben Pickering and/or whoever is advising him, we are condemned to a slow demise - probable expulsion from the Conference next season then a year or two of pointless going through the motions until the lease expires, by which time there will be hardly anyone left watching.
Ben Pickering's position, so far as anyone can know the mind of a reclusive octogenarian, is understood to be that he is not prepared to discuss the lease until it has expired in three years time. If that is genuinely the case, he must be badly advised or utterly indifferent to whether the club exists or not, because by that time there will barely be a club at all.
Not that it will take three years for that to become obvious. Ben Pickering could transform the situation tomorrow by agreeing a rolling 10 year lease, terminable on reasonable notice from the club if we are able to move to a new site. That would satisfy the Conference and the Football League, and suddenly there still be a chance, however small, of qualifying for the playoffs this seaon, and something to play for next season and beyond.
If, however, the 31 March deadline drifts past, it will be clear that Ben Pickering doesn't care whether we go up. Equally, therefore, why would he care when, this time next year, we go down? Or down again the season after that?
But leaving emotion aside, to do that would lack a certain business logic, because if owning Rockingham Road is both an investment and a source of income to Ben Pickering, the value of the site will only increase in the long run, and the income is derived from a 19% share of gate receipts which as things stand will inevitably shrink in real terms next season and beyond.
Assuming he understands the implications, is the landlord prepared to sacrifice personal revenue until 2013, worth potentially many thousands of pounds, just to keep us in limbo? I think we'll know the answer to that question before very much longer.
And if you've read this far without punching the wall in frustration at the paltry sum that the ground was sold for in 1985, less than we made from just the Leeds games this season, well done on your self control.
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