It goes back to at least 1990, to the time when they were struggling against relegation and Graham Taylor’s team were in with a chance of winning the league. We turned up there towards the end of the season and lost 2-0.

Thirty-six years, eighteen managers, four owners and probably a couple of hundred players later, and we still have a mental block about playing there. Either the team freezes, or they manage to blow a winning position, or the unseen hand of fate takes over (more on that later). You can, perhaps, understand why the players might feel as thiough it doesn’t matter how they perform, the result is pre-ordained.

Having said that, sometimes we don’t exactly do ourselves any favours. Yet again Unai’s team selection did its best to defy logical explanation. Pau Torres might not be up to playing two games a week and Douglas Luiz might have needed resting but why Ollie Watkins started and Leon Bailey wasn’t left at home are questions that would baffle the great philosophers.

There might be another reason but the only one I can think of is that Unai’s targeting the Europa League and thought we wouldn’t get anything from this one whatever team he picked. It’s a high-risk strategy and not one that’ll make him popular if it doesn’t work, but after all he is a genius.

Anyway, the match went along its familiar, predictable pattern. There wasn’t much worth remembering in the first half although the days when we could be confident of Unai working some dressing room magic during the interval are gone for the moment and the inevitable goal came eight minutes after the restart.

Ross Barkley may have been a surprise selection and his equaliser ten minutes later was equally surprising but worth watching. For a brief time it seemed as though Villa could go on and win but it couldn’t last and two more goals confirmed what had been suspected all along – yet again it wasn’t to be our day.

But having said all that, thee are other things to take into account. We were playing a Manchester club, in Manchester. The referee and the VAR official were from Manchester; thee’s nowhere else in the league, perhaps in the world, where that could happen.

Despite being £500 million in debt they brought on a player who cost £70 million in the summer; our attacking options on the bench were emergency replacements and loans.

And the thing that verges on surreal is that despite this blatant distortion of sporting integrity (a phrase that seems to have gone out of fashion lately) and Villa’s relegation form, with eight matches to go we’re still in the top four. Still in with a chance and with our casualty list improving.