I’m not prone to melodramatic statements or over reactions, but having had a bit of time to absorb the performance at Braintree I’m finding it hard to escape the conclusion that it was a low point.

Ever since we dropped into the Conference Wrexham fans have talked about how far we’ve fallen. When you’ve seen us lock horns with European giants, watched Arfon Griffiths’ side grab the nation’s attention with their successes and gusto, or even enjoyed good crowds and forward momentum during the Brian Flynn era, it’s easy to feel low when you consider the standard we now play at.

I’ve never succumbed to that way of thinking: the way I see it, football’s a soap opera. You have dramas, highs and lows, and you have to accept them as part of the story arc and move on, seeing where the narrative takes you. In my mind our spell in the Conference is merely part of the story, something we’ll look back on as a formative part of what comes next.

But I’ll accept I struggled to see it that way last Saturday. It wasn’t that we lost to Braintree per se: as I said earlier, I’m not a football snob in that way. It was the fact that Braintree had collapsed into the sort of form which is hard to recover from. They were plainly not a very good side, merely a very hard-working, quite well organised one. But that was more than enough for them to be far better than us.

It wasn’t a wholly abject performance. Each of the defenders had decent games, but that just sums up how the game went. We were up against a side in a tailspin, who hadn’t scored in four games or won against Conference opposition since mid-September yet it was our defenders who had to perform. Andy Coughlin made three good saves; their keeper didn’t have to. That’s all you need to know. This really did feel like some sort of grim landmark.

Still, don’t despair. There’s never been a season in the history of football that didn’t contain a duff performance, and there never will. You’re allowed to underperform in the course of a year, and we might be able to ascribe the sluggish nature of our performance to playing Sunday-Wednesday-Saturday with two trips to the south east thrown in.

It’s how we react that’s most important. In March 2003 we lost 1-0 at Exeter and provoked a livid reaction from Denis Smith. The consequence? We won twelve and drew four of our remaining sixteen games, winning the league and the Welsh Premier Cup.

In November 1992 we were embarrassed at Crewe, losing 6-1 in the FA Cup. We lost just three more league games all season and went up. Believe it or not, in the middle of the 1969-70 promotion season we had a run of six losses out of seven games! We bounced back from all those set-backs; last Saturday’s debacle might just be the making of this side.