WAS it those Machiavellian football gods at play that decreed that Swindon Town’s promotion ambitions would be torpedoed on the weekend the club was celebrating arguably its finest hour?

For while the heroes of ’93 were being rapturously acclaimed, 25 years on from taking Town to as-yet unsurpassed heights on English football’s pyramid, Saturday’s County Ground offering delivered a sobering reminder that the club is now at its lowest league ebb for the best part of 35 years.

It is highly debatable if there is a Swindon Town supporter anywhere who expects their club to be punching at anywhere near the weight that the team of Glenn Hoddle did a quarter of a century ago.

The game has moved on, the financial chasm between the haves and have-nots in particular having widened to such an extent, to make such a notion one to file under the category of fanciful dream rather than achievable ambition.

Yet when assessing the merits or otherwise of a 2017-18 League Two campaign that is two matches away from its conclusion, most supporters would at least have settled for tangible signs of progress and some sense of forward momentum towards a discernible vision.

Twelve months on from the unmitigated self-inflicted shambles that led to relegation from League One, it remains arguable as to whether Town tick either of those two boxes.

Let’s start with the obvious - and ultimately what the club will be judged by - the on-pitch fare.

For sure, chairman Lee Power acted as many would have deemed necessary in the wake of last season’s trauma, appointing a manager in David Flitcroft rather than a coach to head up the squad and apparently removing himself from the front line of the team building process.

While Town’s rivals had enjoyed a head-start in terms of recruitment, Flitcroft at least managed to fashion some sort of squad, boasting a streak of experience as well as younger talents in time for the start of the campaign.

And there were promising early signs - four away wins in the first 10 matches, eye-catching results on the opening day at Carlisle and at most observers’ favourites for the League Two crown Luton.

Crucially though, the majority of Town fans never felt wedded to those triumphs, the team’s alarming struggles at home - just four wins prior to Christmas - depriving Flitcroft of the opportunity to build up any bank of goodwill among the faithful, who had already been denied any chance of an early look at their team by the slightly-farcical lack of any home pre-season friendlies.

Town nevertheless plodded along in a constant state of flirtation with firstly the automatic promotion spots and play-off places, without ever threatening to deliver the sort of commanding run of form to cement that status, or really boasting the sort of ‘on the same page’ togetherness that Flitcroft frequently claimed existed.

Even so, Power can hardly be held accountable for the man he had entrusted to restore Town to League One status abruptly upping sticks for a rival, with the play-off push poised on a knife-edge, ushering in all the associated upheaval and uncertainty such a development inevitably brought.

Enter Phil Brown - a gun for hire if you will - in an attempt to secure that top-seven finish.

One win in eight games attests to the failure of that mission, yet surely it is overly harsh to point the finger somebody parachuted into a situation of inheriting another’s squad with its associated issues and without recourse to the transfer market.

So have Town moved forward? Well, given the quoted mission was an immediate return to the third tier, the answer will inevitably be no, but more crucially, what about those underlying issues?

In the wake of last season’s misery, the Swindon Advertiser urged the club to open up, engage more with supporters and the media, spread the word about what Swindon Town was about and what its was doing.

In other words, get a bit of buzz about the place.

Yet one year on, do we really know any more about the vision for this club? Where it is going? What it wants to achieve - other than vague references to restoring lost status - and most crucially of all, how it plans to go about it?

Given the uncertainty over Brown’s employment beyond these final two games and the make-up and future of the playing squad, one might observe that the situation bears many of the same characteristics as that of April/May 2017.

Football does indeed constantly does move on and examples of clubs paying the price for not adapting, evolving, engaging or adopting a ‘couldn’t happen to us’ attitude are too plentiful to ignore.

Try Sunderland, now ‘looking forward’ to next season in League One, having been in the Premier League just last year.

Or perhaps the contrasting fortunes of Bournemouth, Huddersfield and Torquay, as recently as 2006 facing each other in the third tier. While the former two look forward to another likely season at English football’s top table, the latter could find themselves travelling to Chippenham Town - no offence intended Bluebirds - in National League South next season.

The strife-torn Gulls have become locked into a downward spiral, featuring an ownership that has largely rebuffed attempts to build a relationship with supporters, many of whom in turn are suspicious of the hierarchy’s intentions and ambitions for their club.

Thankfully, Town are not yet in such dire straits, but it seems hard to dispute the club appears locked into it’s own cycle - and not one that appears geared for success.