Back to B Teams, then, and with no apologies. The days of tiptoeing around this subject should be long in the past, the time to weigh up the ifs and maybes long expired.

We don’t want them. You don’t want them. He doesn’t want them, she doesn’t want them. They should have no place at the table in football’s big restructuring talks. Otherwise the logos of all the game's ruling bodies should be replaced with a giant middle finger for all supporters to look at forever.

Nigel Clibbens, Carlisle United’s chief executive, appears to agree. “There’s no support for B Teams in our club,” he said in a long interview on United’s official channels last week.

If this is the reality of boardroom talk inside Brunton Park, then it was good to hear it said with emphasis. There are always, though, layers to statements such as this, and Clibbens – as he has done all year – explained them in diligent detail.

It comes down to the master-servant relationship between the powerful and the weakened, and the fact it is one thing adopting a position, another retaining it when the strong and mighty have their foot on your throat. Such is the nature of football’s bad modern model which, more than anything, needs rebuilding.

In this climate, it absolutely takes a degree of nerve to be the voice against something when your accountant is tapping your shoulder. Not many clubs found that nerve when Under-21s were being ushered towards the EFL Trophy or when EPPP was coming into being. Not many, in the lower leagues, had the long-sightedness to openly object to Project Big Picture when the short-term help it appeared to offer was so needed, so acute.

The first two of those things have, though, increased football’s inequality, not levelled it. The third is progressively being exposed as the wolf in sheep’s clothing it always was.

So perhaps it is time to reflect on this and come out more aggressively than before against such things. Being accommodating and collegiate hasn’t particularly helped those down the divisions thus far; being a proxy voice for big football’s big ideas hasn’t advanced too many noble causes either.

Let us hope, then, that what Clibbens said can somehow be a red line drawn in thicker ink than when the Trophy votes were cast, and United and many of their peers found it impossible to say no under the heaviest pressure.

Anything else and it is only another tiny shred of encouragement to the chancers who want to reshape the game for their ends, not ours. These folks take all the encouragement they can get, and one has to conclude that people willing to try and forcibly bend football for their massive gain during a pandemic are not going to play nicey-nicey just because we think we can get them to.

If there is a glimmer of B Teams in the pyramid, then be sure they will spot it. If they know their history they will keep playing this long game too, and so in the current, heated climate it’s thankfully unlikely we would read so enthusiastic a view on the subject of B Teams from Brunton Park as we did back in 2014, when Greg Dyke was FA Chairman and his commission produced a report which proposed a new ‘League Three’ infiltrated by those big-club reserves.

The argument was not quite as raw then, which perhaps explains why United’s John Nixon, over the best part of 2,000 words, set out the possible merits of Dyke’s plan and, at the very least, wanted us all to consider the upsides of B Teams.

In an official club interview, Nixon emphasised that the new division would “in no way destroy the current pyramid”. There was, Carlisle’s co-owner added, detail to be levelled out, yet one trusts the passing of time, and the wretched crowd figures seen in the Trophy, have long caused the revision of his 2014 opinion that Carlisle versus “Manchester United B” would raise attendance numbers beyond an equivalent fixture against certain lower-league opponents.

Nixon, in the same piece, cited other countries who have “made it work quite successfully”, claiming it had not “diluted” the general standard of football – not really the point, if you talk to lower-league fans in England – and also invited Carlisle supporters to admire Pep Guardiola’s coaching route via Barcelona B.

There would, though, need to be “recompense” for the lower divisions in order for such a scheme to fly, he added – which is usually a big flashing red light on top of a dreadful idea. In the event, Dyke’s plan was rejected by the EFL and, six years on, Rick Parry’s Project Big Picture (which didn’t contain B teams, but you could smell the risk in all that enhanced “big six” power) also did not get past first base. Additionally, the FA’s Greg Clarke has been jeered for nudging B Teams across the table in other, discredited proposals. Now we have thinly-veiled threats of a breakaway European League, suggesting the Glazers and chums have got over their internal traumas about the future of the English pyramid reasonably quickly.

They won’t be the last attempts to remind the game who’s boss, the end of the unthinkable blue-sky thinking. However small your voice, then, it surely serves to use it in the strongest way possible, which increasingly should be to say no to these ludicrous things and then act that way. Supporters everywhere, meanwhile, are within their rights to listen to their clubs and then say: we’re watching you.