EMBARRASSING oversight, or calculated omission?

Whichever it was, the not-unnoticed failure of the match report from Saturday’s 2-1 home defeat by Scunthorpe on Swindon Town’s website to even mention the ever-so-slightly significant fact that the team had been relegated from League One, at least until Monday lunchtime, as a result was perhaps a fitting postscript to confirmation of that fate.

Muddled, ill-prepared, lacking in awareness and empathy. On and off the field.

All the hallmarks, in fact, of a club which has walked through the trapdoor to league football’s lowest level in some sort of comatose state.

If only the long-suffering supporters were so lucky. So many of them have been only too wide awake to the painful car crash unfolding in front of them, week by every grim week.

Muddled? Well, how best to describe a hierarchical structure in which the style of play was dogmatically decided upon first and the manager/head coach picked to deliver that ethos, while appearing to have little purposeful say in the recruitment of the playing staff to implement it.

Ill-prepared? What about a squad high on youthful exuberance, promise and yes, even a dash of ability, but woefully low on those lower-league staples of leadership, experience and nous.

Not to mention six summer signings on the day of the opening game of the season or later.

As for lacking in awareness and empathy, well, where to start?

Maybe with the arrival of a “director of football’’ - a move clearly designed to capture positive headlines and attention but subsequently revealed to be little more than a sham - damned by the actions, or lack of them, and subsequent words of the man in question.

Definitely not what it said on the tin.

Or perhaps ludicrous PR own goals such as the Bristol Rovers abandonment ticket debacle or the resolute refusal of the top brass to engage with local media and supporters other than via sporadic and repetitive “club statements’’ or radio phone-ins, all pointing to a club both ill at ease with itself and seemingly on a perpetual cycle of repelling the very people it should be courting.

As ever in such sorry tales, the key protagonists come under the harshest spotlight.

On the pitch of course, the bare stats reveal that Luke Williams and his squad have simply not been good enough with, inevitably, the head coach receiving the brunt of scrutiny and criticism as a result.

Given a heavily unflattering winning record during his tenure, it is hardly surprising the brickbats have been aimed in Williams’ direction.

Yet there is also little doubt he has also been an all-too-convenient punchbag for decisions and events over which he has had little or no control.

Williams has, in many cases shamefully, been left alone to carry the can for strategic mistakes made above his head.

Supporters will accept the highs and lows of football, the golden years going hand in hand with the seasons of darkness, as part and parcel of the cyclical nature of the game they love.

What is tougher to swallow is the likes of what has unfolded at the County Ground in the 24 months since that tantalising glimpse of the promised land of the Championship was emphatically snatched away in that May 2015 play-off final.

Yes, it’s been a decline, but worse, it has been a managed decline.

From a young, vibrant squad, packed with potential and, yes, assets has been reduced to a ragtag collection of untested, raw individuals, augmented by a smattering of loan players, some of whom are of questionable quality and usefulness.

Within minutes and hours of Town’s relegation being confirmed, both chairman Lee Power and said director of football Tim Sherwood had both been on the airwaves to grace us with their verdicts.

Power at least acknowledged his responsibility for the debacle, while continually falling back on his trusted and often contradictory lines about having cleared debts, the club’s ‘precarious’ financial predicament and building a squad capable of doing so much better.

The less said about Sherwood’s appearance on Sky Sports’ Goals On Sunday the better, a largely shameless display of deflection, evasion and history rewriting, given he was only too eager to insist he’d be rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in at his unveiling in November.

The question now is, what next?

After Town’s last two relegations to the bottom tier, decisive action was taken with the appointments of Dennis Wise and Gus Poyet, then Paul Sturrock in 2006 and Paolo Di Canio in 2011, screaming of a club determined to recapture lost ground quickly.

Yet past experience and knowledge of Power’s modus operandi indicates such a monumental change of approach or statement of intent does not seem likely – not if the Sherwood debacle is anything to go by.

For now, Town supporters head in to a long, dark summer, with little visible light on the horizon and reflecting on Power’s previous appeals to judge him on his actions.

Well, judgement has been passed, Mr Power.

And that judgement is failure.