MOST startling of all sensations I felt while watching Witton condemned relegation at Stamford was one of expectation.

From the moment Ryan Robbins rifled in a penalty to cut Albion’s interval lead in half, what unfolded was unsurprising.

On eight previous occasions this season, the men from Wincham Park had lost a league encounter after scoring the game’s opening goal.

More acutely, it happened three times in a torturous campaign’s final seven days.

To claim one single factor was decisive in the club falling through the Northern Premier League top-flight trapdoor for a second time in six years is simplistic.

But for a psychological frailty to be exposed so frequently – more than a third of the team’s 25 Premier Division losses arrived that way – is of course significant.

Put simply, losing became habitual.

How could it not during that club record sequence of 12 reverses between September 9, when Curzon Ashton luckily left town with maximum points, and that disastrous four-goal hammering at FC United of Manchester?

What will frustrate Witton fans is that vulnerability seemed vanquished during March, when they collected more points – 13 – than in any other month.

Four wins in six matches, the latest a 3-2 success against Rushall, propelled them to 15th in the table.

Yet Albion did not win again.

An awful April, which yielded five defeats in six fixtures and 16 goals against, could not have been foreseen after such an upturn.

Instead, that mental weakness manifested itself in a different way.

Witton approached an Easter double-header, when they faced direct rivals to beat the drop in Whitby and Nantwich, knowing a single win – or two draws –would take them to a 50-point target set by chairman Mark Harris before Christmas.

Tony Sullivan said afterwards his side had been complacent, something a senior player – Alex Titchiner – confirmed in an interview later the same week.

He said: “Collectively we didn’t play as we’d been asked. There was a game-plan, but it wasn’t followed.”

They did not recover, a valiant goalless stalemate with FC United proving only an illusion.

Sullivan needed only seconds following the final whistle at the weekend to decide his next move.

As manager on the day Witton’s destiny was decided, he was right to take responsibility.

When I spoke to him on Monday, the chairman said the board should accept part of the blame too.

In mitigation, both found themselves in circumstances not of their making when Sullivan became Albion’s third manager of the campaign at the start of October.

To have lost two bosses, both who quit, had already set Witton on an opposite course to one plotted by Brian Pritchard in the summer.