United went down 3-1 at Bury this afternoon as Chris Hackett became the first United player to receive a red card this season, given for violent conduct a couple of minutes after Oxford had gone 1-0 down from a Jon Newby strike. Newby also scored Bury's second before Chris Armstrong finished United off. Joey Beauchamp scored a consolation for Oxford in the final minute. As predicted the only change from last week's line-up was the introduction of Darren Patterson at the expense of Dean Whitehead. David Kemp made a triple substitution immediately after Bury's third goal went in, with ten minutes or so remaining: Whitehead replaced Matt Murphy, Paul Tait came on for Robert Quinn and Steve Anthrobus replaced Phil Gray. A match report appears here, kind of.

Most of the other teams around the relegation spaces picked up points, the exception being Swansea who, despite a Giovanni Savarese hat-trick, became Luton's third successive victims going down 5-3 to Joe Kinnear's new outfit, who leap-frogged them in the table. Bristol Rovers drew 0-0 at Wigan, Port Vale drew 1-1 in the Potteries derby at the Britannia Stadium and swindon won 1-0 at Cambridge. United are now 14 points from safety.

When we're (finally) going down

At last the results of Rage Online's most popular (and most famous!) poll can be revealed. Only 6% of Rage Online readers think that United will be relegated after losing at home to swindon on March 10th (which our crap maths makes the earliest we could be mathematically relegated). 4% of you think that Joe Kinnear's mob will send us down, but a huge 20% of respondents reckon that our nadir will be on Tuesday April 3rd, when we travel to Dean Court in the rearranged game against Bournemouth. We're not taking bets that Jermaine Defoe will score the goal that relegates us. 11% think that we'll hold out until the following Saturday when we welcome Oldham to the Manor with 18% suggesting that promotion hopefuls Wigan will be the ones to seal our fate when we visit Lancashire on 14th April. Reading's visit to the Manor will be the end of our shakey tenure in Division Two, according to 17% of voters, and only 1% think that it will go right to the wire and we will finally go down at Notts County on the final day of the season. A ridiculously high 11% of you just take the piss completely, claiming that United will stay up. Where can we get some of what you're smoking?