If Southampton Football team were a racehorse, you wouldn't know whether to shoot it or send it to stud. I can only liken our current state to the English cricket team - at times sublime, at times clueless; the former occurring when least expected, the latter with a certain dependability. The phrase to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory might have been invented for both.
How is it possible, you wonder over your glass of Claret, for either side to win when they struggle so irritatingly against the lowliest of opposition?
Take our now infamous victory against Wolves. In truth, scoring six against someone has been on the cards all season. It could, any maybe should, have come against Derby, a team who rode their luck as well as any jump jockey riding at the Grand National meeting next week.
I've never seen a team mauled 0-0 for half an hour, and a half-dozen goals before half-time would have been no more flattering than the final score-line at Molineux.
But then, rewind the clock to our last home game and we could no more finish off a cocktail sausage than we could a fellow Championship football team.
That night the word lack-lustre could have been invented for us. Lifeless, we were; devoid of basic football skills like marking and defending. If there's one thing they drum into you at 'soccer school' it's not to concede immediately after you score.
Concentration, they tell you, must be at its highest in the aftermath of celebration. It's fair to say that Claus Lundekvam was missing from class that day, no doubt to be found behind the Baby-Bentley sheds, cigarette in hand.
When Kevin Peitersen was interviewed after his dismal dismissal by Ireland he confessed 'I batted like a clown'. How soon before some of our players admit they defended like one? And wouldn't we be more forgiving for it? I know I would.
And there can be no justification for the hopeless lack of defensive ability against Colchester other than comedy. But sadly, these idiosyncratic performances are far from a laughing matter.
A good run against mediocre opposition (and Preston looked decidedly ordinary until gifted an opening goal) might have propelled the Saints into a safe, play-off berth. Instead, we've backed ourselves against the perimeter and drawn in a firing squad.
We've turned on the searchlights and the clanging of calamity defending has brought out every dog and camp-guard alike. No, friends, our inability to kill off the opposition means we are now staring at barbed-wire fence, and unlike Steve McQueen, there is no German motorcycle handily placed to leap it.
If we are to escape from this league, then we must do what we've managed to do all season - confound the football observers in their droves. Not a man-jack of them thought Colchester would cause us a problem. Most imagined a comfortable home victory, exactly like the one they expected on Saturday.
Found a team on a winning run, we'll nail them. Found one with confidence lower than a snake's belly button? Chances are we'll give them a timely boost.
So now, with just seven games remaining, allow me to throw some rope and a set of neatly forged papers in the direction of the team. You see, I don't believe we can do it any more. Just like I didn't believe we could possibly beat Wolves with half a team on the bench and the remainder recovering from international duty.
We need this rag-tag assembly of Poles, Czechs, Swedes, Celts and Anglo-Saxons to do what Dickie Attenborough failed to accomplish. If ever there were a Great Escape, slipping the net of the Championship and crossing the mountains to the promised land is surely it.
Stopped believing? Me too. And don't you just know that now it's almost beyond reach, we'll finally give it a bloody good go.