MANY of us find comfort in life’s patterns and routines.

The coffee shop where we pick up our morning caffeine rush; the lunchtime sandwich bar which stocks our favourite mix; the quick pint in the local on the way home from work.

Small everyday delights which provide a reassuring, predictable regularity. However, there’s not much comfort to be gained from the pattern that Liverpool FC have fallen into this season, even though it’s been as easy to predict as a Wayne Rooney volley of expletives.

It goes something like this: encouraging win against top opposition; players say we can ‘hopefully build on this’; appalling performances against sub-standard opposition; players say we can still turn our season round.

So the home defeat of Chelsea was followed by a lucky draw at Wigan and feeble defeat at Stoke; the win in the reverse fixture preceded another draw against Wigan, a narrow, struggling aggregate victory over Sparta Prague and a dismal showing at West Ham; and the demolition of Rudolph’s Reds triggered the near-death experience of the two Braga ties.

At least this time we had a short break in the sequence at Sunderland before resuming the routine at West Brom.

It’s typical to lay the blame for this frustrating pattern of events on ‘inconsistency’, as if the outstanding victories are the true reflection of a team’s capabilities and the defeats an aberration due to some twisted mental process that regards three points gained from Blackburn as somehow less valuable than those taken from Arsenal.