Mad dog bites

SOMETHING strange happened on Saturday.
Rickie Lambert didn't score.
In fact, for 82 minutes none of the Southampton all-stars scored against us.
Unfortunately in the 83rd minute they did, leaving us marooned in the relegation zone.
Saints 1 Sinners 0
Lambert, as has been mentioned many times previously on these pages, was our lynchpin, our 20-goal a season striker who was tempted away from us by the bright lights of the South Coast two years ago.
Since then our fortunes have taken a bit of a nosedive.
And every time we had played them since then he has continued to stick the knife in, scoring at will against our hard-pressed defence.
On the face of it a 1-0 away defeat to a team currently pushing for automatic promotion with a hatful of household names isn't a bad result.
And the other teams around us all had a bad day at the office, too.
But, oh what a difference a point would have made.
Particularly when on Tuesday night one of our main rivals, Notts County, managed to take all three points at Tranmere with their game in hand.
Notts County, incidentally, span the management roulette wheel and landed on Martin 'Mad Dog' Allan, a bloke who is not known for his tolerance of failure or players not giving 100 per cent.
I hear they are still searching for some of the bodies of those players brave enough to ignore his instructions.
Having inspired deeply troubled Barnet to three wins in a row after taking over he walked out on them in the middle of the night to take over at Nottingham and could yet get County on a bit of a roll.
By contrast, our plight once again looks extremely difficult.
We have home games against big name clubs Charlton and Sheffield Wednesday, must visit Bournemouth who are pushing for a play-off spot and will be eager for revenge after we stole the points from them at the Mem a couple of weeks back, and the final game of the season away at Colchester and our ex-manager John Ward.
Suddenly all the hope of the Campbell revolution is draining away, though Gasheads are still sticking with their belief in a great escape plan.
Difficult, though, when our top striker has his horrendously injured ankle held together by sticky back plastic and we can't buy a goal for love nor money at the moment.
And I can't help feeling the turning point was that insipid home performance against Exeter. If we had just managed to take a point, and possibly three, the revival would still be going full-power ahead.
Now we are clutching at straws.
Even caretaker player manager Campbell threw the dice and gambled on Saturday by putting two 17-year-old strikers, Lamar Powell and Ellis Harrison, on our bench and bringing them both on in the second half.
By all accounts they put up a decent show, but I wouldn't be pinning my hopes on them pulling us out of the doodoo at this late stage of the season.
Still, our assistant caretaker manager Craig Hinton insists that we aim to win our last four games. That's ok then.
Mind you, I wasn't expecting him to say in his press conference that we were thinking of maybe losing one and drawing another.
And I would love to know how you win games without scoring goals.
It's all spin and sometimes I wonder why we even bother with such mundane interviews. Hardly inspiring.
The truth is we have four of the most important games in the club's history lying ahead of us.
I'm not sure we have the firepower to pull it off.
But until it is mathematically impossible, in true management-speak, I will keep the faith.