Mark McGhee, the Motherwell manager, has conceded he has no way of telling how his side are going to perform on any given Saturday as he strives to lead them to the Holy Grail of consistency.

Unpredictability is a trait that has long been associated with the team from Fir Park. For much of the last seven or eight years they have defied logic and expectation to upset the odds and punch above their weight, regularly finishing ‘best of the rest’ and enjoying more air miles than Lord Flashheart. Recently, it has been a case of coming back from the brink when disaster seemed inevitable, most notably last year when a season awash with failure was salvaged in the most spectacular fashion with a dynamic and emphatic 6-1 play-off triumph over Rangers far removed from what had gone before.

This season a rollercoaster that M&D’s would be proud of is once again in full motion up the road. Motherwell, and in fairness a few others around them, seem to lurch from inspired performances to abject mediocrity on an almost weekly basis. It is a reality that is not lost on McGhee. In his team’s last four games, he has seen them go out with a whimper at home to Kilmarnock, hammer Dundee United at Tannadice, chuck a late goal to lose in Perth before outplaying a Partick Thistle collective that got the better of them only a month earlier.

While it does nothing to help punters pick out a winning line on their coupon, it also leaves managers at a loss to predict after a positive week’s training just what their players – and indeed the opposition – is going to produce when Saturday comes. McGhee is no different.

“It’s not just about the opposition, it is about ourselves,” explained the Motherwell manager. “Sitting here today, I don’t see any reason why we can’t play as well this Saturday as we did last Saturday. But it’s not happened like that.

“If you able to buy like the top level, you know what you are going to get. On a good day he will be eight out of 10. On a bad day he will be six out of 10. At times, we are far more hyperbolic. We can be two out of 10 or 10 out of 10! That’s just the weird nature of the beast.

“The only points target I can have is three points on Saturday. It would be ridiculous to think another way. I can only go one game at a time for those consistency reasons we are talking about.”

He added: “I don’t know what is going to happen on Saturday. Arsenal, for example, probably know they are going to play the same way and they might win or lose. We don’t know how we’re going to play. We hope we’re going to play as well as Saturday. We are capable of it.

“But importantly we also don’t know how they’re going to play. Thistle come here, we beat them comfortably and then they go and beat St Johnstone. You just don’t know.”

Looking ahead to tomorrow’s Lanarkshire derby away to Hamilton Academical, those Motherwell fans making the short journey across Strathclyde Park do so knowing they are not going to their happy place.

It may be close to home, but New Douglas Park has been nothing but a place of frustration and torment in recent years, with their last win there coming back in 2009, bizarrely when McGhee was last in charge.

“Well, it isn’t a bogey ground for me,” joked the Motherwell manager. “Nothing like that frightens me. The inconsistency is much more relevant than any superstition.

“As much as I’m not an advocate of plastic pitches, we have trained on them a lot and our boys love it. So the pitch there isn’t a factor either.

“We are looking forward to going there. It’s a local derby and the passion from both sets of fans and players was terrific in the 3-3 game here.

“It has got the makings of another big game.”