We're halfway through the season, and City are still third. West Brom are only ahead of us on goal difference, and Watford by two points. Don't believe me? Here's the table. I don't blame you for being doubting Thomases, partly because Thomas is fairly much the only character in the whole Messianic farce that deserves any respect at all, but mainly because I'm struggling to believe it myself.

It's amazing to think that at Christmas two seasons ago we were bottom of League 1. For the benefit of my American readers, and a disappointingly large percentage of my English ones, the top division (the MLB equivalent) is called the Premiership, the next division down is called the Championship and the next two below that are called League 1 and League 2. After a decade spent mainly in League 1, City were promoted to the Championship last spring, and this year are challenging to go up to the Premiership.

Again, I should probably explain. Every May the top three teams in each league go up to the league above, to be replaced by the bottom three from that league. For City, it's as if we were the Springfield Isotopes, hoping to get into the same league as the Yankees or the Red Sox. This presents the top teams with a level of risk the money men in US sport would never accept, which is why it doesn't happen to the Red Sox, or more pertinently the Devil Rays, but in Europe it's literally the rule of the game.

Not that we'd survive for long in the cut-throat world of the Premiership. We just don't have the Premiership virtues. We arse around on the edge of the opponent's penalty area too much. Our players never seem to get round to crossing or shooting. How we ever actually score is something of a mystery. Also, the midfielders never seem to see the winger, alone on the touchline and nearer to us in the stand than they are to any defender.

The Championship virtues we have in spades. We work hard, we come out fighting at the beginning of every game and we tend to hold leads once we've got them. We have two big tall forwards and the ability to hoof it up to them, and they know how to occupy the exact space where the ball will fall, then hold it up while everyone else charges into the opponent's half of the pitch.

That's the point where we struggle, though. We don't have the killer instinct. The ball that cuts an acute angle exactly between the two covering defenders is never the ball that's played. Worse, though, we don't know what to do with the split second advantage.

When Premiership players get a split second advantage, they pounce on it like funnel web spiders, and the ball is in the back of the net before you can say Titus Bramble what a donkey. With our players, the first thing they do is stop and think I've got a split second advantage, what am I going to do with it? and by then it's already gone.

Still, all credit to them for their achievement. And all credit to me. My football team are doing well, and that reflects well on me in some undefined yet tangible way. Yes it does.