Ian Poulter is incapable of making anything easy on himself.

Just when it looked like he had positioned himself for perhaps the best chance of his career to win a major championship, Poulter imploded on the second-to-last hole of his round Friday to wreck what had been a beautiful day.

He stepped to the eighth hole having birdied Nos. 4, 5 and 7 to get to 3-under, one shot behind leader Dustin Johnson — then posted a grisly triple-bogey.

Here’s the anatomy of the Poulter self-destruction:

He hit his tee shot into the fairway.

He hit his 7-iron approach shot into a bunker to the right of the green.

He bladed his sand wedge shot across and over the other side of the green.

He fluffed his fourth shot from some tamped-down grass into tall greenside fescue.

He chunked his fifth shot out of the high rough, still short of the green.

He putted his sixth shot onto the green and left himself a six-foot putt for triple and made the putt to avoid an eight.

The carnage dropped Poulter from 3-under and one shot behind Johnson to even-par and four back. He then failed to rebound on the ninth hole, again hitting a poor 7-iron approach shot into a greenside bunker and finishing with a bogey to finish 1-over and five shots behind Johnson.

“When you’re out of position on this golf course and you’re trying not to make another mistake and another mistake … it just looks really stupid,” Poulter said. “I felt stupid knifing the first one. I felt even more stupid semi-chunking the next one, and I didn’t do much better on the next one, either. So maybe it makes a few people happy out there that, you know, we kind of mess up just as everyone else. We’re human, right?’’

When dissecting the blunders on No. 8, Poulter said he “got lucky with the lie’’ he had.

“I was expecting it to plug,’’ he said. “A really a poor bunker shot should have been 20 feet [away from the hole]. A really poor bunker shot. A really, really poor bunker shot to about 30 yards is really poor. I was trying to hit the perfect bunker shot. I was trying to nip it clean. I was trying to land it half a yard over the crest to get it to check out.

“A good bunker shot, I felt like I could hit it to about 4 or 5 feet. I didn’t commit to the shot I wanted to play, and that’s the only disappointing thing, really, about the mistake I made.’’

Poulter, who hasn’t had any success at U.S. Opens in his career and hasn’t played once since 2015, was candid voicing his feelings about this major championship.

“I’ve hated it for 14 years,” he said. “I came into my first U.S. Open [in 2004 at Shinnecock], and I wanted to enjoy it and I hated it. I hated a lot of U.S. Opens through the years because I’ve gone home early and I haven’t had the finish that I would have liked.

“[But] coming in this week, I’m feeling good about my game, feeling good about the course. I kind of love it, [and] even though I finished triple-bogey, bogey, I love the challenge. So, you know, I hated it and I love it.”