Eggert Magnusson, the biscuit bloke that bought West Ham, must have felt like putting up two Cadbury's Fingers towards the heavens on Sunday.

The Hammers have no-one to blame but themselves. On and off the pitch the club is in turmoil. You can accept players suffering from loss of form on the pitch, these things happen - until, in the case of West Ham, you ask why. You don't need a sociologist of repute (sorry for the oxymoron) to tell you that people with high-stress jobs should not be bringing high-stress issues into the workplace.

And reports over the past few days suggest that stress is literally high-stakes at the club. As the team coach rolls to away defeat after away defeat, so the pot in the card school rolls to absurd proportions. In the fifties and sixties card schools consisted of Happy Families (which is what football clubs were). Now the stakes are so high that two West Ham players have allegedly run up debts of tens of thousands. Hardly the best preparation for crucial relegation battles.

Of course, if such a thing was to happen at Manchester United, the manager of the company would string up the culprits and leave them dangling upside-down until the stupidity of their actions was literally drained out of their systems. Whatever you say about Sir Alex, he comes from a generation and background that knows the difference between right and wrong. Under his tutelage, you simply could not imagine the late and great George Best going off the tracks.

I think herein lies the problem with West Ham. Alan Curbishley was head of the family at Charlton Athletic for 15 years, a nuclear family with a mum, dad and two delightful children who were always on their best behaviour and whose school results were good, if not spectacular.

And what happens when he arrives at West Ham? He finds a dysfunctional set of siblings, out of control and showing no aptitude for hard work (including the siblings he adopted in the January transfer window). And worse still, he has no control over the antics of his unruly children; from the card school, to one going missing, from lack of effort to one of the kids telling tales on the others.