On The Premiership:The University of Georgia has published a report suggesting the attitude of youngsters is shaped by the buildings surrounding them at school. This is reassuring, if only because it proves American academics are just as adept as their European counterparts at blowing vast research budgets on determining the bleedin' obvious.

Those good ol' boys in the Deep South could have saved themselves a few thousand dollars had they turned their attentions to the play-pens of Premiership footballers.

Take Reading, for example. The road to the club's training ground takes in two picture-perfect Berkshire villages, a country pub called The Plough and an army training barracks, complete with tanks. They provide an ideal backdrop for a club whose honest yeomen have been drilled to military-like precision by their sergeant-major manager Steve Coppell.

So far, so what? As any good scientist - or even a bad one - will tell you, a curiosity only becomes a trend when it is corroborated by more evidence. In that case, look no further than West Ham, whose Essex headquarters are ringed by luxury car dealerships - including, deliciously, one selling Baby Bentleys. Case closed, point proved.

Professional footballers have an exasperating habit of abrogating responsibility for everything except success and Alan Curbishley's squad would undoubtedly love to portray themselves as the helpless victims of circumstance, their poor, tiny minds bedevilled and befuddled by the trappings of wealth which hove into vision every time they go to work.

But this just isn't good enough. West Ham's season has been one long, sorry story of self-inflicted catastrophe and yesterday's extraordinary encounter with Tottenham will have exacerbated Curbishley's exasperation. It served both as a reminder of his side's undoubted potential and also their chronic, costly flakiness. Besides, a more pertinent test of their mettle was last week's trip to the Valley, where three points were gift-wrapped and presented to Charlton in an unforgivably craven manner.

West Ham's penchant for only turning up when it suits them - they are the only team to have beaten both Arsenal and Manchester United this season - has already cost one man, the redoubtable Alan Pardew, his job and now, as if to prove that was no fluke, they are in the process of doing the same to his successor. One Sunday newspaper has even set a date for his departure next season - September 29th, for the record, although most consider that optimistic.

Curbishley is not blameless. He has clearly made mistakes, most obviously his decision to fritter £10 million on one notoriously injury-prone centre-half (Matthew Upson), one notoriously bad one (Callum Davenport) and a midfielder whose career has been distinguished only by the number of times he has been relegated (Nigel Quashie). It is as if the manager has made it his mission to assemble some sort of reverse Fantasy League team, especially picked to ensure calamity and embarrassment at every turn.

But Curbishley's scattergun spending was only prompted by the dull-witted displays of the players he inherited from Pardew - including two illegal Argentines, Nigel Reo-Coker, a Captain Dreadful, and the improbably imbecilic Anton Ferdinand, who apparently thinks nothing of using his sick grandmother as an excuse to creep off to South Carolina for a lavish birthday party.

Curbishley does not deserve such shabby treatment. Yet it is he, not his players, who will pay the price for West Ham's spectacular fall from grace.

Perhaps there is something in the water in east London. West Ham are curiously prone to outbreaks of unfettered egomania, from the days of Frank McAvennie in the 1980s, to the class of 2003 - Joe Cole, Jermain Defoe, Michael Carrick et al - which out-did even the current crop in terms of rank underachievement.

Then, as now, most of the blame was pinned on the manager. Glenn Roeder was accused of failing to adequately motivate his prima donna players - as if the multi-million pound pay-packets, 20-hour working week and adoring crowds were not inspiring enough - and was duly punished by being placed in charge of an even more malodorous collection of reprobates at Newcastle.

Would it not be refreshing if, after West Ham's next surrender, one of the main culprits came in front of the assembled media, admitted complete accountability for the shambles and vowed to perform some appropriate act of penance - a donation to charity, perhaps, or a few hours with the club's community scheme? It would at least show supporters that not all the humility had been drained out of their former heroes by one season of admittedly startling success.

Failing that, they could pay a visit to Reading, stopping off at the army boot camp on the way. If a verbal barrage from Curbishley cannot prompt a revival, a real one from a Challenger 2 might do the trick.