WHEN Aston Villa score four against you, you know it's just not your season.

It's not a good time to be a West Ham fan right now. The only thing worse is being a West Ham manager.

Unless something miraculous has happened this afternoon, I imagine Glenn Roeder could already be scanning the jobs section of the local paper and thinking about how much more time he has got to do the Christmas shopping on a Saturday afternoon.

When you look at the league table, they always say the teams at the bottom around Christmas are the teams you fear for.

As the festive season approaches, you have to look at Bolton and West Brom as concerns although you can't rule out the likes of City, Sunderland or Charlton.

There won't be many people who wouldn't back the East End boys for the drop. Just three points from eight home games isn't something that looks too good.

So where is the problem? Is it the manager? Possibly. Roeder has never commanded the full respect of the bigger name players like Di Canio.

When you see him on the touchline, you can only imagine that, somewhere, there's a school missing a physics teacher. West Ham are a team that is so much less than the sum of its parts. Not only is there Di Canio, there are experienced pros like Sinclair, James, Winterburn and Dailly. And then there are the talented youngsters.

Could it be there are too many kids? Cole, Carrick and Defoe are players who look almost dead certs for great international careers who could get into most sides in the league.

It may be that there is too much expected of them but the only problem with that is it never seemed to bother Beckham, Scholes and the rest.

You can't even say they don't have any aggression in the side. Would you argue with Repka and Winterburn's never been someone too worried about arriving a little late for a tackle.

All of this suggests that the problems stem from the lack of direction from a strong manager. To be fair though, it's not all his fault. They've never recovered from the problems with the work done on the stadium several years ago.

They've always ended up selling their best assets such as Ferdinand and Lampard and that hasn't helped previous managers and you can't see it helping the future ones, either.

If they go down at the end of the season and the big names disappear, you can't see how they could return to the top flight. Maybe they should start looking for a suitable man to lift the gloom around the Boleyn ground now? You never know, that nice Terry Venables will probably be available to help them out very soon.