This has been a miserable season for West Ham and a huge effort is required in the final two matches to avoid relegation. But the club have to face facts. We're locked at the bottom of the Premier League table, our recent form is woeful, and there's little about manager Avram Grant that inspires hope or confidence.
Relegation would be a disaster for the club I served for 15 years. In my opinion, it's inevitable that we will lose our best players if we are relegated from the top flight.
I believe, for instance, that even the club's fans would accept that a player of Scott Parker's status would want and deserve a move. I'm sure that they'll agree with me that he deserves to be playing at the highest level of the game.
He's had a fantastic season for West Ham, a fact that was acknowledged last night when he picked up the FWA Footballer of the Year award.
But playing Championship football is no good at this stage of his career and I fully understand his desire to stay in the Premier League.
The loss of players like Parker, Matthew Upson or Robert Green would simply be one of the consequences of a long, slow decline that started at Upton Park when the former chairman Terry Brown sold out to an Icelandic consortium.
Back then, West Ham still adhered to standards set down in the Ron Greenwood-John Lyall era when Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and myself helped the club enjoy a period of 20 unbroken years in the old First Division.
The Hammers produced a conveyor belt of good youngsters and until a decade ago were regularly turning out players of the calibre of Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Michael Carrick.
Stability and caution underpinned the club but in the last 10 years we've had six different managers at Upton Park and relegation would almost certainly add the hapless Grant to that list.
Read More
Furthermore, we've had bewildering transfer policies that have allowed the club to invest unrealistic fees and salaries in players like Kieron Dyer and Freddie Ljungberg.
As for Grant, what a poor managerial choice he was. He simply didn't have the pedigree for the job and would certainly not be my choice if West Ham faced the challenge of a Championship promotion fight next season.
Should that be the scenario, West Ham need to bring in a manager with experience of Championship promotion campaigns otherwise I can see a bleak future with declining income and rows of empty seats when we move to the Olympic Stadium.
