Comment: Victory today is a must after taxi-theft allegations from West Brom's Barca farce

After a tumultuous week at boardroom level plunged a club with one league win in 25 matches into further turmoil, supporters will have been looking to their playing staff for some degree of reassuring professionalism.

But instead, skipper Jonny Evans, Gareth Barry, Jake Livermore and Boaz Myhill had to be interviewed by police for allegedly stealing a taxi in the early hours of the morning during a break in Spain.

Whether Albion’s midweek jaunt to Barcelona had a positive or negative impact on team spirit won’t be evident until the end of today’s match.

But it’s probably easy to predict, particularly if the players were indeed up until 6am.

Alan Pardew admitted that in hindsight, he wouldn’t have gone to Spain. Albion's head coach has been doing a lot of admitting recently.

He said the same thing after dropping in-form Jay Rodriguez for injury-prone Daniel Sturridge.

His honesty endeared himself to fans at the start of his tenure, but he's starting to make a few too many mistakes and is now under pressure after one win in 13 league games.

This trip was always destined to be a disaster.

It was billed as warm weather training, but the temperatures never topped 16C and plunged as low as 4C at times.

Perhaps that’s why Evans and Myhill – two of the protagonists – are wrapped up in coats and hats on a picture that surfaced online of the team having dinner together.

Mind you, if you're out all night you better wrap up warm.

On top of that, it was initially booked for this week because the powers that be didn’t expect to beat Liverpool away in the FA Cup. How’s that for ambition?

It should have been a week-long escape, a chance to relieve pressure ahead of a busy period. But then Albion stunned Jurgen Klopp’s men at Anfield and it was cut short to three days.

That is not enough time to unwind and enjoy oneself, and perhaps the reason some of the players went overboard is because time was precious. You do crazier things on a two-night stag do than a week long holiday, after all.

Just to compound the misery, Pardew himself lost his wallet and phone on the first night out when his jacket was stolen.

He was disappointed these senior players stayed out beyond12am, but Evans and co didn't just break his curfew, they smashed it to pieces.

Coming back six hours later than you were supposed to is not time running away with you, it's a complete lack of respect for the man who set the rules in the first place.

And this wasn't a set of wet-behind-the-ears youngsters nowhere near the team. It was the club captain, an England international, the Premier League's most experienced player, and a goalkeeper in his mid-30s.

It raises serious questions about how much respect the squad has in its head coach.

If you read a story about McDonald’s and a stolen taxi in the autobiography of a former player it would probably be funny, and no doubt it will be told in after-dinner speeches in years to come.

But the fact it’s come with the club on the brink of relegation and with the most crucial part of their season coming up makes it unacceptable.

If you or I stole a taxi in Spain, or even a set of keys, we could expect to face an uncomfortable night in a Spanish jail and a sore head thanks to the Guardia Civil’s truncheons.

But the same rules don’t apply to multi-millionaire footballers.

This behaviour less than 60 hours before an FA Cup match is an insult to fans, who are starting to see this competition as the final scrap to cling onto in what has been a catastrophic season.

It’s also an insult to the club’s history on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 triumph.

And all it has done is heap more pressure on a team that has already looked incapable of dealing with it all season.

Today’s match against Southampton is now a must-win because the fans won’t accept anything else.

The worrying thing for Albion is that this is all starting to look extremely reminiscent of Villa’s catastrophic 2015/16 campaign.

It was in this very week two years ago that Joleon Lescott sent out a tweet of a high-performance Mercedes following their 6-0 defeat to Liverpool.

Albion’s players arguably went one better, and allegedly stole the car instead of tweeting a picture of one, but just like Lescott’s antics it came shortly after an all-too comfortable defeat to a top six side.

When you look closer, the parallels between the two sides are scary.

There was just as much turmoil in the boardroom. Chief executive Tom Fox resigned from Villa in March 2016, although Albion owner Guochuan Lai took that decision out of his chief executive’s hands earlier this week.

Both clubs won their first game of the season, both clubs had just three league wins by this stage of the campaign, and both clubs enjoyed a mini-resurgence in January.

Villa went on a five-game unbeaten run in the first month of 2016, but that included two games in the FA Cup and proved to be a false dawn.

Hopefully that will not be the case for Pardew’s band of merry men, and this will actually instil a bit of siege mentality in the group.

But it’s certainly going to take some work to stick the wheels back on Albion’s taxi, because at the moment, it’s careering all over the road.