The original Crazy Gang grew old disgracefully and retired to leave the Victoria Palace still echoing with laughter.

At Wimbledon, however, the jokes have worn a little thin. There, the gang show is no longer crazy and if the team are to stay in the Premiership their players need to reacquire a modicum of fighting madness.

If Wimbledon lose at Bradford City tomorrow they will probably be relegated and already the repercussions have begun.

A clamour of former Wimbledon managers, along with players - past and present - have apportioned blame for the crisis according to their lights.

Dave Bassett, under whose management Wimbledon won promotion to the old First Division in 1986, says the bulk of the responsibility must lie with the team.

Joe Kinnear, who managed the club successfully for seven years until his heart attack 13 months ago, blames his successor, the Norwegian Egil Olsen.

Carl Cort, Wimbledon's leading scorer this season, has criticised Olsen's team formations and tactics. Kenny Cunningham, the club captain, feels that Olsen has reacted too casually to the run of seven successive defeats which has plunged the side into a relegation crisis.

John Fashanu, red-booted battering ram of the Wimbledon attack in better days, believes that Robbie Earle, who has been on the playing staff for nearly 10 years, should be the next manager if Olsen leaves at the end of the season, as has been widely predicted.

In the meantime Terry Burton, once Kinnear's assistant but more recently in charge of the youth academy, has been given his old job back - at the behest of the players, according to some reports.

Given the seriousness of Wimbledon's situation Olsen's decision to spend two days back on native soil this week collecting an award for services to Norwegian football seemed a mite perverse.

Then again, the welly-wearer was noted for his eccentricity long before he arrived at Selhurst Park. He was a successful coach, that was all that mattered.

Wimbledon, however, have always needed something more than a capable boss.

Kinnear was right for them not merely because he knew how to organise a winning team, or at least one that did not lose too often, from slender resources, but because he understood the psyche of this odd little club and was prepared to embellish it with his own offbeat powers of motivation.

At times he overplayed the image of sod-busters holding out against the Premiership's cattle barons and his perpetual complaints about getting a poor deal from referees, the Football Association, the wicked witch of the west and so on became predictable and tedious.

Nevertheless it is hard to escape the fact that Wimbledon's precipitate and possibly fateful decline set in the moment Kinnear collapsed with a heart attack shortly before the kick-off at Hillsborough on March 3rd last year.

Wimbledon beat Sheffield Wednesday 2-1 that day and lifted themselves to sixth place. They did it, everybody said, for Joe, but the gesture was a brief one. Nine of the last 11 fixtures have been lost and the other two drawn.

Olsen has been unable to arrest the slump, not helped by the departure of Wimbledon's best defender Chris Perry to Tottenham for Stg2.4 million before the season began.

The situation has not been improved, either, by financial matters which persuaded the club's Norwegian owners, Kjel Inge Rokke and Bjorn Rune Gjeltsen, to send in a troubleshooter, Svein Bakke, to inspect the books shortly before Christmas.

At the time Sam Hammam, who sold a controlling interest in the club to Rokke and Gjeltsen in the summer of 1997, made a gloomy, but now increasingly accurate, prediction of the effect of the three-day investigation on the players.

"It will demoralise the team and we could hit a downward spiral," Hammam said. "If we ever go to the first division we will lose between Stg7 million and Stg11 million a year.

"In two years the club will have no players, no money and would probably be in the second or third division, heading nowhere."

The likelihood of Wimbledon ever regaining Premiership status would be remote. They might, as Hammam has warned, drop through the divisions like stones down a well.

But why the fuss about Wimbledon? After all, clubs have abseiled before now. Carlisle, Northampton, Brighton, Leyton Orient, Swansea: they had all found room at the top once upon a time.

The point about Wimbledon is that, and especially since the formation of the premier league, they have represented the last of the corner shops in a game which increasingly benefits their shareholders.

Maybe Wimbledon's course was run once they became the property of distant Norwegian trawler billionaires.