West Brom 'Cab Four' debacle cost Albion relegation and my job, says former boss Alan Pardew

The Baggies' season was thrown into in chaos after the trip when it emerged four senior players – Gareth Barry, Jake Livermore, Boaz Myhill and skipper Jonny Evans – had allegedly taken a taxi in the early hours of the morning.

The players, dubbed the Cab Four, were all subsequently fined two weeks' wages.

And Pardew, asked on Sky Sports as to how much damage had been caused by the escapade, admitted: "It was damaging in so much that prior to that incident and that trip, where it was meant to be a team-bonding trip, we had a fantastic result of course.

"We beat Brighton in the league, we went to Liverpool and beat them in the Cup; their strongest team. And suddenly I honestly felt, after the Liverpool game, we were there or thereabouts and we were going to make it really tight for everybody else.

"But the Barcelona thing was a terrible incident and obviously the players let themselves down, they let the club down and they let me down."

He added: "From that moment forwards we never got results that kind of banished that fault, so it was always in the background.

"Probably the results afterwards were the bigger problem.

"We had just got some momentum and we had lost it with that incident. The senior players involved were a big, core part of my team."

And the former boss, who admitted he should have taken stronger action action the players, after Evans and Barry were selected for the next match with Myhill on the bench and Livermore only left out due to injury. The only immediate sanction was that Evans was stripped of the captaincy, though he was later reinstated by Pardew.

The 57-year-old, asked if he should have dropped those involved, replied: "Well that was probably a decision that some of the players in the group thought I should have , and some probably thought I shouldn't have.

"It was a decision that me and my staff, Darren (Moore) and John (Carver), we talked long and hard into the night about what we were going to do with that whole situation.

"Obviously we didn't call it right because we would have had a better reflection than we do now."

On his disappointment as losing the Baggies job, Pardew added: "The toughest thing is for West Brom, because it didn't work out – for the fans and people who work there, they obviously gave me everything that they could in terms of backing.

"But it didn't work out for reasons of a mix of me and the players, the players and me and as an experienced manager that just can happen sometimes.

"When you reflect as an experienced manager you have to kind of hold your hands up a little bit and think I made some decisions in there that probably didn't work out.

"I probably didn't know the squad and the way that I played and the way that Tony (Pulis) played was quite different, perhaps the grasp of the two different styles didn't quite work out.

If you're going to be a manager if you're going to take some blame as well and I certainly but some blame at my door too."