Dreaming of a team of Jason Pearces

I bought my train ticket to Shrewsbury after the euphoria of the Rotherham result and before the misery of Wimbledon and Scunthorpe. Perhaps I wouldn’t bother after all …. anyway, despite the landslip and diversion via Northampton – I made it to Shrewsbury in time for a couple of pre match pints with old mates.

The game was pretty poor really, but there was only ever going to be one winner and by that I don’t mean Charlton, I mean Jason Pearce. He may not be the best footballer  but he is a born leader. The rest of the team followed his lead and were well worth the victory.

It will be a difficult game at Pompey but if eleven Jason Pearces turn up – we’ll win there too.

 

Bullied Again

Watching the game yesterday was a bit like those games you used to play in where you played against the year above at school. Yes, we’ve got some nice players, skilful players, committed players but when you add it all up we lack the sheer physicality to compete with the older boys.

Jason Pearce is not enough on his own – we need to recruit some Kinsellas, Aizlewoods, Stevie Browns, Steve Gritts, Scottie Parker’s, Herminators,…….. Lee Bowyers ! – otherwise we will never get out of this division. The return to 442 has been welcome, but the oppositions have now realised that none of our front two choices are proper goalscorers – Ajose, in particular, whilst he works hard spends most of his time waiting behind the centre halves hoping they will miss it rather than showing in front of his marker to win the ball and hold it up.

Jake Forster Caskey has been excellent recently and he put another enormous shift in yesterday but much as I like both Reeves and Aribo, the 3 of them together just look lightweight in this division.

Football aside, I walked the slightly abridged unofficial version of the Upbeats walk yesterday – we walked about 8.5 miles rather than the 10 miles by cutting off a bit of Greenwich Park, it got us to the Rose of Denmark around Noon for a welcome pint ( or three) – a really lovely walk in the sunshine with lifelong mates and raising money for the Upbeats. A special mention to the landlord of the Rose of Denmark where the staff were very welcoming and without any of us asking, he actually gave us a tenner for the Upbeats , which we duly deposited in a collection bucket at the Ground.

Shame about the football , but there we are – hopefully we will eventually get an owner who cares as much as we do !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What was Karl thinking ?

Great credit is due to Lee Bowyer and Johnnie Jackson who have galvanised the players into a proper football team. They have been hugely assisted by the continued availability together of Jason Pearce and Patrick Bauer. The team were great today, Joe Aribo was simply magnificent as was the reborn Ben Reeves and as Lee has said its a simple game and the players are winning their individual battles and not being bullied anymore.

My only concern would be Ezri Konsa who had a poor game and looked rather out of sorts all afternoon. Mind you he is an excellent player so I’m sure we will find the right role for him at some point.

It is impossible not to question why Karl only played one bloke up front, why he dropped Joe Aribo, why he played Ben Reeves out of position, why he didn’t give Zyro or Ajose a chance earlier and finally why it all seemed very complicated and difficult when we were only playing in the 3rd division against generally poor teams.

Funny old game isn’t it ?

Charlton Upbeats Walk

Dear Readers, that’s those of you who send me both nice and nasty messages !

I will be walking for the Charlton Upbeats on April 14th. As we all know, its a great cause and part of CACT’s brilliant and groundbreaking community activities.

If you can’t make it yourself or fancy sponsoring me – any donations, however small would be most welcome. I’ve started the page off with £200, so if I manage to get to £205 it will be a indicative measure of my blog’s popularity.

See https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/alburyaddick

 

Football is a simple game

When you watch your football team week in week out, you see things going on that you hope your highly FIFA badged and experienced manager sees too. The case in point at Charlton has been Karl’s policy of playing poor Josh up front on his own isolated from the nearest team member. Now if we were playing Man City or Liverpool each week you could sort of understand it, but when you are playing Bury, Oldham and Fleetwood every week and all 3 of their centre halves suddenly transform from Fred Heckingbottom who spent his whole career in the lower leagues to looking like Franz Beckanbaeur, you sense that the tactics aren’t correct.

The ball doesn’t stick to poor one man Josh and consequently the opposition push up and the game gets played in our half of the pitch.

I have been moaning about this for months on here and lots of the fan observations on Charlton Life and Twitter have been saying the same thing.

Anyway, lo and behold , Lee and JJ have obviously been thinking the same thing and yesterday was a revelation – two men up front – hoorah and do you know what happened – Plymouth had to defend deeper and we played in their half and had lots of chances. The team were also highly motivated and that obviously helps a lot.

So well done to our new management team for using some common sense rather than tactical mumbo jumbo.

Lets hope we’ve turned the corner in every respect.

Monty Python catering from Delaware

The Valley AD and The Valley BD could be referring to after and before Duchatelet but I’m talking about after and before Delaware.

The catering at Charlton along with the football has deteriorated hugely over the last 10 years with an accelerated decline since they outsourced it to Delaware.

Yesterday there were 2 guys standing next to each other dispensing the “food” in the North Stand Lounge. One guy takes the money and the other bloke standing next to him serves the food.  – So the customer in front of me has two little kids with him and he says I’d like 2 sausage rolls and chips and one sausage in a bun – ok that will be £12.80. He pays and then moves on to the server who is an inch from the bloke who took the money. The server goes to the hot cabinet behind him and gets out a vegetable plait and offers it to the bloke- who says what’s that and he says it’s a vegetable plait to which the bloke ( not unreasonably) points out that he’d ordered 2 sausage rolls.

At this point the server appears to suffer from some kind of brain freeze so much so that you’re not really sure if he’s auditioning for Westworld or someone’s just unplugged him. Nothing seems to happen for an eternity as the server and the bloke who took the money stare at each other in some kind of vacant out of body experience.

Fortunately, and realising that this impasse could go on for a while, I seized the opportunity and jumped in with my order to the bloke who was taking the money. The vegetable plait holder and the man who wanted two sausage rolls were nowhere near solving what seemed to me to be an intractable problem – particularly if you come from a solid meat eating kind of background.

Anyway, sensing that this whole situation could work to my advantage, I questioned the guy who was taking the money “what pies have you got ” – we’ve got vegetable plait ( I was reasonably familiar with that offer by now because of the dilemma currently facing my predecessor in the queue) and Steak and Guinness pie.” Great” – I said, “the steak pie and chips please” – that will be £6.60. I then moved to the critical food dispensing element of the ordeal and I seemed to be in pole position now because one ingredient of the previous but now revised order on account of the distinct non availability of sausage rolls, whether it was chips , rolls or sausages had run out – so not only had he not got what he ordered but when he changed the order to something they had got – they’d run out of that too.

Anyway, no bother, it was my turn now , frozen stiff from the trip to The Valley, a pie and chips would do very nicely thanks. So there I am, head of the queue facing the refugee from Westworld. Steak Pie and Chips I repeated – I saw his eyes dart back to the vegetable plait hot drawer dispenser and both our hearts sank. Neither of us could see anything that resembled the Steak Pie that his neighbour had just sold me.

But luckily, just when it looked like the whole situation was about to turn nasty – his mate – the cashier pointed at the beef stew in front of the server and said there you are, this weeks special is a deconstructed Pie.

Its a Fuc—-g what ……………………….. ????????

I’m truly sorry to the man in front of me with the little kids – I really shouldn’t have reacted like that.

Another dreadful performance

Charlton were awful again today, playing a brand of football that is dull, boring, predictable, slow and ineffective.

Against a team which has home crowds of 3,000, no history, no budget, hasn’t stopped the opposition from scoring since 2017, were hopeless too and are likely to get relegated to Division 4, Charlton were generally second best and on balance of clear cut chances, Fleetwood should have won.

I don’t care how many coaching qualifications Karl has, but if playing Magennis again as the lone striker with Reeves as his deep lying mate was the wrong tactic as early as the 60th minute then as all the supporters would have told you when they saw the team sheet, it was also wrong in the 1st minute. Talk about flogging a dead horse.

Although Zyro and Ajose don’t look much good either, they did, at least look like two conventional strikers and caused problems to Fleetwood with some decent link up play.

I really like Karl and I think he is a decent, honest and straightforward person , but he needs to go now so that we can start to build for next season.