Monthly Archives for December 2013

Deckchairs on the Titanic

Whatever formation we play , whoever the personnel ,more or less whoever we play against, it results in the same outcome, 0- something .
It is obvious the players give everything for the manager and that’s partly why the crowd remain so patient , but basically they could change the rules and make the game 180 minutes long and we still wouldn’t score.

It is to be hoped that the Board don’t resort to the blame game and sack SCP . That would be a mistake , but lets face it they’ve made a few.
The games I have seen in sequence this year are Derby 0-2 , Reading 0-1 , Ipswich 0-1 , Leeds 2-4 , Blackpool 0-0 , Watford 1-1 , Boro 0-1, Bouremouth 1-2 , a total of 8 games , including 5 home defeats , 1 home draw and 1 away draw with 4 goals scored by us in over 12 hours of football . I haven’t seen a win all season and we are now at the end of December .

Dear Mrs Agony aunt …..what should I do. ?

Sinking Fast

Following the bad news that the takeover has collapsed , its really difficult to be optimistic right now.
I guess Kevin Cash has to decide whether to keep on putting more money in to keep the club afloat or cut his losses and bail out completely which presumably would mean administration , a 10 or 15 point deduction and back to League 1 . Presumably we will find out when payroll is due in December or January whether we can hear the sound of plugs being pulled.

In a way , what I find completely depressing is how our club continues to slip down the London pecking order . When I started going as a kid in the mid 60’s , quite a lot of the crowd still remembered how good we’d been in the 40’s and although we’d already slipped down a fair way then , teams like QPR, Watford, Reading and of course Palace & Millwall were still regarded as significantly lesser clubs, let alone the likes of Wimbledon, Wigan & Swansea who didn’t register at all.

The news this morning of a huge proposed development for QPR with a 40,000 seater stadium fills me with envy. How on earth did that happen ? I guess a West London location is always going to be trendier than South East London because its not so far to travel from their homes in Notting Hill or Chelsea for foreign investors like the Mittals and Tony Fernandes.

However with all that building East of the City, surely someone gets it that we could fill a 40,000 seater stadium too.

We need a visionary ( with lots of money) …………………………

Deal or no deal

It is difficult to be optimistic right now . Its a struggle on the pitch and who knows what’s going on off the pitch.

We need a goal scorer urgently and probably another couple in central midfield and central defence. I’m not sure I really understand the Michael Slater comment that there is no deal imminent and we are on track in our 5 year plan . I didn’t have the benefit of being there when he said it , but I’m not sure that hovering around the bottom of the championship would feature in any sensible business plan.

My feeling with CAFC is that the Premiership has to be an imperative for a London club like ours because of the huge competition for fanbase and generally other activities in the capital . If you live in Hull or Blackburn or Bolton or Newcastle or Sunderland or Norwich , etc, etc – who else are you going to support , whether you are in the Premiership or the Conference ? . In London, we can all support Chelsea or Arsenal or Tottenham or West Ham .

The lower reaches of the Championship just don’t work for us.

My experience of buy outs suggests that if the deal doesn’t get done quickly , it doesn’t get done at all.

Lets hope I’m wrong and the Lone Ranger and Tonto are about to ride in over the horizon

Neat but ineffective

That was how the Times described Charlton’s performance at QPR and the journalist would have no cause to reach for a different thesaurus when describing yesterdays performance .
The trouble is that the opposition know that if they score a goal at the Valley , particularly the first goal then they are going to win 1-0 because we just can’t score. We lack guile and creativity and real threat in the penalty box .
Mick McCarthy’s team talk went something like this ‘ OK, guys what we do is attack with 11 men for the first 10 minutes , throw everyone forward , launch yourselves like an exocet at any corners or free kicks we get , score a goal and then lets spend the remainder of the game , letting them come onto us because they can’t score if the game lasts until Christmas ‘

We desperately need a freshen up with some real goal threat and more invention in the middle.
Lets hope the Josh Harris takeover story is true and that they give SCP the resources he needs to climb the table .