I feel a sacking coming on

I can’t really believe anyone with half a brain would have thought that the couple pretending to have sex on the pitch at the Valley was a clever marketing idea. .
‘Sex on the pitch’ can feature up there with ‘kids for a quid’ and ‘football for a fiver’.
Actually lets forget about hiring the pitch for playing football , lets just get people to pay for having sex on the pitch.

Maybe we could offer a cheap rate for under 15’s and pensioners – then maybe we could market and sell the videos in the club shop. Maybe we could have sex competitions against other London teams , home and away , who can last the longest. The commercial opportunities are just limitless.

Heads need to roll

Push on Charlton

Firstly a bloody fantastic result last night, which makes for a lovely weekend and optimism returning. Well done to everyone , new manager , players and the brave fans who made the journey

To be frank as I said in my last blog , fans only really care about the results.The majority of fans don’t make moral judgements about where the money comes from and would be delighted if colonel gadaffi was the owner if he put tons of money in to buy good players. Look at the dodgy owners of both Chelsea and Man City. Lets be honest , even though roman abramovich has effectively robbed every man , woman and child in Russia , we’d have been delighted if his helicopter had landed at the valley.

If charlton started winning every week , loads more people will come and watch again and all is well with the world. All the stuff about warm feeling , cuddly , ‘different’ charlton to my mind is a load of cobblers.

Just a bit of perspective on this mini revival is required. Lucky Guy (long may it continue) has been able to pick Steven Henderson, which poor old bob didn’t have available during the losing run. Secondly, we have had a 2nd centre half available ie Roger Johnson to give Bikey a break. Bob had Morrison and we should have kept him.
Guy has been able to play a proper 2nd striker, ie not network George but network Tony ,which wasn’t a choice open to poor old bob.
What we have really needed all season is 2 decent strikers and at least 1 if not 2 proper wide players. Last night we had Bulot, Gudmunssen, Eagles and Harriot all playing out wide at some point.

None of this was really a surprise to any of us who watch every week was it.
Maybe if Guy sits with us in the east stand and then phones Roland after every game , Roland will trust him and we will get what we need and not 1 bloke up front , no wingers and 6 kids on the subs bench.
If so , we will all be happy- it’s not complicated.

Anyway let’s hope the run runs and runs. We need to keep progressing and not just trying to avoid relegation every year. That will keep everyone happy.

Fan contract

What is the deal as a football supporter?
Firstly let’s be clear , there is no football club without customers ie supporters.
There really is no point in owning a football club if no one wants to come and watch the matches.

The reason fans come to watch matches is a complex mix of geographical accident, familial obligation and history,interest in sport and a desire to be entertained plus many other reasons.
Fans don’t really care who owns or indeed manages or even who plays for the club.
In return for their attendance , fans want their team to win and be successful. Often the team isn’t successful and in that event, most supporters will continue to attend if they can see and believe that sensible steps are being taken to improve results.
That is the fan contract between the owner and the supporter.

If supporters don’t feel any real ambition from the owner to improve results, and particularly in the face of no communication or inept communication they lose hope and faith and many stop going to matches.

It’s not complicated. Our steadily diminishing attendances reflect not only the poor results but also the belief that the fan contract has broken down.

I hope that tonight’s meeting and more importantly the trust meeting tomorrow eventually leads to a rebuilding of the fan contract.

Richard Murray

 

I am a massive fan of Richard Murray . In a lifetime of unremitting pain and embarrassment as a Charlton fan , he gave me one of the best moments of my life at wembley in 98 and he gave me the best team I have ever seen , playing lovely football, competing and winning in the premiership for 7 years. The guy poured millions into the club and persuaded others like Maurice hatter , another lifelong fan , to put significant funds into the money pit, so that we could all go and have a great time. I was very proud to be a Charlton supporter , probably for the only time in 40 odd years of support.
When I travelled abroad , people knew about Charlton. When I was lying in my hotel room in Dubai once there was a TV Channel devoted to Charlton games. When I visited the floating market in Bangkok , there was a local selling fruit off his canoe , wearing a charlton Mesh team shirt. You could go to Hong Kong and the knock off markets were selling Charlton team shirts. Richard Murray was the bloke who got us to that level.

Eventually,he got to a point where he couldn’t or wouldn’t put more money in, for whatever reason, but who could blame him , he had done his bit. Obviously along the way he made the odd mistake, Les Reed, Ian Dowie and probably sacking Pardew a bit too early , but on the whole , he has been magnificent. He has been a great communicator with the fans and he is a bloody nice bloke. Which brings me to today . We have been pretty unlucky with our last two owners. Slater and Jimenez were just slimy chancers moving someone else’s money around.
Duchatelet is a deluded egocentric geriatric.

Richard has stuck around because he is a FAN . He is the only fan on the board – in that sense he is just like you and me. He screams and shouts and celebrates when we win and he is sad and depressed when we lose. I know he is getting his share of abuse and negative comments on the fan forums, but when the trust meets next week , I hope one of the outcomes is to try and enlist Richards help and support.

I watched the Luzon appointment press conference. It was embarrassing and I squirmed for Richard. It was uncomfortable viewing. He is a proud bloke and he is basically one of us. I suspect that Duchatelet listens to no one , even his psychiatrist and the many voices in his strange head , but it’s worth trying to get Richard to speak for us because he, unlike us, at least, has direct contact with the idiot owner and he CARES like we do.

Support the Trust

I think the club is in a dire situation. The owner is obviously a deluded and idiotic megalomaniac who knows nothing about football. The fact that he is rich and has been successful in business does not mean that he is rational.
If you care about your club , we should support the supporters trust and get along to their proposed meeting if you can.
I have joined the trust , I hope you do too.

See their statement here. http://www.castrust.org/2015/02/trust-calls-public-meeting-fans

Honey I shrank the club.

Scene :The valley : 2nd February 2015 ,strategy meeting chaired by katrien Meire.
“Ok so we are here to discuss the new initiative for next year.
It’s called Target 5,000. This is an idea I came up with myself for next years 3rd division campaign. It’s similar to previous campaigns that the club used to run called target 10,000 and target 20,000 only it’s a bit, well , smaller. Those campaigns were a bit flimsy because they were run by people who got emotionally involved with the club and didn’t really see the whole money laundering opportunity.

This is a much better idea , this is designed to tap into the clubs traditional fanbase, fishmongers.
I had the idea on the train back from Watford the other day.
Frankly I’m amazed that it took a girl with an MBA from oergenfukenbegenfluken business school to come up with the obvious answer.
Any idiot could have realised that up the addicks is a fantastic opportunity to woo back the original fishmongers who set up the club back in the 1100’s when the king agreed to allow the formation of charlton athletic as part of the magna carta.
Roland took me through all of that when he originally bought the club and told me all about its history which he had methodically researched over many months prior to buying the club.
Only last week, Roland reminded me about how our most famous sons , bobby and Jackie won the World Cup for charlton in 1966 and from that day onwards rolly knew that there would only ever be one true love in his life , well apart from maybe standard liege cos he likes them , and possibly st trudien because he lives there and maybe ujpest dosa because he had a fun night out there once and even at a pinch Carl zeiss Jena, where he used to buy his cameras.

Terrible , shocking , awful, hopeless, clueless

I could go on . Rotherham are frankly poor and we were even worse. We deserved nothing and scrambled a point.
Now we are in a relegation battle , how do you fancy the likes of buyens, vetokele, gudmunssen, lepoint, watt, bulot in a physical relegation fight away at millwall , Blackpool and Wigan ? I like Harriot but he is a winger and playing him up front as a second striker is just STUPID.
Vetokele looked good in early season but he is poor now , although at least he can head the ball. Do they do heading in Belgium ? None of the midfielders or “strikers” we have had from the network seems able to head the ball.
Apart from the local lads Jordan cousins and Chris solly , we never win the second ball. Rotherham were strong , physical , quick, tough, determined and generally useless.
Lepoint looked like a pub footballer- maybe it was jet lag from Belgium.Hard to believe he can be that bad.
Was there anything good – well Bikey and Ben Haim are perfectly good championship centre halves. The goalie, whoever he is, had a good game , Jordan Cousins was total effort and Chris Solly was well Chris Solly.
As a final point , it is difficult to understand why joe Gomez is not playing somewhere in the team , because he is so obviously a class above the rest of them.
As a final, final point , to play 2 up front , I would have played the welsh international no 9 simon church alongside igor.
We are in big trouble. The crowd is diminishing every week. There is no respect for the owner or manager. To hear’ you don’t know what you are doing ‘ as the manager in the 61st minute of your first home game must be some kind of record.

My mate, who is an experienced and successful sales manager asked me to pose you this question ( after a few vodkas)
If you were the owner or the chief executive running a company and you had hired 4 sales managers in a 12 month period , what would that say about your competence to run a business.