Hopeless again but a win

Another dull and depressing afternoon of generally awful football at The Valley. As usual, even though Chesterfield were completely clueless,lacking in confidence and a long losing run, the game could have gone either way. Credit was due to Lee Novak who finally showed us why he got a contract with an excellent headed goal. Nicky Ajose showed again that he doesn’t seem to be able to hit a cows arse with a banjo and you can understand why Slade leaves him out of the team.

Holmes and Magennis played well and worked hard whilst the defense was solid as usual, but once again the midfield struggled to create much.

Anyway, having been stuck on the M25, the A3 and then the South circular, after a 2 and a half hour trip to get to the game,it was lovely to see my first win of the season.

The highlight of the day was when Andy Hunt arrived pitch side at half time . God those were the days, a great player in a great team with a packed stadium. He must have looked around at the vast empty spaces  today and wondered where it all went wrong. – Don’t we all ?..

Effective crowd control

I remember going to Chesterfield in 1975 to see us crown our promotion season from division 3. Because we are Charlton, the players decided to lose 3-0 instead, which prompted a degree of emotional alcohol fuelled aggression from the Charlton faithful and involved a futile attempt to invade the pitch and run the whole length of the ground to get at the bemused Chesterfield fans.- Aahhh- Those were the days –  you have to go to West Ham now for that sort of fun.

The fun and games continued after the game in an attempt to find anyone in chesterfield who,wasn’t on their way to the post office to post a letter or attend their aunties 80th birthday party, the Charlton crew were relentless in their mission to find someone willing to have a punch up.

Anyway, the frustrated police dog handler let his Alsatian go, which created blind panic amongst the tough boys. We all scattered, you don’t fancy yourself against an Alsatian do you ? No more trouble after that.

What happened to police dogs, send a few dozen of those to the Olympic Stadium and that will be the end of that ?

 

6 simple questions that Jim White should have asked Katrien

1. when you arrived – why did you immediately sell the 4 best players ?
2. why did you commission a video portraying a couple having sex on the pitch to promote the club ?
3. since you are the CEO and you have hired and fired 7 managers in the last 2 .5 years , don’t you think that you have done a poor job and should resign ?
4. why have you not resigned when the majority of your customers do not want you in charge of the club ?
5. Having lost over 40% of the season ticket holders and alienated the overwhelming majority of the rest of the fans – don’t you think it is time to step down ?
6. The fans believe that if you resign, many stay away fans would return – would you resign for the good of the football club ?

CARD should be applauded

All the people I know who have decided not to come to Charlton this season are doing it because they can’t stand the current owner and CEO. The reason that they take this view is because of the lack of any vision, ambition for the club or indeed understanding of the fanbase.

It is not because of any of the activities of CARD, who I believe they generally support. There seems to be a view, notably taken by Michael Tucker, who posts under Vital Charlton that CARD are part of the problem rather than the solution.

Yesterdays protest was non violent, received huge sympathetic media coverage and the analogy of the flying pigs was suitably intelligent.

Sensing that they have been comprehensively out thought by CARD, the Supporters Trust and every other sensible respresentative fan body, the club has employed a PR company to respond to the barrage of criticism. I suspect that a fair amount of the social media which purport to oppose CARD are actually from imaginary people.

Anyway, whether CARD is likely to achieve its objectives is open to debate, but I applaud them for trying.

We currently sit 15th in the 3rd division of English Football, we have an owner who has attended one game in 4 Years and a CEO who thinks that the club should promote its image by featuring a couple engaging in copulation on the centre circle.

Criticism of CARD is ridiculous by comparison.

Don’t blame the manager

I keep on reading that our squad is good enough for Top 6 in this divsion . We will all have our different views on this but I am firmly in the camp that our playing squad was never going to be good enough for anything better than a mid table or relegation battle in this division. You have to look at the players that form our midfield and attack. JJ, Crofts and Foley are all at the end of their careers. Ulverstadt arrived 5 mins before the season started , has virtually no English league experience, think Ba , Ceballos etc. Magennis is OK but let’s face it he was playing for Kilmarnock , Ajose had one good season at Swindon, Novak was available on a free. Our 2 best players , Lookman is 18 years old and Holmes was playing in League 2 last year.

My biggest criticism of Slade would be that he seems to think it’s about commitment and ‘ choices in the final 3rd’ when it’s really about lack of quality on the pitch – but I guess he can’t say that.

I don’t think Mourinho would be getting results with these players. Anyway we can’t change much before January. It looks like being a very long and bleak Autumn. I wouldn’t be surprised if we are bottom at Xmas.

Player recruitment has been a complete shambles since Roland and his cronies arrived. They lurch from one half arsed strategy to another.

The problem is exacerbated because neither the owner or the chief executive know anything about football and so in the land of the completely blind the one eyed Thomas Dreisen is king.

Heaven only knows when the pain will end. A new manager will make no difference at all.