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.

Direct Action against Duchatelet necessary

Let’s be honest everyone knows that the idiot who owns our club is set on trying to destroy it. He bought it on a whim, appointed an even bigger idiot to run it and it has sunk to the most predictable and lowest point in the last 50 years.

He is now asking a ridiculous price of c £50m to potential buyers who are pretending to agree but basically haven’t got the money or are unwilling to pay a silly price for a poor 3rd division club.

We need to decide as a community what we are prepared to do in response to his continued attack on us

Through neglect, mismanagement and total lack of care he is intent on destroying a community asset that has stood for 113 years.

We need to consider more direct and meaningful action against our absentee geriatric landlord before he succeeds in destroying something we love.

Fresh start needed everywhere

Depressingly my feeling that we would be tonked at Peterboro was well founded. We really are a poor team – we are regularly conceding 2 , sometimes, 3 and now even 4 goals in the 3rd division of English Football. Yes that’s right , it’s the 3rd division and it’s a disgrace. We need a fresh start – The obvious thing is to compare the current team with the one that got promoted from this division last time and man for man every single one of them is not as good ( recognising that Solly and Jackson were in their prime then and are not now). Not one of them would have got in that team so that doesn’t give us much of a chance does it ?

We need to clear nearly all of them out like Chris Powell did, we need new owners and despite the fact that I think Karl is a lovely person , we need a new manager too.

We need two strong big centre halves, two quick full backs , two tough and competitive midfielders and TWO goalscorers up front and we need to play 4-4-2, particularly at home where we regularly get outplayed by teams like Oldham, Oxford and Bury because we have one bloke up front against 2 towering centre halves.

Managers often over complicate football. Also , the first thing we need to do to win a game is to stop letting in goals – that needs to start at Blackpool.

 

Raw meat Evans

I’d like to be optimistic about tomorrow , but really the last team we want to be playing against is Peterborough with it being Steve Evans first match in charge. Evans is a kind of poor mans Neil Warnock, relentlessly driving lower division teams to success with a combination of pure fear and physicality. Although he hasn’t had much time at Boro you can rest assured that the players will have been fed enough raw meat to boost their testosterone to ball busting levels.

If I was our Karl, I’d be tempted to play anyone who is even remotely hard and / or big tomorrow- why not play JJ and Lee Bowyer in midfield with Pearce, Lennon, Bauer and Sarr at the back with two big fellas up front, Zyro and Magennis.

We might lose the game but at least we won’t be intimidated. Anyway, look I was optimistic against Shrewsbury and they mullered us, so now I’m pessimistic for tomorrow so maybe we will stand up to the challenge.

What on earth is going on with the takeover. The only real conclusion you can come to is that neither of the parties who have ‘ agreed the price’ can actually , as they say  ” come up with the money”  We all know that Roland is stark raving bonkers but he did at least get the deal done quickly when he bought it from the spivs. There is absolutely no way that it should take this long and also how on earth can no-one ! I repeat , no-one , know the identity of the 2 parties other the Roland – it’s like something out of the X Files.

You know what – I’d like to see Bernie Ecclestone takeover the club. He’s a billionaire, he comes from Dartford, went to Woolwich Poly. He’s good mates with someone who has strong Charlton connections who in turn is good mates with Peter Varney.

He’s out of F1 , he’s out of QPR , he’s got £3bn and he’s 87 years old and he’s a South Londoner – come on Bernie – come on down to The Valley and hear 27,000 people sing your name as we slalom up through the divisions.

Whats the alternative , leave it all to your kids who will only waste it.

You know it makes sense Bernie – give some back to the community and become a hero !!