Welcome McGrit

Of all my moans over the last season, my biggest and most consistent one has been -barring the excellent Dobbo- our lack of fight and energy in the midfield. It’s where you get the platform to play and all too often we were outfought and outrun.

The arrival of Conor McGrandles is a very welcome signing. He is a proven League 1 player with excellent reviews from fans of his previous club, he’s a good age and a good height and he’s signed a 3 year deal.

Lets hope he becomes the linchpin for our march to the glorious sunlit uplands of Championship football.

Dogs Dinner behind the scenes at Charlton

Rick Everitt who can be a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to the goings on at Charlton called it exactly right at the beginning of TS’s ownership at Charlton when he criticised the decision not to appoint an experienced CEO to run the club. I wasn’t certain he was correct because there are lots of different successful business models these days without necessarily having to be that traditional. I was wrong.

Thomas has made a series of senior appointments that have worked out badly, notably Ged Roddy, Wayne Mumford and now Brian Jokat who barely lasted long enough to locate the coffee machine.

He has appointed his son to a senior role which regardless of Martin’s talents is never a good idea and he has now got the very fragrant Raelynnn performing a who knows what role of HR assassin in chief.

However successful and brilliant Thomas has been in the past, the right way to run the football club would be to appoint a sensible and competent CEO, working full time at the club and let them get on with it providing financial resource and acting as a sounding board and mentor. He can’t run the club as a quasi CEO from Colorado.

Football clubs are unique in the variety of noisy stakeholders that have to be managed effectively. Zynex Medical may have customers, shareholders, staff and the financial community to deal with, but a football club has all of those in spades plus a bunch of customers( sorry fans) who also think they own the club and have a huge variety of passionately held and sometimes bonkers ideas about how THEIR business should be run.

With regard to ticket and hospitality sales, the biggest influence on that will be who we sign and fans expectation of success on the pitch. Increasing the marketing effort and the volume of cold calling staff will have a negligible effect if its not part of a coordinated campaign (preferably driven by a sensible CEO) which includes fan engagement. Running a football club is not like running Zynex where putting more sales reps on the road increases sales.

So far, we have made some encouraging player acquisitions who look useful but we’ve lost one of our best players in Connor Washington and need to be realistic because all 3 newbies have been League 2 out of contract players so its not exactly an avalanche of great new talent. We’ve also replaced our relatively inexperienced manager with another one.

We are Charlton fans so we have to keep hoping that a new sunlit dawn is arriving soon but the jury remains firmly out until we see the shape of the full team line up.

Ball Players come to Charlton

Welcome to Charlton to our 2 new signings, Eoghan and Mandela. They both look like very useful additions and the reshaping of the squad is gaining momentum. I think the policy of bringing the best players from a lower level, in this case, Swindon & Rochdale is generally a better plan than bringing in players from the Championship, think Watson, Gunter, Arter even Famewo.

I don’t think the quality gap is as great as generally thought and this way we get players who are on the way up with a point to prove rather than those who think League 1 is a step down and a bit below their level of ability. I’m all for a tough centre half from Rochdale – lets all hope that he comes up against Lyle Taylor at some point and converts him into Row Z.

This whole narrative about our new style utilising ball playing players is a bit of a hoot. It makes you wonder what our previous professional footballers did with the ball. I certainly wouldn’t want to build a team of non ball playing footballers.

Roller Coaster Tactics for Charlton

Great news that we’ve finally got a new manager. He’s young and has a decent track record so we can only hope he gets the right ammunition in new players to be successful.

You have to chuckle a bit about this desire to play out from the back, high press, attractive possession football. It all sounds lovely but frankly I couldn’t care less how we play – 3 big blokes up front and missing out the midfield completely would work for me – IF it gets results. Winning is the only thing that matters.

You can imagine the scene as Ryan Inniss gets caught for the 2nd time dribbling out of his own box to allow Accrington to go 2-0 up at The Valley after 10 minutes. Hopefully that won’t happen but it won’t take very long for the tactical geniuses in the crowd to be clamouring for our defenders to stop fannying around and hoof the ball forward.

We might have a few 4-3 or 5-4 results next year. It could be fun but I suspect crowd patience will be needed and we aren’t exactly renowned for that are we ?