Bury fully deserved their point today. We huffed & puffed, but our creative players Fosu & Clarke were both poor. KAG was simply anonymous - never mind Ricky Holmes, even Sherlock Holmes would have struggled to find him this afternoon. Robinson had nothing to turn to on the bench - 4 youngsters including Sarr and arthritic legend Jacko. The real problem at the moment though is that every other manager in this league has rumbled KR - press us and needle us and we are very easily subdued. Robinson needs to go 4-4-2 or even 4-3-3 sooner rather than later, because this vanity project is leading to poor results which will lead to him getting the sack soon. PS: the sight of Meire posing for selfies with two fans in the West was vomit-inducing.
Huffing and puffing sums it up perfectly. Bury did deserve their point. I heard fans around me lamenting KR's lack of choices on the bench, as if that was not his fault. Others though were far from happy, unsurprisingly. Poorest display at home for quite a while.
To get promoted out of League One you need to beat the likes of Gillingham away (they got tanked today..) and Bury at home. Let’s be honest - we all know the truth - we are going nowhere under this mob. Stuck in the middle with you ...
How is it Robinson's fault the lack of options on the bench? He has had the rug pulled from him by the owner. You can't be a brain surgeon if the tools you are given to perform the operation are a knife and fork. We started the game very poorly but Beckford took his goal well. When we scored, from a decent Forster-Caskey cross and a neat Magennis header, we upped the tempo. We played OK in the second half the goalkeeper made a couple of decent saves. We had nothing to come off the bench to make a difference. Konsa, a defensive midfielder/ centre half came on that sums it up. Dodoo had one neat turn and that was it. NO CUTTING EDGE. I think you have more chance of spotting Lord Lucan riding Shergar than seeing Ben Reeves play football for Charlton.
Was a pile of **** in truth. Flat throughout the team and never looked like going on to win the game, and you could sense the players felt that too. KAG is just a whole lotta nothing. I don’t want to be too hard as it’s not his fault that he’s being exposed horribly, but he’ll be out of the football league within 18 months. Fosu plays like an individual who pretty much knows he’s guaranteed of his place. Tries to do the tricky things but doesn’t muck in to the nitty gritty. One question - if Magennis is pretty much useless with the ball at his feet in the box and very formidable in the air, why do we continuously try to play it on the deck?
Even the official attendance was embarrassing - 9985 In truth, there wasn’t 7,500 in that old stadium this afternoon incl loads of comps in the East. No doubt the human pork scratching Seriously will pop up later to say the crowd was up 23 on year, so we are making progress.
Jason Pearce hobbled away from the Valley on Crutches with his knee in a brace. Could it be Naby Sarr time.
No self-respecting surgeon would agree to operate with a knife and fork. Karl Robinson is not some kind of neutral arbitrator or 'fans' friend' in this whole business. He has has taken Duchatelet's shilling, he is Duchatelet's man. KR is on record saying he thinks this squad is good enough to gain promotion. He has never publicly stood up to Duchatelet or Meire, and has never criticised them (aside from a few ambiguous phrases he could explain away as meaning anything). If Charlton fail to gain promotion this season Robinson is 100% responsible for that. It's his squad.
SeriouslyObviously posted this today. How can you write 500 words without saying anything, he does it all the time. That target of two points a game is for an automatic promotion berth. I'm afraid that ship has sailed for the time being. We are not at the same level as the likes of Peterborough nor Wigan and it would be a very big ask to get there considering where we were 12 months ago. Peterborough did the double over us and Wigan were in the Championship. A draw today probably takes us to a fair points tally for this point as we might easily have drawn vs Southend the other week. And a top six place is there for us to grab given that we are only a point behind the likes of Blackpool. We are playing a 4-2-3-1 every week and the lack of cover for Magennis is a moot point - we won both of the games without him and he's not been out for any period of time. Better cover can be resolved in January if the club is in the frame. The issue is that the first choice '3' in the 4-2-3-1 were all unavailable today. Far from having a paper thin squad, we are on course for a top six place with our second string of attacking midfielders. Where I would question things is why Konsa doesn't start, pushing JFC further up. Today it was clear that Solly missed Holmes big time. In the first ten minutes he had no outlet and wasn't shy in explaining that to the bench later on. One point from games against Gillingham and Bury is poor - we saw too much of that last season. And that's not in character with the side since April which has clearly worked out how to play against lower half sides. Perhaps Holmes playing on Tuesday will assist us in winning three points, break this winless run and liven up our outlook.
The willingness to accept utter mediocrity among some of our supporters is breathtaking. Still being in with a chance of a top six place by the last few weeks of the season is all Charlton fans should hope for according to this. Wanting anything better would be showing a ridiculous sense of entitlement. The fact that we are not at the same level as Peterborough or Wigan is simply accepted as a fact of life. After all, how could we ever be as good as them? Never mind that two seasons ago Charlton were a Championship side. This kind of attitude is pitiful. As if everything which has led our team to where it is now (taking one third division point from two games against 24th place Gillingham and 22nd place Bury) was some kind of natural progression that was nobody's fault, rather than the direct result of the gross mismanagement and incompetence of the very people who are still running the Club now. As if Charlton's decline from a Championship team with 17,000 fans to a lower league side now attracting fewer than half that many, and playing in a partly closed stadium, is just one of those things. Oh well. Never mind. We aren't as good as the top teams in League One, so the best we can dream of is picking up points where we can and nabbing a play-off place next May. How low our expectations have fallen. How much less we are now expected to be content with. Official attendance figure at the Valley yesterday was 9,895. 9,895. In reality it was less than 7,000. Everybody knows it. Not long ago Duchatelet's defenders were scoffing at the warnings that attendances would fall below 10,000. For pity's sake what will it take to shake regime apologists out of their deluded fantasy world? How much longer will it be before merely finishing in mid-table will be acceptable to supporters like this? The answer is of course that it's already acceptable to them. If Charlton finish 12th this season, one place better than 2016-17, will that be seen as progress? You bet it will. We will have turned the corner. We will be on an upward curve. Duchatelet and Meire will be getting it right and we should all get behind them. And back in the real world, for season 2018-19 the Club will be closing entire stands rather than just blocks of seats.
I've only just noticed this news. Not good at all. Inevitable that it was going to happen at some point to somebody important. But with the team losing form and facing some tough games, Pearce being sidelined is a proper headache. 26 hour later and naturally no official word on this yet from the Club, unless they are saying something on social media. Guess we will have to be told something soon however, two away games in the next 6 days...
Pearce has been our best defender & most consistent player so far this season. He should be our captain. Duchatelet must be knashing his yellow teeth with frustration that Konsa is not playing & thus in the shop window - now he will get his chance. P.S - I see a new pro Duchatelet excuse from the Apologists today - that every squad in L1 is small, so what is the problem ? Surely if every other club has a small squad, we would have an advantage if we had a bigger one
Last time Charlton were in League One we were a huge team for that division. 15,000+ fans still came to give their support despite the miserable relegation season of 2008-09. Even with nearly no resources Phil Parkinson almost got us promoted back up in the first season. Now after less than a season and a half in the 3rd tier the only thing left to remind anybody that Charlton used to be a much bigger Club is the Valley. In every respect we are now a League One side, rattling around inside the hollow shell of a stadium that was once fit for the Premiership. And that's all the apologists want. They are so frightened of the unknown and the future that they would rather all hide under Duchatelet's bed, blessing the old miser for paying the bills on time. They have forgotten what it is like to dream of anything better, and they hate the majority of Charlton fans who still have some pride, and will never accept what RD and KM have done to the Club. Apologists who are happy with a lower league future should go forth and multiply at Gillingham or Welling - except that even those Clubs have a culture of wanting to be better than they are. Something Charlton Athletic does not possess anymore. In the meantime, the rest of us will wait for Duchatelet to sling his hook and try to pick up the pieces afterwards. The apologists laughably claim that the Club does not want its old fans back. Once we have the Club back, by rights we ought to tell them that they are no longer wanted. But unlike them I don't think most of us are that mean-spirited.
