Royston will be gutted to learn that he's missing live commentary of Arsenal v Chelsea women's teams on 5live.
Credit to Rochdale, they were fired up and should have gone 1 up. But they didn't. Gillingham are doing us a massive favour, but we have opened Rochdale up a few times. If all of our crosses were of the quality Kashi can deliver we would already be a couple up. It's not looking too bad so far...
Interesting too, Northampton are now beating Oldham. Rochdale no longer need a win to stay up, but they surely won't be relying on Northampton to hold that lead. I still think Charlton can get through Rochdale (and probably more than once) as the game opens up later in the second half.
Naturally as a fan who wants to see the team win I'm disappointed we could not get any kind of result at Rochdale today. It wounds my pride every time we lose. But looking at the larger picture we had much more important considerations. Gillingham effectively did the hard work for us, tearing apart weary Plymouth. Of course our players were well aware for most of the second half that a defeat would not affect our play-off place. They wanted to win and to be competitive, but they know they have bigger fish to fry now. It should be a relatively simple task to put this game behind them and concentrate now on the real prize. Credit to Rochdale again - they knew they had to commit 100% to this game, they had no reason to hold anything in reserve. I am concerned that once again Charlton proved lightweight and easy to brush aside against a physical team, and we won practically nothing in the air. But again we should remember the motivation was not really present. Getting an equaliser would have been a morale booster and made the players feel good, but beyond that it was simply not that important. To our opponents their result meant everything. So I think we can put this result away and look to the future now. Lee Bowyer has performed a minor miracle, getting Charlton out of the upper mid-table doldrums and firing us into the League One play-offs. I'm sure he will be fully focused on that now. If we suffered no new injuries today, that matters much more going forward than the dented pride of a 1-0 defeat. Shrewsbury also lost today. PS: Well done our army of travelling fans, supported the team really well
A great day out today ....spoiled by the team. A cracking atmosphere inside the stadium from both sets of fans. Shame about both teams. Rochdale were poor, but on an admittedly difficult pitch, we were woeful Particular barbs must be aimed in the direction of the useless KaiKai and the appalling Zyro - we were playing with 9 men today. No creative spark and nothing up front whatsoever. We need to play 100% better in the Play Offs. We missed a trick today and risk losing momentum. Great scenes at full time when the tannoy finally announced Rochdale were safe - most of their fans came to our end and applauded our fans.
What a load of crap; this team in the Champoinship. you cannot be serious. Better that we get knocked out of the play-offs, absolute rubbish.........
Charlton are in the play-offs because they deserve to be on results. If we win the play-off Final at Wembley it will be because we deserve to win it, and deserve to be a Championship team again. If we get knocked out then so be it. At least Lee Bowyer and the team will have done the best they can to reach the play-offs and extend our season. Why are you so negative about our team?
Kaikai and Zyro were only playing because Lee Bowyer wanted to rest our better players and he played the percentages - it was almost certain that this result would not matter against the bigger picture of our play-off semi-finals. And Bowyer was right. Gillingham did the hard work for us. Kaikai and Zyro had this one chance to prove to LB that they might be worth a starting place against Shrewsbury, but they failed utterly. I'm sure our manager will have noted this. It's a pity for our travelling fans that the team's performance was lack-lustre in the end. But looking at it objectively avoiding injuries and conserving energy will matter more in the longer term than saving pride this afternoon, as long as the players can put this result behind them and focus on the job now to be done. After all we did not get thrashed.
The players knew the scores from the other games - loud cheering broke out every time Gillingham or Northampton scored. That doesn’t excuse today’s really lazy performance however - fans are entitled to see proper pros turn up every game.
