2 old boys playing against each other tonight in the Champions League. Jenkinson played again for Arsenal, but against them playing for Marseille was one Soulemaine Diawara...5 years have passed since Dowie signed him for us...
Djimi Traore was on the bench...how he STILL manages to play in the Champions League is beyond me. Alex Song as well - remember when Alan Pardew subbed him against Reading on the ref's advice (he was one bad tackle away from a second yellow)?
I was watching it with my millwall housemate, he seemed to get annoyed everytime I mentioned the ex charlton players on the pitch, he got even more upset when Clive tyldesley started name checking us too
Err... scared I might get beaten up for this.... I thought Soulemaine Diawara was one of the very very few decent Dowie signings
If you look at the team Dowie inherited/purchased, we had Carson in goal, D Bent up front, Reid in wide midfield (fat midfield?), Diawara in defence, would we have stayed up if we hadn't sacked Dowie? Faye and Holland were a bit weak in central midfield, but not that bad a spine, and when you consider the likes of Young, Ambrose, Thomas, Rommadahl as well, on paper good enough to stay up. If we could have scraped enough points to stay up, things would have been very different :-(
Sorry, I didn't mean to put Song in the same category as Traore, just to mention that he was another former Charlton player (sort of, he was only here on loan) playing in the Champions League
Do we judge players on one game? He was a good player- Wigan was towards the early days of his career if I remember rightly? Turned out to be pretty solid.. Shame his partner was el karkouri.
I still think had Djimi not seen red at West Ham and that we'd gone on to get a result that day, then we wouldn't have got into trouble...
