Under the circumstances I’ll take the draw - shame about Lavelle’s injury and another red card but hay ho ****e happens
More down time for Lavelle? He's only missed 15 games through injury so far this season... Inniss' red card will bring his tally of missed games to 29
That was way worse than saturday. The lack of vision and basic footbsll nouscwas just horrible. Like a car crash, sat there waiting for the inevitable equaliser (which duly arrived,) and the last gasp winner (which didn't) and wondering whether I really want to see this team next season. I don't know if it's the management, formation or motley collection of players we have, but we have what most of us would say was the ideal team available, and apart from the first fifteen minutes, Wimbledon looked a lot better. And this is a team that haven't won in what? 22 games? It isn't even that it mattered last night to us. It was just our ability to perpetually pass in the wrong direction, or pick out a player wth nowhere to go when better options were available, or Washington blasting over the bar at the end of the first half. As for Iniss, the stream commentary would have possibly annoyed him. They were saying they had never seen a challenge like that (an eight yard lunge in the middle of the pitch) and that he completely let his team mates down, among a debate that never gave him anything other than grief. Having been injured most of the season, you could allow that he might be a bit rusty (the control moments before the horror challenge) but what on earth was he thinking? So we got a point at a ground where we usually do badly, and the clock runs down on this season. I hope that we are working hard on the summer refit, because we badly need one.
What I find worrying is I’m now seeing very disgruntled fans across all three forums I visit, apart from BB of course, so how long before the protests start again ? I’m still thankful TS came along when he did but I am now questioning his ability to stabilise and progress this club in a forward direction
I'm not going overboard yet. We are nicely placed in a way that the season is over, and we have a space to rebuild while a lot of clubs are still trying to go up, or avoid going down. There were also a lot of fans throwing their toys out of the pram when we had all our strikers injured, and managing to blame TS for that as well, which was frankly embarrassing. But the dust is settling on a very poor season. It needs a clear headed look at what went wrong, without hiding behind excuses like the injuries, or imagining that some players are better than their performances suggest.
I should also add that TS when he arrived said that the club was in a real state and it would need time to turn things around. There's been a lot of mixed messages coming out of the club, but I well remember when RD was in charge, we seemed to be perpetually losing staff and not replacing them 'to keep wages down and make the club more attractive to potential buyers'. That made no sense at the time - slicing away the backroom support quickly does more harm than good, and just means new staff have to be brought in. But if the club finances were up sh1t creek, it's silly to expect us to instantly shoot back up the leagues. How many people were bemoaning how RD had destroyed so much of CAFC that made us an example of a well run club. So if the idea is to return us to that status, sounds good to me. But in the meantime, we do need to start to get the football right, and make it clear it will take time to do that.
Agreed. TS seems to be floundering, albeit with the best of intentions. What I don't understand is how we manage to take players like DJ, Gilbey, Kirk and now possibly Fraser who have been excellent at previous clubs, but are poor players now. Recruitment does seem a bit hit-and-miss, but these are players we were all glad to see at Charlton. TS's idea that football is easy, all you need is common sense, is a worry. It's notlike any other business. Recruiting two players in January whom the manger doesn't rate is a sign of muddle.
