Went to Charlton v Brighton tonight. Charlton have a caretaker manager atm (new bloke takes over tomorrow) and have really been struggling. Crowds are pretty low (my third visit this season) and tonight Brighton made up just under half the approx 14000 crowd. Brighton players (and fans) acted like they were in for a stroll. For the first 15 minutes their fans made a bit of noise and that was pretty much it. Charlton fans kept going the whole match. Brighton only had 6 shots on target (three of which were soft and straight at the keeper). Their penalties were shocking missing 4 out of 7 Even worse was that 3 of their penalties were off target! Charlton deserved the draw and took better penalties so we'll deserved their win.
This is why starting matches with the right attitude is so important. Conteball may offer evidence to the contrary, but it's often incredibly difficult to recover. The other side gains confidence, the crowd turn one way or the other and it's an uphill battle. Start well and it's like the wind is in your sails. Start badly and you're fighting through a headwind.
It started as a joke in the Loan Watch a couple of seasons ago when he was in charge of Bristol Rovers Then he pissed off Swindon fans en masse by openly negotiating to take over the Charlton job when Swindon were leading 2-1 after the first leg in the playoffs, which they then tanked And then I remembered he was a little scrote who was starting **** with a bunch of people on Friends Reunited (myself included, obviously) at a time when, according to his Wikipedia page, he was a youth coach at Palace. Shame that nobody screengrabbed those, eh?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63965765 "Guardiola may face the greater balancing act. City's players, between them, featured for 4,628 minutes in Qatar - Arsenal's played just 1,699 minutes. The players of Tottenham (3,692), Chelsea (3,588) and Manchester United (3,585) also all had more than twice as many World Cup minutes as the Gunners." Will be interesting to see if/how this plays out over the rest of the season.
Arsenal have suffered the most imo as they’ve lost Jesus. Bentancur is a huge loss for Spurs but hopefully he will be back sooner rather than later. Richarlison should be a loss but probably isn’t.
Bentancur doesn’t look like he’ll miss any games that he wouldn’t have missed from suspension anyway, so lucky there. Richy worries me a bit if Kane is out of sorts or has any injuries or fatigue.
I think it was Poch who said he knew how the game would pan out depending on the first 90 seconds of the game. That may have been partly down to the fact that he rarely if ever had enough quality in the bench to actually change a game, but it was also reflective of an attitude that he expected 100% effort from all players over the entire 90min period.
Ok, NOW I am officially worried about Newcastle. Never thought they’d have a storming start to the season. And with the Jan transfer window around the corner, I’m starting to feel legitimately threatened by them in the CL race.
They’re way ahead of schedule. Wonder if they’ll go for it in January and make a statement signing of some sort.
Saw Brighton lose on penalties to a struggling Charlton side on Wednesday and they were pretty meh but Southampton have been bloody awful this afternoon and made Brighton look like a top 4 side
