With regards to the SMT & the background noise generated by their forum spokespeople, all you have to do is look at the cold hard facts. The common consensus amongst Charlton fans who go to the games is that our best three players last season , in a team that delivered our worst league finish in 100 years, were CBT, Dobson & May. Under SE7 / SMT - CBT - we couldn’t compete on a new deal with Derby County. Dobson - we couldn’t compete on a new deal with a Hungarian club that gets 3,000 crowds May - accepted a £750,000 bid with no apparent improved contract offer for our best striker. Some might suggest that there’s a pattern with the above, not unlinked to ambition and lack of finance ? Thats a personal opinion though, so let’s just stick to the facts - under SE7 Partners and this fly boy SMT, we have lost our best 3 players out of a very bad side in the last 6 months. Now, given the spurious amounts of BS talked by Rodwell on Charlton TV, and Methven thru useful fools in the fanbase, you’d have to say putting it kindly that the delivery so far is not matching the publicly declared strategy. The only thing that can turn this perception around is the owners / SMT now spending proper cash on the team.
The alternative is a squad which is weaker than the one which finished 16th last season. Not much longer until we find out which.
I’d only give our transfer window a 6/10 so far this summer. We still haven’t signed a No.1 keeper, and we don’t have any creativity or pace in the side. The Alfie May fee has gone on the two strikers and the Scottish full back, so I can’t see how the SMT / owners have spent much yet ?
The recruitment seems to have hit the buffers. I think we need to shift some of the people who won’t be used. Fraser, Isted, AMB, etc
We've all been hoping that this is the summer that halts the long term decline of our club. At the moment it looks 50/50, but the stakes couldn't be much higher. We won't survive indefinitely as a L1 club. With no direct communication from the actual owners about their strategy we can only guess, since anything from the SMT can be taken with a pinch of salt.
They need to speculate to accumulate. I’m so bored with this “it’s going to be a really competitive league going toe to toe with Shrewsbury” guff we see on another forum.
I think it's easy reducing our losses by 75% and getting promotion, it's all about making the development squads strong and bringing the youngsters in
Looks like Ness is available to be sold. Nathan Jones said on Saturday that we are back in the familiar Charlton position of having to sell before we can buy . The owners /SMT have already received £750,000 this Summer for Alfie May. Did we pay a fee for Ahadme ? If we did, I missed it. They spent £150,000 on the Jock lad, but they’ve also shifted decent earners including Isted and Hector off the wage bill, so unless I’m either Bexley Boy, or else am missing something, where is the net spend on improving our squad this Summer ???
According to Ipswich we bought Ahadme for 1M. I think this is the total fee including add one. We spent money on Alex Mitchell and Josh Edwards. I think Docherty and Berry were frees but are on good money. Was Godden a free? He would also be on decent money coming from the Championship. Our squad is still overloaded with dead wood. We need to offload the likes of AMB, Edun Fraser etc. I think the owners have backed the manager this window. Whether Jones has brought in the right players, I am yet to be convinced.
Had a good chat with a well known fan who was at the Wimbledon game. In her words we look like a team of odds & sods with no obvious quality. Time will tell. I still can’t fathom why we replaced Alfie May with a guy who is 33.
Alfie asked for a transfer because, he said, his wife wanted to move back oop north. But they only moved to the midlands, and NJ's treatment of him, ie dropping him or subbing him early, even at h/t once, must have been a factor. Scott to blame for Dobbo and CB-T but not Alfie. We let him go too easily.
I was at the Wimbledon game and I have to agree with that description. The Midfield wasn’t working, we lack width and not great upfront. It is still early days but we look a million miles away from a promotion winning team.
If Alfie wanted away I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe it was partly because of how poorly the Club is run. He could see from about October that it didn't really matter how many goals he scored, Charlton were not getting within a country mile of the play-offs. He was literally wasting his time and effort. I suppose when a lot of players join a new Club they don't care much what fans are saying about it. They get the wages they wanted, so they figure they'll just go with the flow and see what happens. But talented ones must lose heart quite quickly when they realise they are not going to be part of anything noteworthy that season.
A quick scan of social media and forums this morning shows a growing mood of disappointment amongst the fanbase at the stalling of transfer activity. You will always have a handful of verbose forum bores who see football as an academic / balance sheet algorithm, but the vast majority of us just want to get out of this poxy league at long last this season. The growing disappointment is in no short measure due to the public pronouncements of Nathan Jones, who publicly said he wanted his squad in place by the end of June, and the huckster SMT, who spoke about 8 elite players. Neither has happened. We are still miles off.
What we have done is sell May to finance the purchases in, now there is no dough to spend they are waiting on offloading some more players before bringing in more.....if any.
But don't worry, we have it all wrong. We are far stronger then we were at the end of last season , the signings so far are a step up .. people talk about May but we relied on him to much , can see goals spread about a lot more and in Godden he a better all round player then May … As we stand now top 6 … but as I said before there 10 Teams all expect to be in the top 6 ( not including Wrexham ) so it’s going to be the toughest league one for many a year .. but at least we are better prepared then we have been in years
Steve Wisdom who is close to the Club says that the Club is trying to offload Scott Fraser as he doesn’t want to be here. His family are in Scotland but the clubs up there are offering much less money than he is getting with us. He has to make his mind up whether he wants to be with his family or stay with us. It appears that nothing will happen until he and other players are shifted.
