Invite

Come & join me!
One of my very oldest pals is the brains (insert obvious joke here) behind this App.

Football Shokx.

I've been playing it a while.
Have a look and if you want, come and join me at the 'Charlton Casualty' league within the Football Shokx app.
You will also be able to compete against others in your own leagues and trade shares (Shokx) in a virtual football stock market.

Ultimately, you'll be going up against other players to see who has the best football knowledge.
Want to accept the challenge?!

Simply go to the iTunes App Store to download the Shokx app.
Then head to the Competitions section and search for Charlton Casualty.

When you've found it just click 'Join'

Happy trading!

Oh Dear.

Charlton Athletic 0 - Millwall 2.

Well that didn't go as planned did it?

I've had a self imposed twitter and general internet blackout since yesterday.
I know there'll be Spanners crowing about their success, along with other Addicks making dicks of themselves all over the places I'd usually frequent.

 I knew it wouldn't help my state of mind one bit.

I've also refused to watch any (ahem) 'highlights', despite our game being flagged up as one of the featured games on the Football League Show.

If this means I'm flying in the face of the general consensus about yesterday, so be it.

The omens were all fairly good before the game.
The Spanners had played twice since our win at Huddersfield and surely we'd be the fresher outfit?

Crispy had demolished a Lion bar while traveling to the Valley and we decided this was highly significant.

Millwall were pretty poor in the first half.

Charlton had most of the decent chances and played some attractive shapes, despite a pitch more suited to lumping it up into the penalty area and hoping for the best.

The Millwall 'keeper Ford kept them in it, with an excellent save from Pritchard and another from Harriott.

Despite the most obvious Charlton domination, it wasn't the kind of domination where you felt a goal was just around the corner.

Millwall were happy to soak up the pressure and whenever there was a break on goal, Danny Shittu seemed to be on hand to nudge (usually Haynes) off the ball, mostly by fair means.

After hearing the Spanners shouting "it's what we do, it's what we do, Danny Shittu, it's what we do" over and over again, I fear for the future of our language.
It makes no sense, (unless they're all having carnal knowledge of him), which as much as I'd find amusing, I do find rather unlikely.

On the subject of the Millwall support, weren't they awful?

Until they scored, they were among the quietest of visitors to The Valley all season.
Nottingham Forest, Burnley, Brighton, Ipswich and of course Crystal Palace all made much more noise than our supposedly 'famous for their support' neighbours.

Now before anybody starts comparing our crowd with theirs, yes ours was poor too.

The difference being that we all know we are a relatively quiet set of fans, don't trade on our nutjob reputation and are in the middle of a horrific home game slump.
There's not much to cheer about at the Valley this season. Most of us have started arriving with trepidation rather than expectation.

Our announced crowd yesterday told it's own tale, being a rather disappointing 18,000.

Given the weather, the ridiculously early kick off and the profound lack of people who normally come along with their kids, it was understandable.

Needless to say, the same size crowd at our fixture at The New Den was described as a bumper turnout in Bermondsey so I suppose it depends on where you're coming from.

The second half started with Charlton piling on the pressure.
In the East stand we were all up on our feet, believing Kermorgant had scored a curling free kick but the rest of the ground knew the ball had whizzed past the upright.

The turning point for me was when the ball came in from the left and Kermorgant was grabbed around the neck to stop him making contact with the ball.

As clear a penalty as you'd ever expect to see.

Last season, absolutely everything went for us but this year, the footballing gods have decided we are worthy of nothing.
The ball went past Kermorgant and onto Wilson who seemed to have a bit of a collision with the keeper and the post.

The ball went over the bar and we all rose as one waiting for the referee to point to the spot.

Except he didn't.

Once play started again, Millwall had a rare foray forward and scored a breakaway goal that could be described as
a) a sucker punch, or
b) one of those the keeper Button "won't want to see again".

The ball seemed to go through his legs, though I may be being unkind given the distance I was from the action.

The Millwall crowd woke up, their team suddenly looked a yard faster while ours looked deflated.

Only around 5 minutes later, Pritchard made a half hearted challenge that gave away a free kick.
It was so far out, nobody was too bothered.

Unfortunately, once the ball left the players boot, it flew straight towards Button's top left hand corner.

He saw it coming, adjusted himself and launched himself to perform what seemed a rather routine save.
Oddly, he chose to block with two hands rather than one needed to push it around the post and ended up making a right old horlicks of it.

Two nil and game over.

Fuller and Waggy came on but nothing changed.

Fuller deserved a penalty but again the referee was having none of it, and later when Fuller had a chance to place the ball into the net he rather optimistically decided to leather it and sent the ball into the top tier of the North Stand.

As the charmless oiks up to town from the Medway announced, "You might as well **** off!"

Many Addicks chose to do just that and by the time the referee put us all out of our misery, (or started a whole knew chapter of it), around half of the home support were already out of the ground.

Part of the deal when you are an away supporter is that you are inconvenienced so the home support can get away without much hassle.

I've been kept behind in grounds all over the country, not least at Millwall when we were penned in behind the away stand for around 45 minutes a few years ago.

Not yesterday.

Not content with bending over on the pitch, the supporters also found we had to go on a rather pointless journey so the Spanners could have a more comfortable journey home.

No wonder people weren't happy.

I don't know what more Chris Powell can do with the current squad.
He's introduced Harriott who has been one of the few successes but beyond that, it's a treading water season.

As I said right at the beginning of this campaign, the target is consolidation.
Anything better than relegation is fine by me.

However, I'd really rather it wasn't quite so gloomy, especially as I see the majority of my football at what used to be known as Fortress Valley but is becoming more of a 'Help Yourself' convenience store for visitors to our club.

A Tale of Two Dogs

I turned on my television earlier today to witness an odd looking bloke, rather camping it up, as he minced along next to an overly shampooed canine.

It appeared to be the Cruft's dog show.

Anybody who has seen the fantastic film Best in Show won't be able to take any of that nonsense seriously, so I quickly flicked past.

Saturday was also a day of dogs for me.
I'm not really a 'dog' person, - my little pal Top Cat would agree - yet Saturday was most certainly one where I seemed to be seeking them out.

The first set of dogs were the Terriers of Huddersfield who were playing at home to Charlton.

An early goal, scored by our own homegrown youngster Callum Harriott, was the perfect start.
The next 85 minutes were somewhat shaky at times but a combination of fine defending, excellent goalkeeping, plus the kind of spirit that makes you proud were enough to fend off Huddersfield.

A 1-0 win was Charlton's 8th on the road this season and makes a mockery of the rather feeble home record.
I believe Charlton only need another win to guarantee Championship football next season. Another win  and a few draws should totally clinch it for me.

Lately, I've been having awful luck on my bets involving Charlton.
I've been betting much more successfully on LOSC Lille.
Generally, the money I've lost betting on Charlton has come back again from my LOSC bets.

For those people who don't know, LOSC are known as 'Les Dogues'.
 Literal translation is 'the mastiffs'.

Well just for once, everything came up for me.
My bet on Charlton beating the Terriers and Les Dogues to win 'le derby du Nord' had me like a dog with... etc etc.

Due to picking out Rodelin as a correct goalscorer, I was most certainly quids in last night.

Champion.

Not Quite There.

Charlton Athletic 0 - Burnley 1.

Another disappointing afternoon at the Valley.

Burnley were no great shakes and the game had 0-0 written all over it, as they say in pundit land.

Unfortunately, the team from the North West managed to produce the one piece of sublime skill that was on show all game, just a few moments before Half Time.

Charlie Austin really is a decent player and his rasping long shot was just the kind of Roy of the Rovers style screamer we all dreamt of scoring, when we first started playing.

From our seats in the East stand, we had the perfect view as it accelerated off his boot, leaving goalkeeper Button without any chance.

Up until the Burnley goal, Charlton had tried hard but nothing had come off.

Burnley had tried equally hard but other than getting the ball in the net, (long after a flag had been raised for offside), both teams had been playing out one of those encounters when you wished you hadn't made the decision to stop buying programmes as there was little to engross you on the pitch.

Once Burnley scored, the game became an example of Park the Bus.

For most of the second half, Burnley didn't even keep a player up front as they defended and defended against a tide of one way traffic.
At times, Charlton had 7 players in attack in a rather adventurous formation but the equaliser never arrived.

I'm sorry to have to report that while the effort could not be questioned, Charlton just didn't have the ability to unpick a defence who managed to block everything.

The tubby referee was particularly fussy and didn't help our cause one iota, slowing down and breaking up our attacks due to the opposition being breathed on or a Charlton player running what could be described as, "a bit close" to one of theirs but in the end, we just weren't good enough.

Losing to Burnley felt much worse than losing to Forest.
Forest were a class above us and it felt like an achievement to keep them to 2 goals, while also playing with only ten men.

Burnley were poor - but still able to exit the Valley with a fully merited 3 points.

I'm fully aware that Charlton Athletic as a business really didn't have any kind of funds to give Chris Powell last Summer, **when we could and should have been looking to push on from outclassing everyone else in League One.

While leaving the Valley yesterday, Crispy and I agreed that now we really are paying the price for not bringing in the 3 or 4 Championship quality players we need to succeed in this division.

I have nothing but admiration for our current squad - but in general they are just players who were good enough to win League One, (with ease). Now we do need a little extra to advance in the Championship.

Hopefully, the current crop will be good enough to maintain our Championship status and then maybe someone will find a bit of change behind the sofa in the close season, to finally get things going.

I'd just like to add one final thought.

I admit, I'm a huge fan of the boo.
BOOOOO~OOOOO!!!
I love a good boo at football.

What needs clarification at this point is I love a good boo at the officials when they've ballsed it up.

I'm most certainly not a fan of booing our own side, purely because they haven't manage to score some goals.

Booing your own team smacks of that 'entitlement' aspect of Modern Football that I hate.

Yesterday, nobody could question how hard our players were trying.
They would dearly love to have been 14 - 0 up at Half Time but obviously, this didn't happen.

Does anybody really think that players being told they're lazy and useless, (usually by some half drunk, out of breath, out of condition idiot in a too tight replica shirt), is going to improve their performance?

Those 'fans' who jeered the team off at Half Time need to take a good, hard, long look at themselves - then they can sod off and watch Crystal Palace.

After all, they're doing well at the moment, so their players obviously try harder, right?

Burnley at the Valley

Burnley come calling tomorrow.

I know next to nothing about them so I really don't know what to expect.

When I think of them, I think of a club who have a wonderful history.
The old Turf Moor was a ground we'd all heard of when I was growing up, even if the precise location of Burnley could have been anywhere Up North between Glasgow and Watford as far as we knew.

Despite a brief flirtation with the Premier league, nowadays Burnley as a town is more likely to feature in one of those dodgy late night television programmes, fronted by a professional haircut with a speech impediment, discussing Britain's 'hardest' pubs or vigilante gangs.

Alastair Campbell is a Burnley supporter.
 I've no idea if he's planning on a few sharpeners at the Rose of Denmark tomorrow but I'd be interested to meet him.
Regardless of his politics, I've always found him to be an engaging and passionate speaker and I was particularly moved by his documentary when he came clean about his alcoholism.
* on second thoughts, the sharpeners might be a bad idea.

The only other useless facts I've picked up over the years about Burnley are:
1. The lowest priced property in our country is in Burnley.
2. At one time, the largest charity shop in our country was in Burnley.
3. Television girl cop show Juliet Bravo was filmed in the town.
4. The French liqueur Benedictine has a remarkable following in the town. I remember hearing that more of the stuff is drunk there than in any other territory.
5. Apparently Burnley has the highest proportion of people who bother to turn up at their home games compared to the population of the town.
I'd argue that towns in the provinces will obviously score higher on this - (I bet Charlton Athletic score highly compared to the population of Charlton Village)- but well done to Burnley anyway, I'm pleased their club is important to their town.

I've made it clear that I know next to nothing about our visitors and I don't know what to expect from them.
Unfortunately, I can say the same thing about the current Charlton side.

Yes, I spend quite a proportion of my non working time thinking about the Addicks, (alright, yes, and some of the time when I should be working), but do I know what to expect from Charlton?

Nope.

We know our Bretagne Battler Yann Kermorgant won't be up front but who will be?
Will Haynes be starting? Will he be with Fuller? Will we revert to 4-4-2 ?

Last week Charlton were given a bit of a footballing lesson.

Nottingham Forest could have given us a spanking and we were extremely fortunate to keep the score to a 2 goal deficit.
Chris Powell and the team will be desperate to give the long suffering Valley crowd a decent performance.
Which Charlton is going to turn up?

If we do concede first, let's remember the Cardiff game when the crowd carried on cheering and roared the team on to a famous victory.

COYA.

Outclassed

Charlton Athletic 0 - Nottingham Forest 2

So, "Where have you been?" is the question precisely nobody has asked me since my last post.

To answer the question, I've still been at all of the CAFC home games, a few aways, plus a trip to Lille to see LOSC, a few exciting non football day trips and stopovers blah, blah blah......

In an effort to fight off the label 'ex blogger', I'm now scratching my head and wondering how I used to just pick up my MacBook and tickle the keys to produce a posting.
It seems a little too much like a chore just now.

Yesterday was one of those 'typical' Charlton supporter days.

Over the years, I've become used to the pre/post match meet ups and libations being the best part of a day, -the happiness only tempered by having to watch my team balls it up for a period sometime in the middle.
The Rose of Denmark was full of familiar faces on both sides of the football sandwich.

Luckily for me, I have the ability to retain the joy of a win for the rest of the weekend but a defeat is fairly quickly consigned to the "Ah, sod it, there'll be better days" department of my brain.

As a Season Ticket holder at the Valley, that's quite a useful quality to have this term.
Four from seventeen is not the kind of record to be flagging up when you're trying to promote next season's sales, so good luck to whoever it is that has to come up with a groovy gimmick to get the half hearted supporters committing to more of the same.

Forest arrived yesterday, high on the dismantling of Huddersfield just a few days before.
We should have been equally confident after an unexpected but totally deserving win away at Leicester the same night.

It quickly became evident that there was only one team in it.

It wasn't us.

An established Championship side with skill and guile throughout, Forest barely had to get out of first gear to dispatch a weak and error strewn Charlton performance. Barely an attack from those in red all game and any transference of possession to Charlton was usually just a precursor to one of our heroes giving it straight back again.

Games Charlton have lost recently have usually been rather unlucky, where just one or two moments of skill or bad judgement have decided a game where we had at least been making some decent chances.

This was not the case yesterday.
Charlton were still at 0-0 but being outfought all over the pitch when the turning point came.

***Now I'm writing this without looking at any television pictures so I fully admit I may have got it wrong, but from my view, Halford had been annoying Kermorgant all afternoon with snidey kicks and shoves. When he came in quite aggressively, then shielded the ball away from Yann, the Frenchman waved his leg a bit. It wasn't an attempt to clatter him, just a frustrated swing of his boot.
(I repeat here, I could be wrong).

What happened next though I'm 100% sure of.
Halford reacted like the frightened housewife seeing the mouse in her kitchen in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, launching himself skywards, falling with a twist, then ascending from the floor with anger to square up to Yann, pushing him in the chest.

So far, a yellow card each seemed to be the correct decision and let's get on with the game.

The Forest players had other ideas and came in on mass, bundling into Yann, pushing and shoving, pointing and gesticulating.

Oddly, the linesman over on the other side of the pitch was the only official who seemed to know what had happened and after a discussion with our hapless referee, Yann was off.

Well done to the Forest players. They'd completely bought that red card with all their chicanery. Halford got off scot free which did seem rather wrong, especially as he had promoted the whole melee with his over reaction and pushing of Kermorgant.

We'd probably have lost even with 11 players but with 10 it was just a question of how long we could hold out.
We were unlikely to be producing much upfront with our major threat now luxuriating with his Lynx shower gel beneath the west stand.

The fact that Charlton managed to hold the score to just 2-0 was very pleasing, especially with Andy Reid dictating play with some amazing through balls for his colleagues.

The goals when they came were disappointing.
The first came after another fantastic Reid pass but the scorer seemed to pull Wagstaff back in order to get the space he needed to shoot.

The second came when the referee decided there was no foul on a bundled over Dervite and let play continue.
 The referee was not to blame though for the goal 10 seconds later. A tame shot bobbled through to Hamer who didn't even need to dive. He could have just taken a step to his right and scooped the ball up.
Unfortunately he didn't, then let the ball squirm out of his grasp for the easiest tap in goal you've ever seen.

Hamer has been a strong player for us this season and has made some point saving stops but he was at fault for this goal and he was at fault for the 1-0 defeat at Hull.

As a goalkeeper, there is nowhere to hide.
He realised he'd dropped a clanger and for the next 10 minutes he looked a complete liability. He'd lost his cool and I was sure he was going to do something stupid.

The game ended with probably around half of the announced attendance still inside the stadium.
So many people had left it seemed more like a home game for Forest.

They brought a large following who were up for it.
It's not the nearest club to the Valley but they packed out the Jimmy Seed like few other clubs have done this season.

I like Forest. They are a 'real' club with 'real' supporters. They've had the amazing European adventures  that I remember cheering them through via (rare in those days) televised games as a schoolboy.
They've also had the downward spiral of relegations that we know so well, yet they still retain that 'Big Club' aura that more recently successful clubs will never attain.

I was very impressed with Forest yesterday, though I must say I was bitterly disappointed by the abundance of tights being worn by their players.

I can't imagine ex Forest hard man (and fan of excellent music) Stuart Pearce would have let that go on if he'd still been around the dressing room.
Primark novelty slogan t-shirts are being awarded for that discrepancy, with the Lacoste polo going, of course, to our ex hero Andy Reid.

Bring on Burnley!

Yeeeeeeessssss!!!

Watford 3 - Charlton Athletic 4

I'm often reminded just how little I know.

On New Years Eve, a brief chat with a Charlton supporting neighbour had me pontificating sage like, (on the back of a defeat to Ipswich and a draw against Derby).

"I don't know why I'm bothering to go to Watford.
We are going to get over run in midfield and I really can't see where our goals are going to come from".

Hmm.

We didn't just score, we scored 5, (though one was chalked off for an invisible infringement from our end of the ground).

As has been highlighted elsewhere, Watford have changed from being a team famous for a rather agricultural approach in the way they hoofed the ball forward and clattered opponents with their elbows and shoulders.
Their current mode of playing the game is certainly slightly more easy on the eye but totally despicable and absolutely everything I despise about the modern game.

Watford are lucky to have some fantastically skilled and pacey players on loan to them.
These players should have had me purring with admiration while also feeling a touch jealous that we hadn't managed a similar link up with Italian club Udinese and others.

As it was, I felt proud to be following a team who while being no angels, certainly don't use trying to cheat as a way of beating their opponents.

Forestieri got sent off for 'slipping' (HAHAHAHAHA) in the penalty box at The Valley.
He has learned nothing in the intervening months.

If he tried to stay on his feet he'd be a world beater.
Unfortunately, his way of playing was to push the ball into space, run onto it and hope he got 'touched' so that as those idiots on MOTD would say, he'd be 'entitled' to go down.

No he wouldn't.

It's cheating and completely anti football.

If it had just been Forestieri who wanted to stretch the rules, it might have been almost acceptable but unfortunately there were incidents all over the pitch.

I lost count of how many times players in yellow fell to the floor, holding their face after challenges were made.

I loved Zola as a player.
I've always really disliked Chelsea but I was able to see through the veil of distrust to admire his honest skill and endeavour.

This makes it all the more distasteful to witness Watford's current tactics.
He's obviously coaching the team to cheat.

Shame.

Sometimes events were so amateurish in their execution, I almost forgot to be angry.

Step forward number 5, (Neuron?) who walked into the back of Fuller, then threw himself to the floor, attempting to get him sent off.

The same cheating basket was touched so minimally around chest height, yet fell to the floor as if he had been shot, holding his face.

His mum must be so proud.

The game itself was one where we went behind according to the script I'd predicted, then equalised, then went ahead, then lost it a bit and went behind before finally Captain Jackson sent the Addicks behind the goal into raptures with a powerful header.

Due to the dubious tactics employed by Watford, it felt so sweet to give them a beating.

I loved the fact that the two attitudes on display had ended up with, in my opinion, the 'right' one prevailing.

In general, our players looked to stay on their feet.
Fuller could have gone down 3 times in one move but didn't, then laid on the perfect cross for a goal.

Pritchard was being clattered but he didn't lie down and cry.

It was ironic that after all the Nancyboy rolling around on the floor claiming elbows and palms in the face from the Italian softies, it was our own Lawrie Wilson who had to go off with a broken nose!

It took rather a long time to get home from Watford.
Transport was working fine, it was just that we all felt it necessary to ease our dry throats in Watford town centre and later Euston.

Thanks for a grand day out Crispy, Jim, Rod & Al.
Thanks too to the Charlton team.
A day to remember.

One final note of thanks must go to the referee, Trevor Kettle.
We've not had the best of relationships but yesterday, though he did fall for a few episodes straight from the RADA handbook, he was generally no worse than any other referee we've had and much better than most.

I really didn't expect to be saying that!

Happy New Year to all Addicks and others.