Jeffers Takes the Wheel

Charlton 3 Birmingham City 1

After my recent comments about the automatic bias which invariably creeps in to press reports about Charlton, I am pleased to announce that, following yesterday's comfortable win over Birmingham City, a writer previously unknown to me, Dan Rockwood, in The Observer, was full of praise and positive sentiments. There was no suggestion that Charlton were lucky, or shouldn't have won because the writer rather wanted the other team to, or scored their goals in the last five minutes (they didn't) or anything like that. And yet if I were a Birmingham supporter I don't think I would have found much to object to, either.

In short, it was a good, unbiased (as far as I, obviously biased, can see) report, and well-written, drawing for its title, as I have also done here, on the performance of Francis Jeffers, and on the new cheap coach services the club has just started for supporters, and future supporters, in Kent, something which has irritated Gillingham chairman Paul Scally, who presumably cannot afford to hire a few buses himself. The coach service is called, not all that imaginatively, the Valley Express, (as a rail man at heart, I still find the use of the word 'express' for a bus or coach service, a bit of an overstatement - there are such things as traffic lights which affect buses, whereas on a properly-functioning railway system, an express service can be precisely what it claims to be) and the admirable Mr. Rockwood compares Charlton's reviving fortunes to the new service. He also draws a parallel between Birmingham without Robbie Savage and Charlton without S. Parker one year ago, though he did not, as I did the other night, link this to the Robbie Blake affair up in Lancashire.

I looked at five or six reports of the Charlton game, and not one of them even mentioned Robbie Blake, who came on as a substitute after 76 minutes, and thankfully didn't score. The club where he was so recently the captain and leading goalscorer, Burnley, didn't either, being involved in a grim hyper-defensive draw with Reading, and are apparently missing him, especially as there is no talk of the £1.25 million transfer fee being used to buy a replacement striker, or a replacement anything. Burnley's rearranged third round FA Cup match against Liverpool on Tuesday night, quite possibly featuring Fernando Morientes, recently departed from here, doesn't look very promising at all.

Quiz Matters

On a different topic, I haven't mentioned the first quiz of the new year because, despite a three-week lay-off, it was a bit of an anti-climax. There were only two other teams present besides ourselves. One of them consisted of a relatively new crowd of people who are very cheery and who made a special request to have more than the maximum six players in their team on the grounds that they were "going to be the bronze medallists anyway", which prognostication proved to be absolutely accurate, and by a long way, too. The other, and winning, team, consisted of our friends and rivals, Luis, David and Gitte, rather spectacularly supplemented by the only two other people to appear on the night, who just happen to be the star performers in two of the other regular teams. So, we, missing one of our number, knew perfectly well when Eduardo arrived and joined them, rather than us, on numerical grounds, that it would be silver medals only. And so it proved. With luck tomorrow night we might be back to normal.