Red Card for Darren, Goals for Darren (and Danny)

Sunderland 1 Charlton 3

Well, here I am in the UK, and on the first day of the football season - the first time this has been the case for many a year, as I usually work in August.

I have had a very pleasant day pottering round the market and shops of Lancaster, a fine city with a great deal to recommend it. The weather, too, has been pleasantly English: cool and damp and like unto rain this morning, then the cloud breaking up and bright sunshine in the afternoon.

I returned home a while ago, and as I went off to the kitchen to make a pot of tea, the usual feelings overtook me, as I noticed that there would be about 30 minutes to go at Sunderland, where the renowned Black Cats were hosting Charlton in the first game of the season.

So, should I wait until it would be all over before checking the score, or was I going to sweat out the final 20-odd minutes frantically clicking the update symbol or jabbing at the F5 key? Two minutes later I carried my mug of tea to my brother’s computer, and logged on to Livescore as so often in the past year.

Sixty-eight minutes gone, Sunderland 1 Charlton 1, well, it could be worse, but when I clicked for details, I saw that Charlton were down to ten men as Darren Ambrose had been sent off, so I started preparing myself mentally to accept 1-1 as a reasonable outcome for ten men, but before I could finish persuading my subconscious mind how good this would be, the score changed to 1-2, where it stayed until 94 minutes, apparently, when substitute Bryan Hughes, playing out time, lobbed a long ball forward. This was snapped up by Darren Bent, who had scored the first goal and now went on to score the third. The second goal was a finely taken free kick by Danny Murphy, just 9 minutes after Darren Ambrose went off, seemingly a little harshly for an accidentally bad tackle, but that’s football. So 1-3 and a much better start to the season than the 4-1 thumping at Bolton last year. And, indeed, much more positive than I had been expecting, after the defeat by the same score, at home to AEK Athens, in the last of the series of friendlies, last Saturday.

The vagaries of the fixtures, meaning that Middlesbrough and Liverpool are playing as I type, and that Arsenal, Newcastle, Chelsea and Wigan don’t play until tomorrow, mean that Charlton are top of the Premiership on an alphabetical order basis with West Ham; I wouldn’t have thought this worth mentioning, had it not been referred to in the headline about the match report on the CAFC web page…

PS Being written the next day: my sister-in-law taped Match of the Day for me last night while we were all otherwise engaged, and I have therefore been able to see the game, as well as all the others. It took practically the whole morning. The awful Mark Lawrence said he thought Darren Ambrose's tackle, for which he was sent off, was the worst of the entire day, but it looked mostly accidental to me. Am I biased? Anyway, Gary Lineker signed off by remarking that while there are clubs in North and West London who might have designs on the league title, the current joint leaders were from East London, so everyone's at it. Maybe I should change the heading of the piece to something like Top of the League!!. Then again, maybe not.

PPS Being written some hours later: and now Darren Bent has been selected to play in the England squad during the coming week. Crikey!