Portsmouth 1 Charlton 2
"I put our team on the board at half-time and told them I've got just three players out there, eight weren't doing it. I told them if that carried on they would be sitting with me in the second half." (Alan Curbishley after the match yesterday)
As the man in the Observer said, not exactly Horatio Nelson, who had been at the forefront of events in Portsmouth the day before, but the same kind of thing. Gerry Cox's clever article paralleling Trafalgar and the Portsmouth match is
here, and well worth a look.
Portsmouth had, in the first 35 minutes, according to the greatest living Englishman, (well I think he is - when his face appeared on the TV screen upstairs in the pub last Thursday after the quiz, I felt like calling for a minute's respectful silence) been the best side Charlton had faced this season, and were greatly deserving of their 1-0 lead. Curbs even admitted quite cheerfully that it could have been 3-0 at the interval, the way things had been going.
Mind you, the absurd Mark Lawrenson, in his preposterous predictions for the weekend column on the BBC website, (which always vanishes the instant the results are known) had said that people might prefer not to watch this game and go shopping with the mother-in-law instead. Er.. doesn't Lawro (ludicrous appellation) know that shops aren't open on Saturday evenings? It's not Madrid over there you know (and not all the shops here are open, either).
Lawro's reasons for not rating Portsmouth v Charlton (not sure about using the words 'rating' and 'Portsmouth' in the same sentence - remember Sven the scorer on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, who liked visiting Portsmouth as he always picked up impressive ratings?) are not explained; maybe he just wasn't interested. It was only a match involving a team lying 5th in the table, after all, and playing away to the 16th-placed one. How different from his analytical anticipation of today's Newcastle v Sunderland, two great big huge enormous clubs lying, er... 13th and 19th, respectively.
Lawrenson's predictions mostly involve seeing which club is higher in the table, and then picking that one as the winner. Not this time though; his reasoning this weekend was that Portsmouth hadn't won for a while, and were thus in need of a win, and so by some unexplained celestial mechanism, they'd get one. This business of being likely to win because you need to is a new one on me, but there we are. It's maybe another reason for putting an end to all this useless chasing balls around on winter afternoons. A committee could be set up along the lines of the pools panel (in fact why not use the panel anyway?) and they could decide which clubs most need to win, and give them the points, and the rest of us could all go shopping with our mothers-in-law.
Anyway, Curbs's tactic of putting his team on the board (whatever that might consist of) and threatening to make them sit with him, no doubt bawling them out the while, worked wonders, and a completely different, motivated Charlton came out for the second half, equalised through Darren Ambrose after fifteen minutes and then Dennis Rommedahl hit the winner about fifteen minutes after that.
Opposing teams have got wise to leading scorer Darren Bent, marked out of the game for the second match running, but Danny Murphy, whose inch-perfect passes provided both goals, is going from strength to strength. Jerome Thomas is injured so this gave Ambrose his first start since the opening day at the "Stadium of Light", when he played very well, until he was sent off for a vicious-looking tackle which in my view was mainly accidental. So that's his first goal for Charlton, and now it's Jerome who might have to wait his turn to come back on side.
So Charlton move back to 2nd, ahead of Tottenham on goals scored, but with the same goal difference, although of course Tottenham have played 10 matches to Charlton's 9. And that's the way it will stay during the coming week, no matter who does what to whom this afternoon.
Quiz Update
During the night, I finally got round to updating the quiz and matters arising, but added it on to the end of my thoughts on the Fulham match, so scroll down and you'll find it.