Not with a Bang, but a Thumping

Manchester United 4 Charlton 0

I wasn't all that interested in this game, all things being equal; Charlton were going to be 12th, or maybe 13th, much as they have been in most of their Premiership seasons, except for the one which indirectly gave birth to this blog, two years ago: the magnificent 7th.

For, not surprisingly, my thoughts had been dominated for the whole week by my reaction to the resignation of Alan Curbishley. The fact that there was a relatively meaningless away fixture at Old Trafford, which Charlton would almost certainly lose, was very much at the back of my mind.

Obviously we were going to lose; there were all sorts of reasons: the fact that Charlton have only managed one victory at Manchester United in 68 visits; the fact that Charlton's record in my native north west has been abysmal for the past two years; and the fact that by announcing his imminent departure to his players when he did, Curbs might well have knocked any remaining stuffing out of them.

It certainly looked like it. I was not there, of course, and nor indeed was my fellow Charlton blogger New York Addick and yet it was he who pointed out that the only decent pass to a Charlton player came from a United one. My involvement with the game came at half time, when I decided to see how things were going, and logged on to Livescore.

My heart sank as I read the 3-0 scoreline; Charlton had already lost; few teams recover adequately from 3-0 down at half time, and very few of those do it when playing away at Old Trafford. I recalled how Curbs had terrified the lives out of his players by putting them on the board (whatever that might consist of) and threatening to sit next to them, that time at Portsmouth when according to Lawro we should all have been out shopping with our mothers-in-law; I thought of it and realised that even if he were to try it now, it wouldn't work; 45 minutes more and he wasn't going to be their manager any longer, and it wasn't going to make any difference to anything. And no more it did; in the end I was just thankful that 3-0 only got one goal worse.

So Charlton's season, which began with high hopes, ended on a low note, as did Curbs's managerial tenure with the club.

As indicated above, I was really quite stunned by the news; I recalled that during the past three or four years, every time there was a vacancy at another Premiership club, the press would rush to associate Curbs with it, and the rest of the media could then fairly truthfully say that his name was being 'linked' with this job or that. His name has been linked with Manchester City and Everton; Rangers and Hearts; Newcastle (repeatedly) and Middlesbrough (lately). And the England job of course. We all dreaded him leaving, and now we have to come to terms with the fact that he has left, and has stated that he is going nowhere for the time being.

It seems useless to insist that Curbs has repeatedly stated his reasons for leaving are that he wants a break; a rest from the constant round of looking for and training players, and trying to keep other clubs off them when they start to look good. The BBC sports website pages; and the rest of the media, see a vacancy elsewhere, and link Curbs's name to it. But I ask, as I have already so 0ften before, why would Curbs want to manage Middlesbrough, and still less the awful Newcastle United, when he was already the manager of a comparable and possibly better club much nearer home? The delightful Mrs Carol Curbishley is well-known to be perfectly happy living in her native London, and not only that, is not thought to view the prospect of Curbs working in a similar post 250 miles or more to the north with anything approaching enthusiasm.

There is also the matter of who will be brought in to replace Alan Curbishley at The Valley, but after a flurry of names - mainly managers in the lower leagues who have won promotion or at least a place in the play-offs - speculation has died for the moment. The most ludicrous name advanced, though frighteningly it could happen, is that of Mick McCarthy, the main reason apparently being that he lives in Bromley.

So there's hope for me becoming the next manager of Real Madrid then; after all I am only 2½ miles away, much nearer than Bromley is to Charlton.

More on Curbs and his possible replacement, and more to the point, the media treatment thereof, and an update on quiz matters, next time.