All Set

One of my self-appointed tasks on this blog is to look at the way the media report football in general, and Charlton in particular. Thus although I support Charlton and to a lesser extent some other teams (see bottom of page), I do not claim to be a proper Charlton blog, or at least not all the time. Thus, here in Madrid, in the cool (unusually) of an August very early morning, I shall eschew the customary prognostication elements of the immediate pre-season, and merely point out that there are many others involved in this game, including my fellow exiled blogger New York Addick, who neatly preserves his readers from what he calls 'preview overload', and simply provides next season's final table, all cut and dried, and as he says, no need to bother watching all that football if you don't want to.

The BBC pages, of which I am frequently critical, but which I look to for a lot of my basic information nonetheless, have once again been guilty, like practically everyone else, of manufacturing stories out of nothing. Thus we see a headline stating that the Premiership clubs are 'set' for the start of the season, or it might have been 'poised'. These two verbs are used more or less turn and turn about to report on things which haven't happened yet, and which sometimes don't, as when Charlton were 'set' to appoint Preston's then manager Billy Davies as Alan Curbishley's successor a couple of months ago. The rest of the league were reported as being 'set' to start their season two weeks ago. A variation on this on today's site has Sheffield United as being 'braced' for the start of their season, from which we deduce that their opening game, home to Liverpool, is regarded as difficult. (Why do I keep seeing the result of that one as 2-2? Yes I know I said I wouldn't prognosticate, but that isn't a forecast, more of a weird hunch).

I often wonder who the editors of these pages think their readers are. If someone logs on to the football page, surely the one thing they will know is that the season is starting later today.


Anyway, here we go, full of hopes and dreams; life returns to its normal tenor, including, again on the BBC, grinning out at me from the right hand side of the page, the familiar yet forgotten, for the past three months at any rate (I didn't follow the World Cup all that much) vacuous visage of the absurd Lawro, still the BBC's 'football expert', despite Frankie Valley's and my campaign to get rid of him, last season.

Unusually, rather than predicting the results of the upcoming Premiership fixtures this weekend (though no doubt he will get round to that) the lad give us his predictions, as a whole, for the season, and my goodness! You can see why the BBC need their own resident expert when you read the thing.

He does not, as New York Addick, does, produce a final table, but if you read between the lines of what he has to say, it amounts to pretty much the same thing; the only difference is that Lawro gets a huge retainer for effectively saying that next season's final table won't be all that different from this season's.

Anyway, after Charlton's 2-2 draw in Utrecht (I was going to write a piece in which I mentioned Beachcomber's Dr. Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht, but couldn't really fit it in with anything else), it is almost time for the season proper, so come on the lads!