MADRID NIGHTS

What You Wish For

2008-04-21T19:36:00.001+02:00

Matt Holland, Darren Ambrose and Zheng Zhi in action on Saturday against QPR. It looks impressive but did no good.

There is an old proverb, or at least saying or belief, which runs along the lines of advising people to be careful with what they wish for, as they might end up getting it.

Obviously it is aimed at people who wish they could win untold sums of cash and leave their jobs. There are lots of true stories of people who have won the pools or whatever, left their jobs and then found they missed their routines, and their workmates, and thus came to realise that money in itself does not purchase contentment.

And now I come to think of it, I am fairly sure that as Charlton struggled away to get out of the relegation slots last season, and had even managed to do so by this time last year, I murmured to my own set of household gods that a mid-table finish would be very welcome.

And now a mid-table finish is exactly what we are getting, but of course it is one division lower down. I have still not got back into the habit of regularly blogging, but since I last put finger to key, the talk has stopped being about Charlton still possibly getting into the play-offs, something which I was never all that keen on, for after all only one side emerges from said play-offs, and the plight of Derby County this season has been quite frightening. Charlton and their loyal supporters suffered a lot last season, but it is as nothing compared to what Derby’s fans have been through this time, and while this season has, finally, turned out to be a disappointment, we can still think of the situation as one of transition. Alan Pardew did a good job at West Ham, in my opinion, and whether you agree with me on that one or no, you have to admit that he laid the foundations for Reading’s Premiership adventure. If he can do that kind of thing, then he is the man we want, and in any case do we really want to venture out on to the managerial job market once more? Who is out there who could do any better? And we also have Phil Parkinson, don’t forget.

So, transition it is, permutations have to be made, and something constructed out of what we have. People have been deriding my quondam favourite Jerome Thomas, who clearly feels he is too good for the second tier. Of course, he isn’t, but unfortunately he has convinced himself that he’d be better off on the bench at Middlesbrough or somewhere. But surely better to get Charlton back up where he thinks they all belong, and then he can carry on living in London. Of course he might be prepared to move back to West London and QPR, who seem to be on the up.

Meanwhile down at the quiz, my team have won some, and lost some, and now people are getting concerned about numbers dropping off, which they have been, a little, of late. But I am optimistic that we shall survive for some time yet. I am avoiding making wishes, though.

Fresh Starts

2008-03-25T17:56:00.007+01:00

Is this a Dagger I see before me? A smiling but regrettably unidentified Forest Green midfielder contemplates challenging Dagenham & Redbridge's Ben Strevens in the 1-1 draw between the clubs last season.

Easter Monday yesterday, and so soon this year. I went down to the quiz, knowing that there would be a low turnout, as we were still on holiday from the Centre. People are always ambivalent about Easter Monday; on the one hand, we are on the final day of our Easter break, for we always get Holy Week plus one day, and on the other, people who have been travelling are usually back, and thus able to come along and meet up and do the quiz. Some of us also remember that Easter Monday is the day on which we moved operations, back in 2002, from our previous headquarters round the corner, where someone frying chips on Good Friday had set fire to the kitchen, causing the place to close down for a few months. Our beloved landlady gladly agreed to take us in, and we have been contentedly ensconced there ever since.

Of course, yesterday was the earliest Easter Monday for 92 years, and thus not the actual anniversary of our arrival at the pub, but as I say, despite being on holiday, I always make an effort to get to the quiz on Easter Monday. The bit about 92 years was told to me by David, one of the original members of our eternal friends and rivals, the Old Farts (a name, I remind you, which they themselves chose), who strolled in a few minutes after I did. There being no other quiz people around, we fell to debating whether there would in fact be a quiz at all. David is an old chum, and a very agreeable chap, but is given to a little light joshing about my affection for Charlton, and he also reads this blog, or did, for, as he pointed out, I haven't posted since 28 January. I got in first on the joshing stakes, pointing out that there has been little down at SE7 to write home about, and thus little to write about anywhere else, especially here. But I did add that I have been trying to find the odd hook to get back into the swing again.

The last time I posted anything, it was to deplore the demise of Frankie's blog, which had frequently sparked off whatever I might have to say about Charlton, and maybe the disappearance of Frankie had a knock-on effect on my own blogging. And also, round about the same time, two other, non-football blogs which I had read regularly also announced that they had had enough and were off to get a life, or whatever.

I did not take a specific decision to stop, and still haven't, but the weeks went by and I found that writing a new piece was getting more and more difficult, partly because I am weary of rehearsing excuses for not writing, and also because of the dismal goings-on, or lack thereof, at The Valley.

But then I discovered that Frankie is not dead after all, and makes guest appearances on the blog of New York Addick (link at right). I also found, on returning to check, that the other two bloggers had started up again, batteries recharged, after a break, and thus I feel that I can do the same.

So, quiz news is that we are chugging along with our basic three teams, with victories being fairly equally distributed among them. We are occasionally supplemented by the group of younger teachers from the Centre, plus one or two of their friends, but not on a regular basis. One thing I am quite proud of is that during a flu epidemic the other week, my team was reduced to just John and myself, Antony asking questions that night and Mush entertaining his visiting mother, and we still won, quite impressively.

Last night, our forebodings were fulfilled, as not enough people turned up to make it worth while running a quiz, so we had two or three pints and left it at that.

Elsewhere, I find myself astonished by the volatile nature of the Second Tier. The rise of Hull, and latterly Barnsley and Cardiff in the Cup, have all come as a surprise, proving that nothing in this league can be taken for granted. How we Charlton fans can have believed, as we all did at the start of the season, that we might lose once or twice to the likes of West Brom or Watford, but that teams like Burnley, Ipswich and Plymouth would be easily overcome, I cannot now imagine. Pards himself admits, now, that the team is in transition, and that the most Charlton can hope for is a play-off place. But what is the point of scraping promotion through that, if indeed it happens, to spend a whole season anchored, like the wretched Derby County, to the bottom of the Premier table?

Meanwhile I keep a watch on the BBC pages, ever a source of amusement in their relentless quest to create stories out of things people think or say, and their equally relentless determination to give nicknames to every team in the land. A reference to the 'U's' on today's page was obviously, I knew, Colchester United, but it turns out to be Oxford. A reference to Wrexham being blunted by the Daggers had me completely flummoxed, and I had to check: they were referring to Dagenham and Redbridge, of course. [And it appears they were right to do so, subsequent research has shown, ed.]

Mind you, a couple of weeks ago the main copy writer must have been ill, for I was astounded to read a headline which said "Linfield beat Newry in Cup Replay". This was neat and informative, and it made such a change. Normally it would have been "Linnets hammer Newbies in Ongoing Cup Clash", or something equally preposterous.

Another headline that caught my eye was "Striker Sam leaves Meadow Lane". Nothing to do with Charlton's Lloyd Sam, unless a distant relative, but obviously a Notts County forward has left the club. Yet there was something about the headline that reminded me of, perhaps, a chapter heading towards the end of a long J. B. Priestley novel.

Maybe Striker Sam could be turned into a kids' TV programme, like Postman Pat or Bob the Builder.

Anyway, the bloggers I regularly visited, and which then ceased, have, as I stated above, restarted and I visit them regularly. I shall keep it up, especially with my 10,000th (I do not actively seek links in other places) visitor due any time now.

A Minute's Applause for Frankie

2008-01-28T14:24:00.000+01:00

Darren prepares to equalise against Watford

Readers, I feel as though a pit-prop of my existence has been knocked away. As I sit here with my large mug of steaming coffee, just up, having been awake reading half the night, where now is my first port of call on t' Internet, now that Frankie has backed his bags and returned his borrowed identity to the erstwhile lead singer of The Four Seasons?

For Frankie has ceased publication. I logged on as always after rising on 23 January, and discovered that Frankie has decided that for the last three years, he has had little to say that wasn't "absolute ballcocks", as he would put it in his refreshingly blunt fashion, and that hereinafter he would be desisting.

[Later]

I had to go to the Centre shortly after that, and thus did not immediately find out what the reaction to this earth-shattering event was on the Charlton Blogosphere, and was subsequently somewhat surprised to find, in fact, that very few people had remarked on it at all. There were a few exchanges on a message board thread which I found through Forever Charlton, however, which did give me pause.

A couple of weeks ago, Frankie wrote criticising the growing tendency for a minute's applause at football matches to replace a minute's silence to show respect following the passing of key footballing figures like Alan Ball or Brian Miller, and was particularly scathing about a catch-all session of applause aimed at remembering all ex-Charlton players and fans who had gone over to the other side, which had been organised for just before the Blackpool game. A day or so after that, he allowed some very critical comment from someone who sounded rather menacing (in the way the Kray Twins used to sound menacing) to appear, although he usually filtered such things out. The person making the comments was saying things like he knew who Frankie really was and who he hung out with and the whole thing was quite, as I say, menacing.

And then, whether owing to all this or no, Frankie shut down. I shall miss him; he was most encouraging to me. I shall keep the link for a while, for the benefit of people reading the archives. But thanks for everything, Paul, as I gather from the Forever people you are really called, and I'll try to keep the Lawro vendetta going (though the Olympic Lawro does not usually concern himself with second tier clubs). If you don't want the applause, I'll see if I can't arrange a minute's silence, although I am inclined to think that breaking a minute's silence by making a noise is worse than not applauding when everyone else is - more noticeable, after all.

West Bromwich Albion 2 Charlton 2
Watford 1 Charlton 1

And meanwhile, Charlton keep on trucking. Though not through to the rest of the Cup, as WBA won that one on penalties, but of course, as one always says, we can now concentrate on the League, and boy do we need to. Andy Gray has joined us from my other club, Burnley, being granted a special emergency loan, or something, so that he could play at Watford, though it was Darren Ambrose, whom I have always liked, who saved the day for Charlton there. Why some Charlton supporters christened him Sharron, implying that he is some kind of big (though he doesn’t seem all that big) girl’s blouse, is beyond me. And he always gives me the impression that he really wants to play for the club, unlike, sadly, another quondam favourite of mine, Jerome Thomas, who clearly feels he is much too good to be wasting his time in the second division, so he might be going to Derby instead. But has he looked at how far adrift Derby are right now? Not a good career move, I’d say. But then apparently Middlesbrough are interested; not much more hope there though, I shouldn’t have thought. Jerome, why not try your level best for Charlton? And do you really want to live outside London?

At the quiz, our new colleagues and quiz enthusiasts Michelle and Graham last week gave their first performance as quiz masters, and most creditable it was as well. This evening, we are missing John, who belatedly (but just in time) remembered it was his girlfriend’s birthday, and Antony is asking the questions; but we expect to make a reasonable shot at things, just the same.

And tomorrow evening, Charlton play Stoke down in SE7 in a game they must win to continue being serious contenders for a return to the Prem. Oddly, as neither Stoke nor Charlton were involved in the Cup the other day, this game, unlike, say, the Burnley – Scunthorpe one, was not arranged back to Saturday. There will be reasons, I dare say. I wonder what Frankie would have had to say about that?

Tangerine Dreams

2008-01-15T16:41:00.000+01:00

Charlton 1 West Bromwich Albion 1 (FA Cup Round 3)
Charlton 4 Blackpool 1 (League)

Madjid Bougherra (he's in there somewhere) scores Charlton's first goal

About 9 years ago, I did my first-ever stint at being a guest question master at the quiz. In those days we had a different venue, an Irish pub round the corner from our present home, which was part-owned and managed by a very amiable young Northern Irishman called Simon. Simon had launched the quiz, and had insisted on being his own question master, and very charismatic he was, too. All the same, there were occasions when he couldn't be around, or when people asked if they could have a chance to be a guest quizmaster, and as I say, my Big Chance came along some time in 1997 or 1998.

I recall that I had a good month or so to get things ready, and, as new quizmasters are wont to do, I resolved to cast away some of the fuddy-duddy old topics. How boring just to have History and Geography and Cinema and Literature. So I said to myself: "how about something exciting and different?" Though of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with the old quiz standards, it having been proved that they are sufficiently all-embracing to work perfectly, in the right hands.

However, once I got down to it, I immediately realised that eight whole exciting, different rounds was a bit much to go for, and opted for just two new-style rounds. One was a general round on transport - buses and trains mostly- which I am very keen on (see last posting). The other round was a whole round about Blackpool, not just the football club, but the whole place, and I included questions about who designed Blackpool Tower (M. Eiffel); the name of the city across the Irish Sea whose name literally means "black pool" (Dublin) and the organist at the Tower Ballroom (Reginald Dixon), and which political party had resolved, in the light of there being no longer any direct trains from the capital, never (though they have since gone back on this one) to hold their conferences there again (the Tories, and whose fault was it that there were no direct trains, pray?) and what was the name of the first footballing knight, who played for the town's club (Stanley Matthews, of course). I also asked for the well-known nickname of Blackpool Football Club (the Tangerines).

My experience as quizmaster that evening taught me a number of things. One of them was that no one knew anything like as much about Blackpool as I did, the Stanley Matthews question being the only one which most people knew, and that while I might be keen on trains and buses and the like, not many other people are, and unless personally affected by this, are unlikely to know which London station you go to if you plan to travel to Cardiff (Paddington, in case you're interested).

Another thing was, indeed, that maybe the old traditional questions are the best, and the third thing was that no-one knew about Blackpool FC being called the Tangerines, even when I told the assembled company, by way of a clue, that it was based on the colour of their shirts. Alex was most put out afterwards when I refused to allow him any points for his suggestion of "The Oranges", insisting that the colour was right, even though I kept pointing out that "The Oranges" is not the nickname of the club.

Maybe, I mused afterwards, this Tangerines thing is limited to the surrounding area, for as regular readers will know, I grew up in rural North Lancs, and Blackpool was never all that far away, both as a place and in its general influence.

And yet, after this great victory, one of Charlton's best performances this season, and on a par with their apparently excellent display against the Albion in the Cup the previous week, there has been a plethora of tangerine headlines, with tangerines being squeezed, peeled, crushed and sliced up, all over the place. So I thought I'd add one of my own as today's title.

Bougherra scored after a number of minutes which varies from 2 to 6, depending on who you read, and then Luke Varney added another after 10 (or 12). Coasting 2-0 after such a short time is not always a good thing, and Blackpool's Ben Burgess hit what was apparently a fine volley to bring Charlton back to earth after about 16 minutes. China's captain (but not Charlton's) Zheng Zhi hit goal nº 3 after 22 minutes, and with Charlton leading 3-1 at half time, Blackpool returned determined to fight back, and tried hard, but ZZ hit Charlton's nº 4 after 52 minutes and that was that, with other open goals and the like being missed by Jerome Thomas among others.

The powers that organise such matters might well be Blackpool fans, for ZZ's reward for being man of the match and scoring those all-important third and fourth goals was to have to go and have tea with Gordon Brown yesterday (see Wyn Grant's blog, link at right). What can the poor boy have done to deserve that?

The picture shows the first goal, and when I first saw it I thought it was no wonder that Charlton won so comfortably, as Blackpool seemed to have no players in the goalmouth at all. But a closer look reveals that Charlton players are wearing white shorts, and Blackpool, er, tangerine ones, but I was surprised to find the shirt colours so similar. And why is what is evidently a Blackpool defender raising his arms in the time-honoured "we've just scored a goal" gesture?

Anyway, a fine performance, and it bodes well for tonight's Cup replay at West Brom, for apparently Charlton played exceedingly well in their 1-1 home draw, and were a shade unlucky. The Albion also, apparently, Wyn Grant reports, feel that they might have done better and are determined to improve their performance tonight. Might be a cracking game. Frankie, who forecast a home victory of 4-1 last Saturday, which made his readers gasp and stretch their eyes, even though he turned out to be right, has predicted a scoreline of West Brom 2 Charlton 4 for this evening. And who am I to argue? If that's what he wants, he may, if he is on a roll, get it.

Cup Fever

2008-01-05T17:33:00.000+01:00

[Being written before full-time in the FA Cup ties]

Kitson's LMS saddle-tank with its British Railways number 47000

Charlton 1 Hull 1
Norwich 1 Charlton 1
Leicester 1 Charlton 1
Charlton 1 Colchester 2

Well, maybe not Cup fever, but I am feeling a bit shivery, but what is a touch of flu when it is the first Saturday in January and the Third Round of the FA Cup is once more with us?

Well actually I feel like returning to bed with a good book (and I bought half a dozen of these while in the UK earlier this week), and looking round the blogosphere, and especially those bits which concern Charlton, it would appear that I am not alone. Frankie says that if Charlton are going to play as they have been playing in these last four cheerless games (though they did manage one goal in each of them), then he'd rather not go, and many of the others are losing the will to live as well.

Mind you, the cup is not what it was. Logging on to the BBC as usual on rising this morning (yes indeed, morning, for once - I am still on a UK timetable) I spotted an arresting headline. It read "FA Cup does not matter" and was followed by a dash, and then the name, "Kitson".

Now usually statements of this sort, something daring and controversial, are attributed to leading figures to make them pack a punch; so I would have been perfectly prepared to be gobsmacked if it had been Hillary Clinton, for example, though to be sure compared to her current situation the FA Cup is a mere nothing, or Fabio Cappello, or Rafael Benítez, but Kitson? "Who is Kitson?" I asked myself. There was a guy called maybe Paul Kitson who played for Derby, among others, but he'd have retired by now and they surely wouldn't have wheeled him out for a rent-a-quote story, would they? The only other Kitson I could think of was a Leeds-based engineering company who, in 1932, built some saddle-tanks (see above) for the London Midland and Scottish Railway, and it was hardly going to be them, even if they are still in the saddle-tank business, which I doubt.

In fact Kitson turns out to be a guy who plays in the Reading forward line, and he is fed up with so much football and is demanding a winter break. Maybe he is on to something there. All this work. We could all have a long winter break. Mind you there'd be no shops or pubs open, or buses or trains running, or garages operating, but Kitson has a point: too much accumulated work. Or maybe Kitson is in the wrong job. Heaven knows, my job is not excessively demanding but I do do more than 6 or 8 hours a week, even so.

But actually Kitson is right. The Cup does not matter as much as it did. Ever since the Cup Winners' Cup was abolished it has just not commanded the same respect from players and clubs. And as for an FA Cup Winner's medal being the ultimate prize any footballer could desire, well those days are long past. Now, winning something has to allow you to compete in something else, though in the nature of things even that has to stop somewhere.

Anyway, this afternoon, Charlton's engagement with West Bromwich Albion is drawing to a close. For once we have the benefit of a Lawro forecast, but without an explanation. He says 1-1. Frankie said 4-3. With 79 minutes gone Lawro is looking good, for 1-1 it is.

Both managers have apparently said that they greatly fear a replay, as like Mr. Kitson of Reading, they are also suffering from too much football.

STOP PRESS

Sadly for the above-mentioned two managers, 1-1 it stayed. More later in the week as I strive to get the blog back on track.

The quiz returns on Monday, and I am one of the quiz masters along with Antony, so I have to leave you for the moment and finalise my questions, though I am not unaware that I have let the 50th anniversary of one of the best-ever Charlton football stories go by without a mention. Next time for sure.

First Feet Forward

2008-01-01T23:46:00.000+01:00

I am travelling in the UK right now, but I ought to write a line or three to mark the passing of the year, and greet my regular readers, who must be beginning to think that regular posting on this blog is a thing of the past. Well it hasn't been too assiduous recently, but this ought to change soon. Comments on the Christmas debacles (no accents on this computer) and especially this afternoon's poor start to 2008 by Charlton (not to mention Burnley and Forest Green) after I return to Madrid on 3 January. Though just because you lose your first game of the year it doesn't mean things won't improve. Does it?

Happy New Year.

Congestion

2007-12-21T17:36:00.000+01:00

Charlton 0 Sheffield United 3
Charlton 1 Burnley 3
Cardiff C. 0 Charlton 1
Charlton 3 Ipswich 1
West Bromwich A. 4 Charlton 2

Luke Varney raises his arms in celebration of one of the few high spots for Charlton this past month

Once more I have found myself in the situation of not having written anything on the blog, and I have been wondering why this might have been, and one of the reasons is fixture congestion.

In the past three years, while Charlton were in the Premiership, I was pretty well able to keep up with their games, and write something or other, albeit at times brief, in reaction to each one. But in the second tier, or course, they have to cram in 46 games, not 38, and at times it seems they come thick and fast. I last appeared in the Blogosphere 3½ weeks ago, when I made an apology for not having posted anything for... 3½ weeks!

There were happier times, though, when I would ramble on at length about such important matters as why everyone I stay with when I am in the UK seems to favour Imperial Leather soap, and of course the quiz team, but time is getting ever-more pressing, and I don't even manage to complete entries in my diary every day any more.

Anyway, this evening the Christmas term at the Centre comes to an end, and as I sit here awaiting the arrival of my final group of students, and also reflecting that all the Christmas cards have been written and dispatched, and preparations for my trip to the UK next week are well advanced, I find myself with some dead time, and also with access to a computer.

So where to take up after leaving off? As ever, tempting fate was how I ended up last time. I spent a long paragraph extolling goalkeeper Nicky Weaver, and pointing out that Charlton had gone 4 games without conceding a goal. I had the forethought to be a little nervous of the form prediction that we would beat Sheffield United, and in my heart of hearts I maybe thought it was time for Charlton to concede maybe one goal, and thus I was thinking 1-1, especially as I was under the influence of the book, Black Swan, which I am still reading. If you check the previous post, you will see that the theory behind the book is basically that sequences of events from the past are much less of a clue to what will happen in the future than we think they are; and certainly the mixed bag of scores at the top of this post would appear to reflect that perfectly.

The Sheffield United game was midweek, and I remember logging on to Livescore on the classroom computer at the end of class on the Tuesday night to see how Charlton were getting on. Before being surrounded by five Spanish boys wanting to make sure that Barcelona were losing, as they hoped (they weren't), I noted that the score was 0-0 after about 20 minutes, and then repaired to the bar to watch the Barça game over a couple of beers, assuming that Charlton's defence and goalkeeper would hold firm, and that Charlton would nick it 1-0, or maybe 2-0. So you can imagine my dismay when, arriving home, I logged on and found out what had in fact happened.

Next up, the following Saturday, was Burnley, my other team, the team that my father, uncles, cousins and friends had persuaded me to follow as it wasn't possible for me to go to London and see Charlton back in the late fifties; it was 230 miles away and might just as well have been 2,300 miles for all the chances were of getting there. The two clubs don't meet that often, and my attitude in the past has been either to hope for a draw, or that the points will go where they are most needed. So in my opinion, Charlton were quite definitely more in need of the points, as Burnley, having undergone a mysterious change of manager (I thought Steve Cotterill was, in the timeless words of Sir David Frost, "doing a grand job") and having just won at Watford, were comfortable enough in mid-table.

Of course I can hardly expect Burnley to respect my desires. They thought, and quite rightly, as it turned out, that if they could travel to Watford and turn them over, then they could do the same at Charlton, and so it proved, leaving me in a state of mild shock.

We were now into December, and although my many friends who are aware of my affections for Burnley were doubtless hoping to read my views on what had happened, I was too busy, what with Christmas cards and then the exams to mark and so the Burnley match came and went and I just kept on hoping. Things did turn round, anyway, with the victory at Cardiff securing a double (why are the fixtures arranged so that you play some teams a second time before you've met some of the others?) and then the encouraging result against Ipswich lulled me into thinking things were going to be all right.

One of my oldest chums at work is a nice lady who happens to be a diehard West Brom fan, so on the night before that fixture there was a lot of good natured joshing, with Andrea (for it is she) voting for 2-1, and me going for 1-2, though without a massive amount of conviction, it has to be admitted. And apparently West Brom were much better, and the result was a fair one.

Anyway, my students are due in about twenty minutes, and there's just time for a coffee upstairs before that, so I'll publish and be off. I have been scanning the latest news about the team, and Wyn Grant reckons that Hull supporters regard tomorrow's game as three points in the bag, apparently because of Charlton's home form. However Charlton's last home game was the 3-1 against Ipswich, and yet I am uncertain. Charlton have a lot of injuries, and there is also the business of the Yorkshire jinx. We shall see.

Black Swan

2007-11-27T09:46:00.000+01:00

Bristol City 0 Charlton 1
Charlton 3 Cardiff City 0
Preston 0 Charlton 2

My title this morning, as I once more take up my ~~pen~~ keyboard and resume blogging, after a 3-week lay-off occasioned by the Internationals, and overpressure of work, is taken from a most interesting book which is going the rounds at the moment. Black Swan is by the Lebanese-born Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is a large thick volume, and I am taking it slowly, and looking forward to enjoying it for a few more weeks yet, but although I am only somewhere round about Chapter 3, the main theme is emerging, and it is one that seems to have an awful lot of relevance for football, as well as more earth-shattering events like 9/11, which Professor Taleb uses as a starting-point for outlining his theories.

Professor Taleb

The great and good Alan Pardew, after Charlton lost to QPR, thus registering their third defeat in eight days, said it was just a blip. I remarked at the time that, while hoping and trusting, even, that he was right, he had to say it anyway. He wasn't going to come out and say the wheels had come off Charlton's season already.

And now, a month later, with the win at Southampton, and the three listed above (all of them without conceding a single goal, you will notice) under their belts, the Charlton roller coaster, with 'Premiership' on the destination indicators, is back at full-tilt, so maybe it was a blip, and maybe there won't be any more.

Here, and in honour of those clean sheets, one should praise Nicky Weaver, and here is a picture of him in action against Preston the other day, where he was particularly outstanding, apparently.

Nicky foils the Lilywhites' forwards

However, coming back to Professor Taleb and his theory, I noticed many years ago that certain books can take over one's life to a large extent during the time one is reading them, and especially if they are long books, or if it is taking a time to get through them for whatever reason. I remember spending a nine-day period with an Iris Murdoch novel (The Sacred and Profane Love Machine) when she was all the rage, in the late seventies, and viewing all my friendships and other relationship patterns through a kind of strange Murdochian prism: everyone had mysterious ulterior motives; no one did anything for the obviously apparent reason. Another time, when spending a month with Our Mutual Friend, a number of Victorian villains suddenly appeared in my circle, only to fade away, with one notable exception, when I'd finished it.

And so it is with Professor Taleb. His theory, at least so far, is that no one can predict events from what has gone before. He argues that 9/11 could not have been prevented, as even though the perpetrators made little secret of what they were up to, with their flying lessons and so on, no one could have believed it, and thus any suggestion pointing to the truth would have been rejected out of hand, and thus nothing would be done about it. Events like this he calls Black Swans, as no one would predict the existence of a black swan based on the visual evidence of swans that one had experienced hitherto. For those still unconvinced, he trots (sorry) out the turkey theory. A turkey, being fattened up over 1000 days for the Christmas market, is kept in comfortable surroundings and given good food by a friendly human being for 999 days. On the thousandth day, the turkey contentedly observes the approach of its benefactor, but this time the benefactor is not carrying food. The true facts behind all the kindness are about to be revealed to the hapless bird.

As I say, this is about as far as I am into the book, and I look forward to more revelations as I go on. But, as with Iris Murdoch and Charles Dickens, the ambience of book is with me quite a lot, and I find myself applying the theory to a number of other matters, and especially the world of football. Our pools syndicate at the Centre suffers a great deal from the idea that just because Real Madrid are a good team of world renown, then they are a safe bet for banker away wins right through the season. This and similar thinking is applied to most of the other predictions, except the Second Division fixtures, which most people claim to have little knowledge about. But of course you are on a loser no matter what. The Spanish pools are state-run, and all you have to do is forecast the results, 1, 2 or x, of 15 matches: all the First Division ones and a handful of key Second Division games, and that's all. If form predictions prevail, there are lots of winners collecting a couple of euros. And yet people persist in trying to get the thing right, using their knowledge of what has gone before.

I was bemoaning this to one of my fellow-syndicate members last evening, but he said it was incautious to move off the banker win syndrome where Barcelona and Madrid are concerned, yet if all we get when this turns out right (and it not infrequently doesn't) is €20 to split between the twelve of us, then I think we need a rethink.

So what are we now to make of Charlton's four-match winning streak, as they prepare for tonight's home game against Sheffield United, fellow relegation strugglers last season? Obviously, to expect it to continue indefinitely is to expect too much. And yet form would indicate that with Charlton on a roll, as they say, and Sheffield United, not, as expected, running away with the division, far from it, a home banker is the only prediction.

Well obviously I hope I am wrong, but tonight's game is making me feel slightly uneasy. The away games in Lancashire jinx seems to have gone away after Preston, but what about being at home to sides from Yorkshire / North Lincolnshire? Barnsley... Scunthorpe...

But maybe it is not the season for black swans in SE7. Here's hoping.

Afterword

As it has been a while since I wrote, there are other matters (the quiz team's exploits; the rise and rise of Forest Green; managerial changes at Burnley) which I hope to write about 'ere long. But Charlton's fixture list tends to control the frequency of my postings, for the most part. And time, and overpressure of work.

First Win in 5 Outings

2007-11-05T02:36:00.001+01:00

Southampton 0 Charlton 1

Curiously, Charlton's last-minute victory at the St. Mary's stadium was their first win in the last five games, and the quiz team also won for the first time in five last Monday. What this proves I hesitate to say. More later, anyway...

Have the Wheels Come Off?

2007-10-28T18:24:00.000+01:00

Charlton 1 Plymouth Argyle 2 // Charlton 0 QPR 1

An organisation I used to work for was once described by someone in my hearing as having a propensity to jump on a bandwagon just when the wheels are coming off it. This was when it was considering outsourcing all the more useful sections of the organisation to other, less reliable organisations, and thus creating more space for more people in suits to sit about having meetings all over the place, and producing reams of unintelligible mumbo jumbo about things that don't matter. Anyway, in the end even they were persuaded that outsourcing doesn't work properly, and abandoned the rest of the scheme.

Thus it is that I am already familiar with the metaphor of wheels coming off, which was used by one of the correspondents on The Inspector's (I think) page after the débâcle against Plymouth on Tuesday. This correspondent in fact said that just because Charlton had lost twice in four days, that was no reason to suppose that the wheels had come off, and that there was a long way to go.

Admittedly, at that stage, people were saying that the defeat against Wolves and then the Plymouth result were tactical failures rather than being symptomatic of anything being seriously wrong, although when I read somewhere (and I genuinely do not remember where) that Charlton would have to be sure they beat QPR in order to save Pards's job, I did begin to wonder whether all the managerial sacking that has been going on in London these past weeks wasn't getting to people.

As I said last time, Wolves won because Mick McCarthy had a stratagem, and it worked. Ian Holloway of Plymouth also had one, and that worked too, though Premiership reject referee (if they're not good enough, then they should just be dismissed, not inflicted on the other leagues) Mr "Rob" Styles of Waterlooville (did he mis-read the team sheets, and think it was Portsmouth in SE7 the other night?) did help them rather a lot.
For example, Charlton striker Svetoslav Todorov was so badly damaged after being attacked by a Plymouth player that he is out for the rest of the season, and as he is on a one-year deal, will probably not play for Charlton again. "Rob" waved play on at that point.

However, moving on to yesterday, judging from the reports I have seen and the reactions of the bloggers whom I link to (see helpful links, at right), this time there is almost nothing that can give Charlton supporters any comfort, and no one is taking any. Charlton were awful; clueless, directionless, and if QPR had had more go about them it could have been 3-0 or 4-0 quite easily. The Sporting Life is fair and unbiased, while the Kent Messenger supports Charlton but even they can't find much to say that is positive.

My QPR-supporting quiz team-mate Mush (who rang and asked me if I wanted to go with him to find a pub showing the game yesterday - thank goodness I couldn't accept) will be pleased, as his team seem to be turning their poor start to the season round, but on the other side of London, Charlton have had to leave the fast lane of the motorway that was taking them back to the Premiership at first shot, as the wheels come off, and sit on the hard shoulder and wait for help to arrive. Or can they fix the wheels back on? Time will tell. And just because loads of London managers are being fired doesn't mean that Pards's time is up yet, surely? (He says that this nightmare eight days is just a blip, but then he would, wouldn't he?) I've always had a lot of respect for that nice Mr. Jol, though, even if he does rather resemble a rather dour conserje who we often see having drinks in the bar we go to after work.

Finally, for those of you who like to follow the doings of the quiz team, we have been through a relatively indifferent run in these past two or three weeks. Certainly whenever Edu arrives late and cannot join his team as they are full, and thus joins the Old Farts, there is no stopping them. We have also been hampered by the fact that Antony has been quiz master a couple of times, and whether it is that he avoids giving us questions that suit us, in order not to incur criticisms of favouritism, or, a view which I incline to, that he asks questions of the type that he likes to answer, and of course isn't actually in our team when they need to be answered, the net result is that we tend not to win.

I am hopeful of tomorrow, however, as Antony will be sitting with us, and Edu will be asking the questions, or some of them, anyway. And next week, Lesley and me, and it'll be Bonfire Night too, though I doubt whether our beloved landlady would be keen on me opening the proceedings by burning an effigy of Rob Styles on an improvised bonfire, much though I'd like to.

Mounting Midlands Misery

2007-10-23T10:07:00.000+02:00

Wolverhampton Wanderers 2 Charlton 0

Ah well, my optimistic feelings about the Wolves game proved to erroneous, and as usual after an unlooked-for result, I didn't bother checking in with the other bloggers or the BBC till later that night. Wyn Grant did not seem either too surprised nor disappointed, and more or less implied that Charlton had been outplayed. The BBC actually said that Charlton had dominated in the first half yet had failed to turn this dominance into goals. This account was followed, as per the usual BBC football page house style, by a quote from each of the managers.

Now I am always quite sympathetic towards managers who are asked to make some remark or other after a game, for whether they are reduced to making platitudinous comments of the "lads done great" variety, following a win, or blaming the referee Dennis Wise style, when they've lost, the whole area is very limited. At the end of last season, I pointed out that managers of relegated clubs rarely say that they've been abysmal all season and might well end up going down again, even when this is readily apparent to one and all. So at first glance, Pards's comment, that once Charlton were behind they found it difficult to catch up, seemed meaningless, as it didn't tell us anything the final score didn't. But then I thought that this is usually the best way to deal with awkward questions from the media.

I seem to recall a Tory lady politician in the late eighties, I think, (not Mrs. T. though) who would smile beatifically, and murmur "so many imponderables", and then pass on before the bemused press guys worked out that what she had said meant nothing more than "you're putting me on the spot to say something, and I don't want to, so I'll say something that sounds meaningful, and by the time you realise that it isn't, I'll be out of here".

So I concluded that Pards was on the same tack, and it wasn't until I checked in with Frankie's piece yesterday morning, which referred to a report on the game in the Daily Telegraph, that I realised that Pards quite possibly wasn't aware of the reason why Charlton had lost. Wolves manager Mick McCarthy (who last year had been rumoured to be in line for the Charlton job on the grounds that he has a house in Bromley, and which prompted me to say that on that basis I had a fair chance of getting the Real Madrid job) has a good track record when it comes to getting teams out of this division and up to the Premiership, as he proved at Sunderland not long ago, and he took a couple of tactical decisions, aimed at stifling any creativity and initiative that Charlton might have, mainly in the person of Andy Reid, and it worked. Pards's bringing Jerome Thomas on after 71 minutes, the Telegraph added, made a difference, but it was too late, so why did Pards not make this change after the 46th minute goal, incidentally scored by an ex-Charlton player (this seems invariably to happen), Jay Bothroyd?

Well I don't know the answer to that, and Pards's view that it was disappointing, and that things must change tonight, when Charlton play Plymouth at The Valley, is one that I certainly echo, but which is so self-evident that it hardly merits saying at all.

And it is beginning to look as though visiting the Midlands this season is going to be about as productive as going to the Lancashire area has been in past seasons, too.

One of Three

2007-10-20T15:24:00.000+02:00

Charlton 1 Barnsley 1

I remember Jimmy Adamson, some time after Burnley had won the League Championship in 1960, when he was club captain, and before, rather disastrously, in my view, taking over as the manager, saying that leagues can easily be won if you win your home games and draw your away games.

Of course he was talking a a time when you got but two points for a win, and maybe the Adamson formula for promotion would not work any longer in these days of three for a win, but people still feel quite pleased if when playing away, a draw is a result. But not of course when playing at home.

The young and highly successful Barnsley manager, Simon Davey, was reported as saying that before the match, he'd take the point, meaning that were his rising Barnsley side to manage a draw in SE7, then he'd feel the job had been well done.

The game, according to the other commentators, produced some of Charlton's finest football this season so far, and people felt that ZZ's goal (above) when it came late on, in the 82nd minute in fact, was going to give Charlton the points and be a true reflection of play. But as so often lately, Charlton conceded a last-minute goal and Simon Davey got his wish.

* * *

Things go in threes, I reflected gloomily this morning as I remembered Alan Coren, whose appearances on The News Quiz, and many humorous writings, I had always so much enjoyed, only a couple of weeks after the demise of Ned Sherrin, another lifelong hero of mine. Who next, I wonder?

But the three theme has its lighter side, and this afternoon brings Charlton's third trip to the Midlands, out of a total this season, of five such visits, which will, strangely, have all (the remaining two are to West Brom and Leicester) been completed before the end of 2007. I mention this because one of the gloomier themes of my writings about the fortunes of Charlton in recent seasons has been the fact that when travelling to my native North West, the team has invariably come unstuck, often quite spectacularly. I am hoping to detect a happier theme for visits to the Midlands. Though thus far two outings there have brought defeat (the only one this season) at Stoke, and the draw at Coventry. Today it is Wolves, where if I recall aright, Charlton's last visit, in the Premiership very near the beginning of the 2003-2004 season, brought us a splendid 4-0 win. I remember hearing this announced in Spanish on the telly down at the pub (and believe me, until you've heard a Spanish announcer trying to say 'Wolverhampton Wanderers', you haven't lived) and assuming they'd made a mistake.

So, if things go in threes, then after a defeat and a draw, a win looks like a good bet, and the resonance of that 4-0 win ought to help, oughtn't it?

The Brawl

2007-10-08T00:52:00.000+02:00

Hull City 1 Charlton 2

If I am to keep my promise to David, what ought to come first, as it did chronologically, is to point out that David, Luis and co. had a splendid win at last Monday's quiz, scoring 133 points and thus knocking us well into second place by a margin of 14. We had no excuses, really; we were missing Mush and Lesley, so we were not at full strength, but we still should have operated with more caution. Where we made our mistake was to jump at a round offered by Antony called Words & Language. When this was announced, we all looked at one another and said things to the effect that this was our trade, and therefore an ideal subject to choose as the Joker round, for which, let me remind you, you get double the points for every right answer, though of course the round has to be publicly specified before it starts as being your Joker.

But sadly, in our job we are not required to know what the third, fourth and fifth most common languages in the world are, and we only managed to get 5½ questions right out of 10 in this one, while in the next round, Geography, our rivals, who are excellent at this, and thus chose it as their Joker, did not miss a trick, and that, really, was that.

And of course the brawl in the title of the piece does not refer to Quiz Night at all; we are always courteous in defeat.

The brawl came on Tuesday night. I was quite tired, for as I reported yesterday afternoon, the new academic year started last week, and indeed had done so that morning with speeches and sessions and meetings, when we are accustomed to working in the evenings. So I got in, worn out, but remembered there was football, and tuned in to Livescore somewhere in the second half to find Charlton 1-0 up. On Livescore, you can get more detail by clicking on the match, and thus I discovered that Luke Varney had got the goal in the 41st minute, but then my eye was drawn to a couple of red symbols, and this conveyed the information that Charlton's Lloyd Sam and the Hull captain Ian Ashbee, had both been given red cards in the 44th minute.

My only reaction to this at the time was to think that the side numbers would thus be even and to start imagining a new rule which said that in the interests of paying spectators, once teams are both reduced to 10 men, then they can each add a sub to make it 11-11 again.

And then came deja vu; the final ten minutes of the game arrived, and Charlton were 1-0 up, as they had been at Coventry, and once again it was nail-biting time, but this time there was relief as in the 89th, a second goal was added to the total by Chris Iwelumo, so it was just a question of sitting back and waiting for FT to appear next to the scoreline and replace the figure 90 which was already in evidence. But in fact this did not happen for a further 11 minutes, by which time Hull had pulled back to 1-2.

The brawl aspects of all this remained unknown to me till later in the week, when I got round to reading the reports. The Kent Messenger is as succinct as anyone. And suddenly everyone was talking about the brawl, involving the two players who were sent off, and Pards apparently came on to the pitch, saying afterwards that this was to stop Jonathan Fortune and Dean Windass from squaring up to each other, and then the FA said they were going to investigate the whole thing, which they did, and now Lloyd Sam has started a 3-match suspension and Pards does not know why.

I must say, not having been there, that my instincts are to side with our own players and blame the Hull players, and Lloyd Sam (pictured above) looks as though butter wouldn't melt and so on, and just when he was enjoying his first decent run in the team, too.

But what struck me most, when I had time to think about things after the dust settled a bit on Friday night, was the use of the word 'brawl', which I don't think I'd seen in football match reports for a long time; it was quite nostalgic, really, seeing it again, like reading reports in the 'sixties.

In fact I always thought that after the famous Evening Standard (was it?) headline in the late seventies which ran: QUEEN IN BRAWL AT PALACE, referring not to HM and Buck House, but to Gerry Queen and Selhurst Park, the word had gently slipped into disuse. Well well.

I'll try and deal with other matters outstanding some time on Tuesday, by which time there will have been another quiz. Talk about an incident-packed existence!

A Changing Viewpoint

2007-10-07T16:19:00.000+02:00

Coventry City 1 Charlton 1

An awful lot has been going on in my life, and an awful lot has been going on for Charlton as well, this week. For me, as ever, October brings the return to full-term working, and during these first days of the month we have meetings, workshops, discussions, and eventually get started on the teaching, meeting our new students, who are going to bring us pleasure and joy (quite true, in many cases) during the coming academic year.

So, while in the normal way of things I try to post something between all of Charlton's outings, I have actually not had time to post anything for eight days, and in that time Charlton have played in three league matches, which have brought in five points, which is all right, I suppose.

And yet it could so easily have been nine. The last time I was writing, I was talking about how other bloggers (more assiduous ones than I) were viewing Charlton's impending trip to Coventry, with all the attendant drama of encountering Iain "Monica" Dowie once more. Frankie had Coventry down to win 3-1, and Wyn Grant thought 1-1. I rounded off my piece by saying that I would settle for that. And that is what we got. But I wasn't particularly happy at all, for Charlton had been 1-0 up with about 5 minutes to go, and suddenly 1-1 looked more like 2 points lost than 1 point gained. There was a good account of all this in The Times.

And so in the end I strolled out on Saturday evening to do the weekend shopping, reflecting that, having said at lunchtime that 1-1 would be fine, I now felt, having got the 1-1, rather let down. But there; I've been following football since the fifties, and you'd have thought that the game had nothing left up its sleeve to take me by surprise with.

I am going to close here as it is lunchtime, in fact well past it, even by Madrid standards. I am wary of making promises about when I hope to write again, or what about, but I can say that it is my intention, at any rate, to get back up to date as fast as I can, and I do plan to try and discuss the quiz, and the Hull game, and the Jerome Thomas affair, and maybe the Barnsley game as well. Time will tell.

Bound to Lose?

2007-09-29T13:02:00.000+02:00

Luton Town 3 Charlton 1

While enjoying a few beers with most of the quiz team and other colleagues last evening I was told by Mush, who is a QPR fan, that their game against West Brom is being televised on Sunday, and this led us to remark upon the fact that when second tier matches are being aired on TV, they nearly always seem to feature West Brom. In the end we decided that the people in charge of organising all this will have decided on what games to show some time ago, and that they must have thought that Albion would be front-runners; for otherwise the prime target for a televisual feast this weekend would surely be the visit of Charlton to Coventry.

Coventry led the table for the first two or three weeks, and are of course managed by Iain "Monica" Dowie, who proved such a disaster down at SE7; is it a year ago now? How time flies. And meanwhile Charlton, with that nice Mr Pardew at the helm, are now up in second place.

But not only is there the attraction of it being a top-of-the table (more or less) affair; and the drama of meeting up with our ex-manager who departed in ignominious circumstances. There is also the factor of the midweek League Cup results.

For, as I had rather feared, Luton proved too good for a half-reserves, half first-team squad, combo put out on Tuesday evening by Pards at Kenilworth Road, and then one night later, at Old Trafford, Coventry out-manoeuvred Manchester United and won 2-0; and 2-0 away victories at Old Trafford are very few and far-between, no matter who you are.

There used, in the old Sinclair Spectrum days, to be a game called Football Manager with which many of us used to while away the long winter evenings. Unlike present-day football simulations, where you are in charge of everything right down to the vegetarian options on the club canteen menus, this game merely required you to shuffle a basic squad around according to the exigencies of form and injury. And then a random score would be generated for your side, taking into account the form of the opposition. Then a randomised set of results for other matches, also randomised as the same teams seemed to meet each other rather a lot, would appear and a league table would be generated.

And there was one other factor which went into the loading of the computerised dice which gave you your score, and that was morale. If you were on the end of a fine sequence of wins, or had been awarded a lucky unexpected away win, then this factor was very high. Over a few months playing the game as Bury, trying to get out of Division 4 as it then was, I came to realise that this factor loaded the dice much more than anything else, so that if you were on a losing streak, it got worse and worse until a random win threw the levers into reverse again.

So as we come to this afternoon, if Football Manager criteria were going to apply, then Coventry would, as Frankie seems to think, be looking at something like a 3-1 win. But of course we ought all to know, and professional forecasters especially, that where two sides meet after one has won, and the other lost last time round, then a win for the winners does not occur 100% of the time, and bear in mind, also, that Charlton may well have 11 totally different players on the field at ~~Highfield Road~~ whatever the new stadium is called; after a Japanese watch, I think.

Obviously Coventry's early form, and the fact that old Monica (in today's Daily Mail he is claiming that he'd have kept Charlton up if he hadn't been fired) will be hoping to prove a point, may well help Frankie to win a few bob at the bookie's. Of course he did forecast a 3-1 score for the Luton game, but he was only right in as far as the numbers were correct; just ascribed to the wrong teams. So here's hoping for a similar reverse this afternoon then.

PS: Have just checked Wyn Grant's page, and he takes the line that pride goes before a fall, and also points out that it was Manchester United's youth team who lost to Coventry, anyway, and favours 1-1; I'd settle for that.

Over Confidence?

2007-09-25T20:45:00.000+02:00

Charlton 2 Leicester 0

Luke Varney in action. He got his first goal for the club against Leicester

The usual Charlton bloggers are well content with this result, which takes Charlton to second place in the table, just tucked nicely in behind Watford. Yet there was a general feeling that there was a danger of them getting too confident. Why, people were saying, did Charlton just sit on the 2-0 lead acquired early on in the game? Is this conviction of superiority a good thing?

Usually it is not, and yet it appears that Charlton were truly superior in all departments. There was even a proper report in the Guardian about it, and this pretty well said as much.

As I write, Charlton are getting ready to play at Luton in the Carling Cup. Pards is thought to be ringing a lot of changes to rest important players, and there are players coming back from injury, Yassin Moutaoukil for example, who are dying for a game, so Pards will have been spoiled for choice. Confidence is not in short supply.

And yet. While in the UK, I actually saw Luton play. Amazing but true. I was staying, as so often, at the home of my dear friends Harry and Liz, who actually live in Tranmere, a real location (so many people think it is just the name of the club and not a place at all), a district of Birkenhead. They live so close to the ground that bits of floodlight pylon can be seen from some of the upstairs windows, and it takes about 3 minutes to walk from their door to the turnstiles. Richard, all-round decent chap and married to my friends' daughter, but a friend of mine too as they have stayed with me in Madrid, is a Tranmere supporter and when he asked if I'd like to go with him, I accepted.

Now Luton looked good; they had Chris Perry at the back anyway, and were 1-0 up after 5 minutes, a lead they kept till the 83rd, when Tranmere equalised; and then 3 minutes after that Tranmere were looking at an unexpected win as they went 2-1 up. Luton reacted, but there were too few minutes left for them to do anything, and that was that. And it just goes to show the vagaries of football fixtures and pairings, for even Richard, through his joyful grins, said, without any prompting from me, that Luton had been a shade unlucky. So we'll see. Of course people are saying that Pards and the boys really have to concentrate on getting back up, but I don't know. They have got, a trifle fortunately, this far in the competition, and it would be a shame tamely to let things falter now.

I flew back to Madrid on the new (started in late February) EasyJet flight from Edinburgh, as the summer ends and life returns to its usual routines, and I have been wondering, too, whether we weren't too confident at last night's quiz. We were almost at full strength again, and apparently had not done well the previous week when Antony and I were both away. Antony was still away last night, but as Mush and I teased out a couple of slightly elusive answers, I suddenly did feel very confident. Sometimes you get the feeling that you can't lose, that you are going to win no matter what, and I did have that feeling last night, and we did indeed win by 119 to the Old Farts' 106 (was it, David? Can't exactly recall). And the other teams (3 of them) came in at just under 100.

But was this over-confidence, or just confidence? And where do you draw the line between the two?

Up Ending

2007-09-20T13:57:00.000+02:00

Izale McLeod was up-ended twice in almost as many minutes

Charlton 2 Norwich City 0

I am travelling in the UK at the moment, so greetings to all my readers from the Cyber Centre at Ayr Public Library. I haven't posted for a while, so I thought that for today, as I haven't much time, I'd emulate the BBC and tell you the bleeding obvious, i.e. that I am delighted at Charlton's late last-gasp win on Tuesday. Last-gasp, for after 84 minutes the score was 0-0; and then Izale McLeod, who'd come on as a sub, was racing towards goal with the ball at his feet (see above) when he was brought down. Andy Reid scored from the penalty; the game restarted; McLeod once more set off for goal with the ball at his feet, and swipe me, he was brought down again! And Reid scored from the spot, again. Two penalties in three minutes, and to think that a couple of years back, a whole season went by without Charlton being awarded a penalty at all, though that was in the Premiership, where only Big Clubs are allowed to have penalties, of course.

Since I last posted, Charlton have also kept a clean sheet at Palace, winning there 1-0, as I hoped they might in my last posting, and they also fought back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 at Colchester, where inevitably, Kevin Lisbie scored against us, just as everyone had said he would.

We have also restarted the quiz, with still a few regulars missing, (well of course I was missing this week, too), winning the first outing after a thrilling tie break after a 130-all draw, but losing out the second time.

So now Charlton are up in third place, nicely tucked in behind the leaders, always a nice place to be. Being out in front puts too much pressure on you. Home to Leicester this coming Saturday, which is the day I will recommence living through Madrid's famous Nights once again.

See you soon after that.

Mills of God

2007-09-01T05:33:00.000+02:00

ZZ waves to the crowd after the Stockport game

There was a period, I think it was in the first half of 2006, when practically every match Charlton played in ended 0-0. We supporters would obviously have preferred 5-0, of course, but nonetheless achieving (or "grinding out" as the BBC Football Page calls it) these draws, many of them away at such places as Manchester City and even that hallowed and sacred shrine of football greatness, Newcastle United, gave us some satisfaction. "We might not have much of an attack, but the defence is as solid as a rock", we thought. Hmm.

But now, in just two games, Charlton have scored 7. And let in 5, but at least both games were won. But we were expecting this. Nine or so days ago I wondered, echoing Wyn Grant, how we were going to manage against Sheffield Wednesday without a right back. And in the end we had to manage without a left back as well. But manage we did. And then came the Stockport escapade. 2-0 up leading eventually to 2-3 down and thence to 4-3 by the end. At home. To a lower-league side.

So with the big South London derby, quite a grudge match, at Crystal Palace later today, and our regular backs still likely to be out for a bit, it came as good news that Danny Mills was coming back. He played for Charlton at the end of the last century and was then sold to that wealthy galactic outfit, Leeds United. He joins Charlton on loan from Manchester City until the end of the year. News then came through of the loan signing, for the whole season, of Steve Sodje from Reading. Mills will be in the squad this afternoon at Selhurst, but Sodje won't.
The news of these arrivals has rather overshadowed the news of two departures: Marcus Bent going to Wigan on loan for the rest of the season, and Amdy Faye to Glasgow Rangers on the same conditions.

Here is an old joke.

Two proctors [enforcers of student discipline, just imagine] at Cambridge in the old days hit upon the idea of watching a certain house of ill-repute to see if any of the undergraduates were using it, which was of course strictly forbidden.

By about ten p.m. a total of four young men had entered, and the proctors settled down across the road to wait.

After three quarters of an hour the first young man emerged. The proctors stepped forward. "Your name and college sir?" they asked. "Cole, of Emmanuel", was the reply. The proctors cautioned him and Cole went away, and the proctors continued to wait.

Just after eleven o'clock another of the young men came out and was asked the same question. "Robinson of Jesus", was the answer. Again he was cautioned and the proctors continued their vigil.

At about midnight the temperature had fallen to just above freezing, but the brave proctors continued to stand and wait in the name of duty. Ten minutes later, a third boy stepped out of the doorway. Shivering slightly, the proctors accosted him and requested his name and college. "Muir of Christ's", he replied. And was cautioned as before.

It grew colder and by about 1.15 light snow had begun to fall. The proctors were undaunted and took shelter under a nearby elm. By 2.15 the snow had turned to sleet, and the proctors were starting to turn blue. It was almost three o'clock when the door silently opened and the last of the students appeared.

"Your name and..." began the first proctor. But the second interrupted. "You don't need to tell us", he said. "You're Mills of God".

Now, I am quite prepared to bet that many of you won't get it. I didn't when I first encountered it, in the Manchester University Students' Rag Magazine in the early spring of my first year there, though my friend Harry, still a friend and a reader of this blog, standing nearby, was able to explain it. It is a reference to this, though the linked page does not explain that Longfellow was in fact translating it from the German.

I include it because the implication of the lines is thoroughness, and this is what I sort of remember about Danny Mills. The joke I tracked down by Googling, but it was in a very basic, semi-literate state, so I have extensively re-written it to highlight the fact that it depends on the fact that many Cambridge colleges are named for religious figures, and the names given to the young men are totally random, by the way.

So, Danny, grind them exceeding small for us this afternoon, mate.

The End of the Story

2007-08-28T09:43:00.000+02:00

Charlton 3 Sheffield Wednesday 2

Chris Coleman appears in the second half (of the post, not the match)

I think I am going to stop looking at half-time scores. They tell you nothing useful. On Saturday, had I been a Wednesday supporter logging in to Livescore or somewhere, I would have seen that my beloved bottom-of-the-table "big" (well they've got a big ground) team had built up a 2-0 lead in SE7, and I would have happily returned to whatever I was doing, looking forward to getting the three points; after all, 2-0 is a decent margin. All that nice Mr Laws would have to do would be put ten men in the penalty box and keep Charlton out, and even if something went wrong, a bizarre decision by the ref, or an unlucky rebound off a passing pigeon (it has happened, somewhere), there would still be the two-goal margin to take comfort from.

But of course I am a Charlton supporter, so all I could see was doom and gloom. Apart from the two goals, there would be the demoralising effect on the team. We went through it all last season when the players managed to convince themselves that there was nothing they could do, and Charlton were going to lose no matter what. So I sadly went off to take my mind off things by vacuuming the bedroom. And the spare bedroom. I didn't dare hope for anything. Which just goes to show. On my return Charlton had pulled back to 2-2, which I obviously considered better than what was on the cards before, but even so it would have made for a pretty indifferent start to the season.

But, as I found out much later, there being little or no information anywhere beyond scorers and goal times, Pards gave the boys a talking-to at half time, and was also obliged to replace Ben Thatcher, who was injured, and the resulting reshuffle and the switching of wings of Andy Reid and Jerome Thomas, made a lot of difference, and it was Chris Iwelumo who got the equaliser and the winner, and a lot of good work was put in by Zheng Zhi, brought on at half time, as well.

So I was quite pleased, in the end, and for the first time for two weeks, looked at the table. Charlton are half way down, at 12th, as you'd expect having had one of each possible kind of result after three games, and it was only then that I saw that Wednesday were rooted to the bottom with no points at all. So the hole that Charlton had got themselves out of was a deeper one than I had thought. Being 0-2 down at home after 20-odd minutes to the bottom club, when you are favourites to walk the entire league, was not at all appropriate, as they say in management circles.

But a day or so later, I checked in with the other bloggers, as I still had found nothing on the usual web media, apart from the Charlton page, and found that Charlton after the break were utterly transformed. The account by New York Addick (link above right), on leave in London and thus able to go to The Valley, is very heartening. He was so impressed that he thinks Charlton will win the league all right, and by a clear ten points to boot. I wish I shared his optimism, but he has at least seen the team playing, so maybe I ought to.

Stockport this evening, yet another opponent beginning with the letter 's', in the Carling Cup.

[being written in the evening of the same day]

Real Sociedad 0 Castellón 2

Last weekend saw the start of the Spanish league season, the first time I can remember it starting in August; it's probably because of global warming or for health and safety reasons. Everything is, these days.

Anyway, while I was trawling the BBC pages for news of Charlton's win over Wednesday, I spotted a story about the Spanish league. Nothing so odd about that, you might say, though in truth there aren't that many. But this one was about a Second Division match, and that is a rarity. After all, I didn't manage to find much information about the English second tier, so to find a Spanish story was a pleasant surprise, though like many stories on the BBC site, this was one which had nothing to report. The match in question was the Sunday evening meeting of Real Sociedad and Castellón.

Real Sociedad is the club which belongs to the northern coastal town of San Sebastián, For, in spite of the fondly-held beliefs of certain UK-based football commentators, there is no such place as Sociedad, a word which simply means 'society', or sometimes 'company', in the commercial sense. The full name of the club is La Real Sociedad de Fútbol, and although I have looked, I cannot find any reference to San Sebastián at all.

One night in June, after the quiz, I was introduced to a couple of amiable youngish Spanish guys by an American acquaintance of mine, and we fell to talking about football. One of them asked me which UK club I followed, and I explained about Charlton and that we had just gone down, and he told me that he was a follower of la Real Sociedad, and that he too was feeling low because of Sociedad's recent relegation, which for them was for the first time in over 40 years, and thus, in my new chum's lifetime. We shared a late-night pint as companions in adversity before I left for home, assuring him of my best wishes for Sociedad's speedy return to la Primera División. Which I suppose I meant, though I hadn't forgotten Cádiz and Castellón.

For, if you scroll to the bottom of the page you will find a list of teams I support, and more or less ever since I came to live in Spain, Castellón have been a side I have had a lot of time for. In my first year here, 1971-72, Castellón won the Second Division championship, and by the time they had settled into the First Division, finishing a surprising 5th the following year and getting to the Spanish cup final as well, they were a side worth supporting. Sadly, as with so many of my teams, harder times have come along, and they are now a mid-table Second Division side, which is better than being the mid-table third-tier outfit they were 5 years ago, at least.

So when I saw on the BBC football pages that there was a featured interview with Chris Coleman, ex-Fulham manager and now newly-installed manager of Real Sociedad, I followed the link with interest. He hoped he would do well, and sounded confident. In the normal way of these things, one's instincts as a fellow (OK, half) Welsh person would be to wish him well and hope he has a good start in his new post, but of course my hopes for Sunday night were with Castellón, and they were not misplaced, as you can see from the result above. In fact someone posting on a Spanish site I occasionally visit said it could have been 7-0, and even the Real Sociedad official club page admits that Castellón were better.

So how did Chris Coleman react to this? The BBC football page was silent. In vain have I looked under their European football heading for the end of the story they started at the weekend. There was nothing, just some speculation about a Rangers match which was going to start later on.

So I think we should be told: does the BBC now regard peddling froth about things which are yet to happen as its prime function? For it is quite likely these days that even when there are loads of proper football matches to report on, such stories will be dropped in favour of a quote by an Arsenal reserve midfielder or whatever, about who he thinks will win the cup.

Anyway, a poor start for Chris, but a good one for Castellón (and Cádiz too, as it happened), and if you want to find out more, I fear you will have to follow the Spanish media, for the BBC won't be helping you out.

Late Score

Charlton 4 Stockport Co. 3

The irony; when I tuned in Charlton were 2-0 up and thus I thought we were home and dry, precisely what I warned against earlier. It got to 2-3 before finally getting to 4-3. Frankie actually predicted this scoreline this morning. We thought he was joking. More later in the week.

Not Much of a Story

2007-08-23T02:07:00.000+02:00

Stoke City 2 Charlton 1

Yassin will be out for a few weeks

I use Hotmail for some of my emailing requirements; have done since about 1998. If you control it properly, it is as good as anything else. I have it set up in English, but I originally signed up for it here in Spain, so when I log out, and this is the case even if I am in the UK or the USA, it reverts to a Spanish page. And of course all the publicity that sits next to the inbox is for Spanish-based stuff as well.

What you get comes up on a random basis but there seem to be about 5 different products, and one of these is called be2. I only noticed it properly last night, though I now realise it has been appearing for a few weeks. This what it says (my translation):

Maria, 35, from Segovia, was looking for a stable relationship.
Pedro, 41, from Madrid, was looking for the woman of his life.
be2 joined them together.
Click here to read more be2 stories.

I repeat that it is my translation and while "joined them together" might seem not the best English, the Spanish was "unió", part of a verb which, besides meaning helping people to unite, is also used in plumbing for connecting pipes, which conjures up images of.... well never mind.

What struck me about all this, as I looked at it consciously, as I say, for the first time, is that you'd have to have run out of bank circulars or the backs of cereal packets if you were so hard up for something to read that you'd want to read more stories like that one. And yet if the woman of your life is in Segovia and you are in Madrid, you might not meet her, even though it's only about 40 miles away...

But the brevity of the "story" (I don't believe a word of it anyway) reminded me of something, and it dawned on me that it was the reports of the debacle at Stoke. Charlton drew at home on the first day of the season and everyone was taken aback. We all said (I certainly did) that we had known all along it would happen, and it was because Scunthorpe were like a lower-league cup opponent, and Charlton had stumbled and all that, and I also thought, but did not say, that Charlton were quite likely going to have one of those seasons like three years or so ago where they did very well away and fell down a bit at home.

For me this sensation was increased by the cup win at Swindon, and by Saturday I was considering Stoke, who almost made it into the play-offs last season, as the very kind of typical and tough opposition that it would be a job to get the three points out of, but that we'd do it just the same.

Well, we didn't, and I have very little information. Pards points out that Charlton were 1-0 up, and then Yassin Moutaoukil got injured and had to go off, and that was when Stoke struck, in the disorganisation that followed. I got that info from the Charlton page (now helpfully linked at nº 6, at right). The Observer carried a few second tier reports, but there wasn't one about Charlton.

The BBC had a link though, for a little while on Saturday night, but when I read the story, it amounted to nothing. Stoke got two goals. Charlton got one first. Jonathan Fortune scored Charlton's. He had played on loan for Stoke last season. Ricardo Fuller scored the equaliser and Jon Parkin, the winner. Fuller was once on Charlton's books. Parkin presumably wasn't. The times of the goals and the name and home region of the referee were duly noted, and that was that.

As a story, not exactly Guy de Maupassant, more like the story of Pedro from Madrid and Maria from Segovia.

But there are 44 league games still left, so people are refusing to get downhearted, or at least to admit it. And now comes the news that Yassin Moutaoukil is going to be out for a few weeks, and Osei Sankofa is injured as well, and Kish has been sold, as Wyn Grant points out, so heaven knows what we will do for a right back against Sheffield Wednesday this weekend.

And the other be2 stories? There aren't any. I clicked, out of curiosity, to see if they might have improved on the banality of Pedro and Maria, and was told that be2 has been helping people all over Europe get together for ages, or some such. I thought it couldn't be a Spanish outfit, for if you say "be2" in English, it sounds like "be two", i.e., become a couple. But if you say the same thing in Spanish, you are saying "bedos", which means nothing at all, but it sounds quite like "pedos", which means "drunken stupors".

What this signifies I hesitate to say.

The Missing Link

2007-08-15T22:34:00.000+02:00

Swindon Town [0-2] Charlton

Izale and Andy show off Charlton's new away colours

I spent the evening at home, pottering about in the kitchen and cleaning the fridge. The fridge is large and was brand-new almost a year ago, and was chosen because the shelves are level with your face when you stand and look into it, the three freezer drawers being down below. All the same it is quite astonishing how things can accumulate. I reached to the back of the capacious shelves and found myself being reacquainted with two yoghourts which had a use-by date of September 9th.

September 9th last year, that is; and even though use-by dates on things like sour cream and yoghourt can be safely ignored for quite a while afterwards, I thought that these had better go, so what with merrily consigning them and a few other commodities to the rubbish bin, and pondering a computer-based system for the stock control of the fridge contents (I already operate one for the freezer), I forgot the time and then suddenly it was 9 o'clock and I remembered that there was football going on. Many of my teams were in action, so it was time for a trip to Livescore to see what was happening.

Most of the games had reached half time, and the first thing I noticed was that Forest Green were beating Weymouth 3-1. Great. But hang on, Conference (or Blue Square as it is now known; thank God they resisted Consignia) teams don't play in the League Cup, do they?

Well no. Forest Green were playing a league game. Livescore had listed a few European games, and some friendlies, and then the Tottenham - Everton game and then the Blue Square matches, and then, the long list of games comprising the First Round of the Carling Cup. Of course the Swindon - Charlton game was quite near the bottom of this, so I saw how most of the others were doing, and scrolled away, and came to the one I sought: it read 0-0.

Hmm. Not that brilliant. But nothing I could do, and the kitchen called, as I would not be able to make a start on supper till I'd wiped all surfaces, cleaned all the fridge shelves and put everything away again, so off I went, and tried not to think about it, but I couldn't help reflecting, for all that, that being held to 0-0 was a trifle odd.

A further trip to Livescore once all was clean and tidy through there revealed that Charlton were now 2-0 up with a few minutes remaining, and so I could relax and start thinking about what to have for supper, now that I'd be in the mood for some.

I had clicked on the score on the Livescore page (as of today helpfully added to links list, at right), so I knew that Darren Ambrose had scored for Charlton after 52, and that Andy Reid had put away a penalty after 63, so once I'd waited for the magic letters FT to appear next to the score, indicating that the match was over, I caught up on a few other scores and went off to make some soup and a sandwich. It's too hot for proper cooked meals at the moment.

Some time later, I was back at the computer, and wondering if there was a report anywhere. And almost instinctively I went to the BBC football page. There was a link to the Tottenham - Everton game, as befitted the only League match (Blue Square excepted) of the evening, and a couple of European games; then there were a few other links to matches which had produced surprise scores, like Palace losing at Bristol Rovers on penalties, and Ipswich the same at Milton Keynes, and one that I hadn't noticed when checking the scores, and which is in fact very near home: Preston 1 Morecambe 2. A local derby with an amazing result, and the clubs had never met before under any circumstances. There'd be high jinks on the last 40 bus up the A6, I thought. I followed this link and read about the game for a minute, but then I clicked back, and further down, there were three more Carling Cup games mentioned, and the third of these was the very one I wanted. I clicked on it, and as it loaded (I am still using a dial-up connection until I get my new machine later this summer), I briefly wondered what kind of adverse comments would be forthcoming, for the BBC never says anything good about Charlton - maybe the area is notorious for non-payment of licence fees, I dunno - and then I gasped in amazement. For I have never read, on the BBC, such a favourable report about a Charlton performance. I was so gobsmacked that I saved the link; here it is. Note that Charlton are introduced to the reader in a positive light as "last season's beaten Cup quarter finalists" ; and then note that we are described as being "safely" into the next round. There then follows a reference to a "fine team move", and then captain Andy Reid is given his full description of "Republic of Ireland winger". The whole thing is but nine lines long, and yet is brimming with metalanguage which tells us that whoever wrote it is very favourably disposed to Charlton.

And then, having read it a few times and saved the link, I clicked back to where I had come from, and... the link was gone. Where three minutes earlier it had read "Swindon 0 Charlton 2", it now read "Rochdale 2 Stoke 2".

Now in fact Rochdale won this on penalties, so I suppose it did fall into the "more interesting for a neutral" category, but I wondered, all the same, if the Charlton piece had been written by a fledgling BBC sports writer, and posted, and then the supervisor had come along and pointed out that you can't refer to Charlton in such glowing terms, "but there's no time to write another one, the pubs will be closed, we'll just have to drop the link".

And the missing link never reappeared. And by mid afternoon today, if anyone logged on to find out about last night's games, there was not a single link to any of them. All the links were to Champions' League qualifiers and the remaining Premiership programme, which had not even started yet, for the BBC clearly prefers froth and speculation to actual reports, especially when they are as unpalatable as the Swindon - Charlton one must have been to the people in charge of the BBC football pages. And there were at least three, possibly more, stories about Roy Keane, fast replacing Teddy Sheringham as the most interesting person in the universe, at least as far as BBC Sport is concerned.

And the mystery of the half time 0-0? Well I eventually found out on the Charlton page that the weather had been wet and windy, and Charlton had been playing against a strong wind in the first half. After the break, with the wind behind them, they settled down and comfortably sailed through.

Good.

Glorious Thirteenth

2007-08-13T19:04:00.000+02:00

Charlton [1 - 1] Scunthorpe United

New signing Svetoslav Todorov in action on Saturday

I mentioned in my last that the BBC, unlike everyone else, do not regard Charlton as a promotion contender, favouring Wolves and Sheffield United, with West Brom and Watford as possible also-rans. And for once, I can sort of see where they are coming from on this one, however much I would like the contrary to be true. All the same, there are 45 more matches to be played before the final reckoning, and that is a very long way to go. Positions can alter quite dramatically in this league in a very short space of time, and in any case little can be read into the first round of results. The BBC were perhaps right to suspect that Charlton would not have things all their own way, but then again, Sheffield United, now under the guidance of Bryan Robson, rather than Neil Warnock, fared similarly to Charlton, drawing at home to Colchester, though many commentators feel that Robson is not the man to bounce Sheffield United back, as their success owed a lot to the combative style of the dreadful Warnock, and I cannot but agree with them. And F365, to name but one, does not have a very high opinion of Bryan Robson either, and again I have to say that if he had been appointed Charlton's manager at any point during the time since Curbs left us, I should scarcely have been jumping for joy.

But it is early days. Like the Inspector (see new slightly improved links, right) I also wished I had placed a bet on a draw, as right from the day the fixtures were published I did not see this as an easy home win for Charlton. As Scunthorpe were in the third tier last season, then the whole thing was too much like all those ties against lower-league sides in cup games which Charlton basically either lost outright or struggled through after a replay or on penalties. So 1-1 seems about right, and as I say, there are still 45 games left: 135 points up for grabs. The reports I have read, plus both Wyn Grant and the Inspector, imply that Scunthorpe treated the game like an away cup tie, including rather a lot of time wasting, whereas Charlton's excuses boil down to the fact that there are a lot of new players, and Jerome Thomas is injured, thus weakening the left side. ZZ had arrived too late to be included, too. Wyn Grant thinks we still need a good striker as absolute sitters were missed. Mysterious refereeing decisions did not help, either. We seem to have fallen out of the frying pan of Mr Halsey of Bolton and the absurd Mr Poll (though hasn't he retired now?) into the fire of Mr Kettle of Milton Keynes, or wherever.

Of course referees might well be disinclined to favour outright favourites, which might account for Pards's comment: "I'm sure our season will be a winning one, though I don't think we're the promotion favourites because ours is such a new squad." If the word gets round that Charlton are not favourites at all, he might be thinking, then the incidence of strange refereeing decisions may drop.

Today is the Thirteenth, the Glorious Thirteenth, a variation on the Glorious Twelfth, when grouse shooting begins, and at one time a red-letter day (though not of course, for grouse) which actually appeared in pocket diaries and suchlike, at least if Alan Bennett is to be believed.

I have long been aware of the meaning of the Glorious Twelfth, ever since seeing it mentioned in a novel I read as I child. And it seems to me that my criticisms of the BBC website for its love of the self-evident need not be confined just to the football pages. For the UK news page was running a piece about it being the 12th of August, when the grouse moors come to life, and the article was very much the kind of thing, so frequently met with on the BBC now, which sounds like it is out of a picture book for five-year olds. It explained what a grouse is, what shooting is, where and what the moors are; and helpfully and inevitably pointed out that the League Against Cruel Sports are against the whole business, presumably to stop us assuming that they are rather keen on it. The whole thing was illustrated with a photo of a nasty-looking individual pointing a double-barrelled shotgun into the air.

It also reported the one thing I found of interest: that because this year the 12th fell on a Sunday, the shooting would not start till Monday, the 13th. Swipe me! And there was I thinking that denizens of grouse moors are all people who don't work anyway, so that Sunday would be much the same as any other day. Being on holiday at present, I know whereof I speak.

So, not Glorious Twelfth this year, but Glorious Thirteenth, and by coincidence, thirteenth is where Charlton lie in the Championship table right now. Of course if Charlton were located further to the left on the map, and were called West Charlton, then they'd be fourteenth, as calculating a league table after just one game means that alphabetical order still has a big part to play; but no, thirteenth it is. Glorious? Or unlucky? Well, as I say, early days yet.

And of course another by-product of no longer being in the Prem is that Charlton's League Cup action (who's running it this year? Not Milk again is it? Or Coca Cola? And why is it always drinks? Shall we one day see the Tea Cup?) starts no sooner than the league programme gets off the ground, and tomorrow evening Charlton travel to Swindon.

Traditionally, Charlton have a lot of difficulty beating the lower league sides in this competition. Perhaps I should have a word with the League Against Cruel Sports about it, but of course now that we are a lower league side ourselves, that might change.

New York Addick

I have added a link to this excellent Charlton blogger, and would like to say to him, should he read this, that my idea that Izale McLeod might be the new Darren Bent was conceived quite independently. Yet, as an example of great minds thinking alike, I discovered that the same thing had occurred to him when I caught up with his blog on Saturday night. Worth a look.

A New Season

2007-08-10T17:18:00.000+02:00

If I still have any faithful readers left, then welcome back. As you will be well aware, I have been taking a summer break, partly occasioned by work commitments, but partly because now that Charlton are no longer in the Premiership, I have had to do some thinking about how to react to things. One of the main planks of this particular blog, which does not claim to be a news or reporting blog, as I live in Madrid and do not get to London very often, has been to discuss Charlton in terms of how the club is perceived by the mainstream media, and particularly the BBC Sport web page and others like it, and the national newspapers and their web pages, too.

I started the blog at the end of the 2003-2004 season, inspired by the fact that Charlton finished 7th in the Premiership. Indeed they had been 4th at the turn of the year, until Chelsea came along and waved their chequebook and Spotty Parker upped and left. But, sadly, since then it has been a gradual decline in the club's fortunes that I have been writing about, and how this has been reported.

My last visit to the Blogosphere was in late June, when I was just about to take off to the UK for a little while, and at that time the season was long over, and the only thing on Charlton's horizon was the imminent publication of the fixture list, and the probable departure of Darren Bent, even though at the time he had turned down West Ham and had also said that he was quite happy to stay where he was, which in fact was on holiday in Jamaica, anyway.

However, the inevitable soon happened and Darren packed his things and went off to White Hart Lane, and has apparently been sticking goals away like nobody's business in pre-season games, so Tottenham are happy, and he might well be, too.

Back at Charlton, though, there was a feeling that despite getting £16 million or so, less whatever goes back to Ipswich, we had thrown away our only chance of getting back up. But for me this feeling subsided when I took stock of the fact that since Alan Pardew had taken over, he had turned Charlton round from relegation certainties, about 12 points adrift at the bottom, to, OK, still being relegated, but not from the bottom slot and it being by no means a certainty till about two weeks from the season's end.

So, feeling a little bit calmer, I returned to Madrid from the UK, embarked on my July summer course, undertaken, as last year, at one of our sister centres, by way of a change of scene, and fully expected to be knocking off the odd blog piece during that month, as developments unfolded.

But I found the summer course rather tiring as well as time-consuming, and I am also temporarily without my invaluable cleaning lady, Madame Gina, who has been feeling under the weather for a few months and said she would like to take the summer off. And even then maybe retire at the end of it, depending on how she feels. So I said I'd hang on till September, but of course this means that I have to do for myself, which I am quite capable of doing, and don't really mind, either, but of course it does nibble away at available time, and so the blog has suffered a bit there as well.

But the main reason for not getting started on anything was that there was nothing very specific. I didn't feel like commenting, as I did last year, on pre season friendlies like those at Ebbsfleet and Gillingham, for example, as they are little more than training sessions carried on in public, as I now realise. Even the games in Spain were against inferior opposition, as well, so again not much point in getting excited over the two wins at Málaga and Marbella. And as for transfer speculation, well I have always tried to refrain from that, and when real transfers started in earnest, well, I was tempted but never quite found the right angle.

Of course I was still keeping an eye on the BBC, and Lawro, all the usual suspects, when it suddenly dawned on me that Lawro will not be making fatuous remarks about Charlton for at least another year. And Frankie describes me on his blog as "a fellow Lawro-hater". But Lawro is irrelevant now this season, except where he might pontificate in the case of Charlton facing a Premiership side in the Cup. And though the BBC will still report on Charlton games, it won't be in such detail, and not necessarily a proper report, more the kind of thing where the two teams, name of referee, goals and scorers, and maybe times, are stitched together into two or three sentences, with maybe a bit of extra colour if one of the goalscorers once had a trial with Manchester United.

One other thing that almost dragged me back to the keyboard last month was the way in which the BBC page had to deal with news throughout July, when transfers were in full swing but pre-season games had yet to start. For, while all player moves were neatly listed, many of the moves were turned into a little story requiring its own headline. This proved a mite beyond them, mainly because they clearly felt that they could not have all the headlines reading "X sign Y", or "Y signs for X". So we were treated to a lot of variations on the word "swoop" and other odd verbal uses, notably "set" and "poised", basically denoting that someone might do something or other.

The BBC Football page also suffered from one of its self-imposed deficiencies, one which is shared by a number of Spanish newspapers. This is that there are specific categories into which news stories are placed. Thus Spanish national papers' Madrid editions will have two or three pages which have to contain all the Madrid news, and anything left over is left out. But if there isn't anything, then the pages have to be filled just the same, so now and again, stories about ladies in municipal markets being overcharged a few cents for pork mince might creep in. Thus on the BBC, after Mr Murray closed down the Charlton women's team and Chelsea took a couple of the players in, the headline "Chelsea Swoop for Charlton Pair" appeared under the "Women's Football" banner, in the second week of July. And it was still there a week ago, Women's Football presumably having produced no new story to replace it.

Back at Charlton, a number of players wanted to leave as there was no way they wanted to play outside the Premiership, despite their having contributed quite generously to this unfortunate situation: these were Luke Young, who has just gone to Middlesbrough, an unwise move in my view as I wouldn't mind betting that a year from now he will want to come back, and for much the same reason; Dennis Rommedahl, who said he couldn't possibly be seen playing in the second tier, even if its official name does end in the letters 'ship', and who has astonishingly been given a berth over at Ajax; Talal El K. has vanished into the Near East somewhere, I think; Herman H. has moved to Portsmouth and the other day Charlton lost Souleymane Diawara to Bordeaux; lost in the sense of he went there, and the price received represented a loss on the price paid by Mr Dowie one year ago. In addition to this, players have been released; Bryan Hughes has gone to Hull; Kevin Lisbie to Colchester and Simon Walton to QPR. And Scott Carson, who was only on loan, went back to Liverpool and has today joined Aston Villa for the coming season.

But there have been been a lot of players coming in, and Pards has clearly got more of the kind of team he himself wants, rather than having to make do with what other people wanted. And I was very glad to hear that both Jon Fortune and Jerome Thomas have committed their futures to the club, despite talk of them being on their way as well. And a warm welcome back to Charlton's new number 15 shirt, Chris Powell.

And good news yesterday about Zheng Zhi (above, in action against Manchester City earlier this year) coming back again; he admitted he's tried to find a deal with a Premiership club, but for reasons as yet unknown, at least to me, this has not been possible and he is pleased to be back; and I am pleased about it, too. And as for Izale McLeod, whose picture up above starts off my new blog season, well he reminds me of Darren Bent with his proven goalscoring abilities, so we might well be offloading him to Arsenal or someone for a £15 million profit in a year or two; or keeping him on where he is, as befits a respectable Premiership club.

For, as I was saying to a Charlton-supporting colleague whom I met for the first time at our sister Centre this summer (hello, Emma), we ought to be able to get straight back. OK, some of last season's players have gone, but they weren't able to keep us up there, and the only ones I really feel sorry to see the back of are Darren Bent and Scott Carson. The players who have come in are well equipped to see Charlton through a Championship campaign, and Pards and Phil Parkinson have the requisite experience. There is such a thing as the lap of the Gods, though, but one has to be hopeful. Charlton are the bookies' favourites; Sarah Winterburn of F365 has Charlton and Wolves down for automatic promotion, and the BBC Sports page, which never rated Charlton in their Premiership days, er.. thinks that now we've sold Darren we have no chance, and that West Brom and Sheffield United, and maybe Watford, will win promotion.

A lot to cram in at the start of the season, and I will try to iron out inconsistencies, fill gaps and react to the early games during the week. So Scunthorpe tomorrow, and back to spending Saturday afternoons biting my nails. Playing against sides who recently were two divisions below you is no picnic, you know.

Picking up the Threads

2007-06-20T15:41:00.000+02:00

I have been writing this blog for more than three years now, and am aware, as are my regular readers, that there is a certain rhythm to it. During the football season I feel obliged to pick up on Charlton's most recent outing, and manage to do this even if it means frantically writing something just before their next one. Outside the season, there is always rumour and speculation about the transfer market, and one or two other related football matters, and the BBC News and Sports pages are always good for a bit of slagging off, and, in line with my own self-imposed mission statement, there is the quiz, and my team, and how we are doing.

None of the foregoing, as I say, is likely to come as much of a surprise to Harry or Rory or Steve or David, nor to those regular readers whom I don't actually know personally. But there are other things which seem to determine what happens. I do occasionally get ill, mainly ailments of the colds and flu variety, and then the time I might have spent during the Madrid Nights writing the blog is reassigned to lying in bed with hot lemon drinks and good books. Then there is the thrice-annual end of term work overload, when approximately 400 exams or tests have to be corrected, annotated, results entered on a spreadsheet, and a report for each of my students (usually about 100) written. This also has a negative effect on time available for writing. But it is beginning to dawn on me that a sure-fire guarantee of the blog not appearing for a while is when I sign off with a promise to write about something or other, or comment on something 'soon'.

My last appearance in the blogosphere was on 27 May, which is 3½ weeks ago, and during that time, the end of term has approached, been dealt with and happened; I have had a very bad cold which even now is only just beginning to lift, and worse still, I promised to write about something specific at the end of my last piece.

So, on what is the third day of a two-week break before the summer courses begin next month, and finally feeling a bit better, I survey the situation and look at scraps of ideas for blogs which never got off the ground, and present three resumés.

Farewell to Gay Meadow (pictured at top, and below)

I mentioned Shrewsbury Town at the end of my last, mainly because of the fact that, like so many other clubs in recent years, they are moving to a purpose-built ground somewhere further out of the town centre. I have been looking at online editions of the Shropshire Star, and cannot find any particular reason for this. However, the one fact that struck me was that the old name, Gay Meadow, having in recent years been the ~~butt~~ subject of a lot of silly jokes, will not be retained. Well, no surprises there, I thought, no new ground continues the name of the old one. New grounds are either cynically named after a commercial enterprise (Reebok, Britannia Stadium) or in one case a nation (Emirates) which might be presumed to have financed the building thereof, or some other boringly pious-sounding name (Pride Park) or something just plain silly (Stadium of Light) is selected. What, I wondered, would be the name of the new Shrewsbury ground? And swipe me, as Tony Hancock used to say, it is to be New Meadow, thus in some wise continuing the old name but dropping the 'Gay', which must have been annoying them for some time; indeed for all I can tell, this might well be the very reason for the move. Though there is also the perennial problem of a waterlogged pitch caused by the adjacent River Severn. And of course the retirement of the man who would sit in midstream in his coracle and handle stray balls.

Peter Tatchell was being arrested during Moscow Gay Pride Week when the last match was played at Gay Meadow, otherwise no doubt he would have been there waving something or other and demanding that the new stadium should be called New Gay Meadow, and for once, I wouldn't disagree with him; it seems a trifle pathetic to drop the Gay and not the Meadow. All or nothing. They could have called it Consignia or something, after all. Shrewsbury's final game was a 0-0 draw against Milton Keynes in the first leg of the play-off semis, and Shrewsbury won the return leg and went on to appear at Wembley against Bristol Rovers, but lost, so it's League 2 fare at New ~~Gay~~ Meadow next season, after all.

Darren Bent

Darren Bent scores from a penalty against Liverpool in happier times

Charlton's relegation set off a whole series of stories about Darren being 'poised' or 'set' (verbs which replace the future tense in modern sports writing) to join various clubs, the names being shuffled about being Tottenham, West Ham, Liverpool and Valencia, and there was also a quite attractive notion circulating, that Charlton might send him to Arsenal on loan so that we can have him back again next year when we bounce straight back (without his help, of course). These stories started appearing while Darren was reported to be on holiday in Jamaica, and thus were not likely to be anything more than idle speculation designed to fill the sports pages in the absence of any actual football going on. But then it emerged that West Ham had met Charlton's £17 million valuation (or it might have been £18 million) and had been given permission to talk to Darren. Deal done and the sports pages confidently announced that Darren would sign for West Ham later that day. But Darren hadn't read his script properly and turned West Ham down. There was no explanation, either, and there still hasn't been, but one fact is standing out, and that is that Charlton will not accept less than their original valuation, and it is unlikely that they will accept say, £11 million plus a couple of supernumerary reserve players (whose wages, after all, they would have to pay), either. So reports on today's pages that Tottenham are 'set', 'poised' or whatever, to sign him for £14 million looked decidedly like wishful thinking on someone's part.

This wishful thinking has its roots in the belief of many commentators that good players are only allowed to play for a handful of clubs, and this mindset leads in turn to the belief that unless you play for someone like Liverpool, you won't be picked for England. Remember the fuss when Sven Goran Eriksson picked Chris Powell for England? "But he plays for Charlton!" the media gasped as one, outraged at the breaking of a rule which they themselves had in fact invented. So in the absence of any definite statement from Darren himself, they have now invented the reason for his refusing to go to West Ham, and it is that he wants to go somewhere from where he might be selected for England, and of course West Ham definitely isn't such a place, despite having produced illustrious figures like Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst.

Down the Pub

The quiz has been trucking away, down the pub, though numbers are dwindling somewhat and we are down to our basic three teams, which, as we are evenly matched and know each other well, is not so bad, but individual team strengths also seem to be on the wane. I know it is that time of the year, and we will come to a halt for the summer some time next month as we always do, but there is a lot of talk about how we can inject new life into it. As we are an expat Madrid pub quiz, rather than the Church of England or BBC Radio 4, there has thankfully thus far been no talk of attracting more young people; they wouldn't be able to answer many of the questions, anyway, and there are enough dumbed-down quizzes in other expat locations in Madrid. No, I think what would be much better would be to attract some old people, which would maintain the standards we all know and love. Anyone who knows any, let us know. The Guardian's wonderful Nancy Banks-Smith, whose entire online oeuvre I am slowly working my way through, would be quite brilliant, were she available.

MPs Praise Shrimps

2007-05-27T20:47:00.000+02:00

Regular readers will know that I get a lot of my football news from the BBC Football website: they will also know that I am fairly critical of its love of the bleeding obvious. Among today's gems is the news that Mr Davies thinks that Derby will win their Championship play-off final against West Brom. Mr Davies is Billy Davies, not the 'sixties pop icon who sang "I Know Something about Love" of course, as I said last year when Mr Davies was in the "race" (as the BBC site put it) to become the manager of Charlton. (And a great pity, as it turned out, that he didn't win this race, too). But in the end he opted to be manager of Derby County, and as I say, he thinks they will win tomorrow. Of course he may not, in his heart of hearts, but being the manager, he can hardly say so, can he? And even if he does truly believe this, in what way can this be properly regarded as information for the football news-loving public? Anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together can work out that managers will be pleased when their sides win, disappointed or "gutted", when they don't, and in many cases will blame the referee as well, and that they have to have some degree of belief in what they do. But I contend that it is only newsworthy when a manager says he doesn't think his team stands a snowball in hell's chance of winning. They never do, though. Another earth-shattering bit of news is that Gordon Strachan is "relishing" the fact that Celtic have won the double in Scotland. Guess who Mr Strachan is the manager of.

But aside from these non-stories, the BBC site has another rather irritating habit, and that is the use of team nicknames in headlines. Now throughout many years of following football, one learns a few basic club nicknames: Derby County are called the Rams, and this is to do with an old folk song that I learned as a child and can barely remember now. Newcastle are known as the Magpies on account of their black and white shirts, though Wyn Grant, figuring that in these modern times people will have seen more of them than they have magpies, calls them the Barcodes; Manchester United were the Red Devils, and might still be for all I know; Arsenal are the Gunners, but most sites (though not the Beeb of course) refer to them as 'the Arse'. Complete your own supporters' phrase. And there are other ones based on the basic name; Spurs for the final part of their second bit of name; Hammers based on part of the name; Wolves ditto. Another theme for names is to do with geography: Blackpool are the Seasiders; Middlesbrough play at somewhere called Riverside, yet I have not, admittedly, heard them referred to as the Riversiders, just 'Boro, a term not normally applied to Peterborough United, nor to Fraserburgh in the Highland League either. Other coastal teams take their names from coastal pursuits or references like Grimsby Town (Mariners); Southend United (Shrimpers), Torquay (Gulls), and then there are names based on local traditions and / or industries, like Norwich (Canaries); Northampton (Cobblers); Stoke City (Potters); that sort of thing.

In many cases, lack of imagination, or reluctance to embrace the obvious, has meant that a team's nickname is based on the colour of the shirts, so there are numerous Reds, Blues, Clarets, Whites, and even Lilywhites, which I think used to be applied to Preston North End, and which my friend Harry once used to describe Real Madrid (but he is the only one so to have done).

And when all else fails, then supporters just emulate Blackburn and Bolton, and call their sides Rovers or Wanderers, and leave it at that.

And there were always a few teams which did not have a nickname at all. Birmingham City; Huddersfield Town (now apparently called the Terriers, but they most certainly did not use to be); Bradford Park Avenue (ask your dad). And a few which didn't really: calling Colchester United the U's is not much of a shot, nor is calling Leyton Orient the O's. (Do Colchester fans shout "come on you U's"? Do Orient fans react to a missed open goal by groaning "Oh, O's?")

And then the BBC Football website came along, and suddenly new nicknames are sprouting everywhere. I admit that some may have always existed and that I wasn't aware of them, but even so, I submit that the BBC has promoted or repeated notional names so that they have become mainstream. And I know for a fact that the ludicrous Black Cats nickname for Sunderland, almost as ridiculous as the name of their stadium, was a corporate invention, along the lines of deciding that the Post Office was unexciting and prosaic, not the kind of thing we want cluttering up the 21st Century, so let's waste a lot of time and money calling it Consignia, which is very like the Spanish word for a Left Luggage Office, by the way. As the Post Office is once more called the Post Office, maybe Sunderland's management team might like to think about renaming the club Consignia, as the name is going spare, and then they can have three silly names in their organisation, and much good may it do them.

So these days I always have to look twice when trying to interpret a headline on the BBC Football page. This morning I saw : "Weymouth eye Cherries Browning", which instantly conjured up a picture of the Weymouth management team carefully toasting some summer fruits, rather than them being interested in a Bournemouth player called Browning. And then there was the heading that gives me my title and picture for the day: "Shrimps win praise from MPs".

Naturally, and despite this being on the football page, I began (for anything they do in Parliament these days is quite believable - they were moaning about Serbia winning the Eurovision Song Contest the other week) to picture MP after MP getting to their feet, and asking Mr Speaker if he did not agree with them that shrimps, potted or otherwise, were almost as wonderful as Mr Tony Blair, Mrs Margaret Beckett, Mrs Tessa Jowell, and all the rest of the crew. And Polly Toynbee of course.

But of course the newest members of ~~the Fourth Division~~ League 2, Morecambe, are known as the Shrimps, on account of the popular Morecambe Bay ones which are known throughout the gastronomic world. I don't know when this nickname was attached but I am sure they did not have it when they were in the old Lancashire Combination, years ago, but then no one else rejoiced in a nickname either. And the MPs? Well it seems that a lady called Geraldine, who is Morecambe's MP, aided and abetted by 12 other local MPs, organised "parliamentary recognition" for the club. The report did not say what this amounted to, or how much in terms of wasted parliamentary time, it had cost. But then, as all decisions are taken at presidential level nowadays, I suppose the MPs have a lot of free time on their hands.

Maybe they could really start praising potted shrimps, and shepherd's pie; and marmalade pudding... Not garlic though.

More, plus the small amount of stuff happening down SE7 way, and the quiz, and Shrewsbury, soon.

Straight Back Up

2007-05-13T16:14:00.000+02:00

Mr Kenny hopes to be back

In the bar on Friday night, Rory reproached me for not having written anything since the sad end of Charlton's 7-year sojourn in the Premiership was confirmed, as a result of Monday's 0-2 defeat to Tottenham. But as I pointed out to him, what is there to say that isn't being said already? I have never claimed to be a match-reporting blog, as I am not located in the UK, and I have also stated on various occasions that telling the world that I am happy just because Charlton have won, or sad because they haven't, is not an interesting topic to write about, whatever the BBC might think, with their irritating habit of creating non-news stories out of things we already know or can readily assume.

(Today's specials include "D-Day arrives for Premiership trio", which tells us little more, when you think about it, that today is the last day of the season and three clubs are still involved in relegation, which people logging on to the page will already know, and they also report that Billy Davies is pleased that Derby beat Southampton yesterday, but as Mr Davies is Derby's manager, I can hardly see the point of mentioning that, either.)

So I fought shy of any kind of impulsive reaction to the Tottenham result, and in any case I had already given up on the whole business before the game, as I said last time. Plus, it has been a stressful and tiring week, what with having a significant birthday to face up to last Sunday, and all the fuss that accompanied it, which went on right up to Wednesday night, and then asking the questions at the quiz (see below) on Monday, and then assimilating the Awful Truth throughout all this; I have been quite worn out, I can tell you.

Anyway, also on the BBC but on the rather better-written Scottish football pages this morning, comes the news that after the mysterious business in the SPL where the league fixtures come to a stop, the table divides in half and the two halves then start a kind of mini league (is it?), Dunfermline's defeat in Inverness yesterday means that they go down. Unlike Mr Davies of Derby, Dunfermline manager Stephen Kenny is not pleased, the BBC tells us. Indeed, he is registering 'disbelief'.

Well, that is slightly more worth reporting than just not being pleased, though how you can be experiencing disbelief when you were at the bottom of the table with two games left is a puzzle; I mean he must have sort of seen it coming, as I did about Charlton well before the Tottenham game.

Anyway, Mr Kenny was philosophical: "Relegation has consequences for everybody, but we just have to accept it and come straight back up," he said, thus providing me with the elusive 'hook', without which I am not otherwise inspired to write anything much.

For there has been a lot of this kind of thing, though it is quite customary at the end of seasons. You don't get all that many relegated managers saying things like: "well, there you are, we've been absolute rubbish all season, and we're going to have our work cut out to stay up next season as well". True though it might be in some cases.

Just look - first off, there was Watford's Mr Boothroyd, whose club was one of the first confirmed casualties, saying they'd be back; which they might be, as it could be argued, much as happened with Charlton in 1999, that they have been promoted too soon and are yet to come really good.

Then of course there was the news that Leeds United will be playing in the third ~~division~~ tier of English football for the first time in their history, and again, Dennis Wise and various other people involved have been saying that they will come straight back. My own friends and acquaintances who are Leeds fans, including our beloved landlady and Antony, have been largely tight-lipped about the whole thing, but I did manage to glean from Antony that he thinks that a good way for Leeds to make a start on coming back would be to ditch Dennis Wise, with which I cannot but agree.

And what of Charlton? I hear you cry. Well in terms of how I feel, disappointment, certainly, but Frankie and many of the usual suspects have pointed out that if we aren't good enough to stay up, then even if the Prem were to dock loads of points from West Ham (though that is too late to benefit Charlton now) then this would only mean another miserable season of travelling up to the north west and being thumped. Better to retrench, have an enjoyable time in the Championship, and give the fans something to feel pleased about, and maybe come straight back, though there'd be little point in coming straight back unless Charlton were likely to be good enough to make a go of it, though of course there are always the financial considerations.

And that is also the point: coming straight back implies the same team, or hopefully a better one, but some of the Charlton squad, notably Dennis Rommedahl, are on record as saying that they couldn't possibly demean themselves by playing for a non-Premiership side and will be off. Where they think they are off to, and why they regard relegation as something that happened to them, rather than something caused by them, and which they might have a duty to put right, is a mystery, though.

My friends have been quite supportive with me around my birthday, and have also been supportive over Charlton's relegation, which happened at more or less the same time, what a present! Many of them have told me that they suppose Darren Bent will be off, and indeed he might, though the word at the moment is that he would like to stay at Charlton, where he is very happy. But in the end it will be a matter of finance.

And so with Charlton about to take the field for their last-ever visit to Anfield, barring an away cup-tie next season, as I yet again delay cooking my lunch to get to the end of a blog piece, I can only say that there are too many imponderables. But let me remind you that when Pards was appointed back in the bleak midwinter, Charlton were several points adrift at the very bottom of the table, and I even wrote a piece which assumed relegation and queried the likelihood of Darren staying on, and of Charlton bouncing back, at the time. So thanks to Pards and Phil, there has been a revival, and a lot of improvement. Pards has an excellent record in running successful second-tier sides, and in my view ought never to have been kicked out of West Ham, so I suppose I am looking forward to an enjoyable season in 07-08, with a lot of good wins home and away, and more successful trips to the north, though of course if they only manage a draw when they go to Turf Moor, I shan't mind all that much.

While Charlton were going down to Tottenham at The Valley on Monday, the fates had decreed that once again I'd be in the pub basement asking quiz questions. Unbeknown to me, they had also decreed that there would be two extra teams made up of colleagues from work, whom I had innocently supposed to be interested in trying out the quiz, but in fact who were there to make me a surprise presentation and sing "Happy Birthday". They chose to do this just as I was about to start asking the questions, which I find slightly stressful at the best of times. I therefore feel that in my role as question master, I may have been a trifle impatient, not to say harsh, with some of the usual barracking that quizmasters have to put up with from one or two elements. If I have caused offence in certain quarters, may I be allowed to apologise? But I was quite stressed out, as we say nowadays. And when are you going to bring Gitte back?

Quiz this coming week is Tuesday night, as Monday is what is called a 'víspera', i.e. the eve of a public holiday - yes yet another; it is Madrid's patron saint, S. Isidro, this time. See you there.

A Close Shave?

2007-05-07T15:35:00.000+02:00

Blackburn Rovers 4 Charlton 1

So Charlton host Tottenham at The Valley this evening, as the bookies are offering 25-1 on them going down.

Until the weekend, the situation did not look good after the usual 4 goal thumping up in Blackburn, but there was a little hope. Fulham would lose to Liverpool, and Wigan and West Ham might share the points. But of course in the end this did not happen, and as I say, the bookies usually know what they are doing.

So is there any hope? Probably not, but meanwhile let me take you back to the cold winter of 1963. The weather had been so bad, that instead of the football season ending, and all the ups and downs sorted by the end of April, things went on with rearranged matches until late May, and this meant that for quite some time, Charlton were facing an away fixture at Walsall, which they would have to win for them to stay up, Walsall going down if they did.

They had to wait until 24 May, and then Charlton went up to the Black Country and won 2-1, and the table finalised as you can see above.

But tonight, as once again I will find myself asking questions at the quiz downstairs at the pub, then once again Charlton will be up against it, and this time I fear there is no escape.

But just have a quick look at who figured in the second tier table in 1963; no one, except two or three honourable exceptions, "belongs" anywhere, and as Wyn Grant pointed out, most of us have been used to Charlton being in the second lot in our lives. And here we come again, and sometimes it is more fun; haven't Sunderland fans had a better time this year than last? Well?

And there's always someone worse off than yourself, as I haven't yet dared say to my Leeds United-supporting friends.

Or Going Down?

2007-04-28T15:03:00.000+02:00

Charlton 1 Sheffield United 1

Talal el Kharkhouri puts Charlton ahead, but sadly they didn't stay ahead

Quite a long time after Charlton had beaten Newcastle, I finally got round to writing about it, citing as the reason for the delay that my only feeling about the game had been one of great contentment, and thus not much of a reason for writing, as anyone might have known I'd be pleased; and I again criticised the BBC and similar online football sites for their "Mourinho hails Chelsea victory" attitude to news stories which are entirely self-evident.

And now again, I imagine the more ghoulish among you will have been eagerly awaiting my reaction to this 1-1 draw, maybe to see how I propose to get Charlton out of this one, but in fact my reaction was precisely what you would have thought. Charlton had to beat Sheffield United to vault over them in the table, and would then be masters of their own fate, but still with a difficult run-in. And they did not even get over the first hurdle.

As The Observer's Stuart Barnes pointed out, Charlton looked very much like a Championship side , and even Frankie was so disgruntled as to say that if that kind of play was all that Charlton could offer the Premiership, then we might as well be a division lower, and get a bit more enjoyment out of our results.

The fact that Charlton did not win, and thus have to depend in part on others losing, and still complete the tricky run-in, makes things look much more difficult, especially when you consider that two of the remaining games are away in the north west, a region which has been most unpropitious for Charlton in the last two or three years, and today it is yet another encounter with one of my least-favourite teams, Blackburn Rovers, who are not likely to be in the mood for giving much away, as no doubt they fancy more outings to far-flung new European nations in the east of the continent in the UEFA Cup again next season. Then it's Spurs at home, and the season, and possibly Charlton's Premiership career, for the present, will probably end at Anfield on 13 May.

Talking of dates, Thursday 26 April was a memorable one for Charlton, being the 60th anniversary of Charlton beating what would become my other team, Burnley, 1-0 in extra time, in the FA Cup Final. And 49 years ago on Thursday, Charlton lost 3-4 at home to Blackburn in the old Division Two, thus missing the second promotion place (and there were only two in those days), which instead went to Blackburn, and when Charlton only needed a draw, too.

Propitious or what?

Staying Up?

2007-04-16T14:59:00.000+02:00

Everton, Sunday: Scott Carson under pressure, like everyone else.

So we move into the second half of April, and the time is approaching when all will be resolved; the promotion issues decided; the champions crowned, and of course the relegation slots occupied for the last time with no hope of escape.

This season, it is beginning to look as though everything is going to be won by either Manchester United or Chelsea, in the upper echelons of football, at any rate, so this really doesn't give supporters of all the other teams much to hope for.

And leaving aside the Liverpool and Arsenal supporters of my acquaintance, I, and quite a lot of other people, have no hopes whatsoever of our teams winning anything at all.

The latest of these is our new quiz team member Lesley, a Blackburn Rovers fan, who saw any hopes of glory she might have been harbouring dashed yesterday by the ubiquitous Mr Mourinho and his equally ubiquitous boys, whereas Antony and our beloved landlady, to name but two, are in near-despair at the thought that Leeds United might find themselves in the third tier of English football next season. Mush is just as worried about the same fate overtaking Q.P.R., and then there is my unenviable situation.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will find a list of the teams I support, and the only two who are safe from any danger of relegation right now are Cádiz (relegated last season anyway) and Clachnacuddin, who can't go down from the Highland League, as there is no down for them to go down to (though they aren't actually at the bottom of it).

But I have spent the entire season nervously watching Forest Green edge themselves away from the bottom of the Conference, and also watching Bury slide down League Two, and Burnley, who started well, then went 19 games without a win, and even now are not quite guaranteed to be safe. Alloa are having a similar, looking-over-the-shoulder, season in Scottish Division Two, and Castellón have only recently started playing well, and could slump once more even yet.

And now once again, after Charlton's heartbreaking late 2-1 defeat at Goodison Park yesterday, we are thinking once more about whether they will get out of the Fizzy Pops at the first attempt, rather than avoiding the Coca Cola League altogether, but I suppose one has to be optimistic. But it isn't easy.

Bluebirds

2007-04-15T16:07:00.000+02:00

One of the rounds I devised for my turn at being quizmaster the other evening was one based on the names of birds; I was at pains to assure everyone that it was not going to be one of those awful natural history-type rounds, full of questions like "which bird, native to the African continent, has the longest wing span?" or "which microscopic insect is the main food source of the lesser spotted grabble bird?" (And don't write and ask me, if you want to know, as I just invented the questions as an example of the genre. I also invented the grabble bird, or rather nicked it from an old radio comedy programme).

No, my questions were about stuff like the nickname of West Bromwich Albion (Throstles, or at least it used to be, though for the last ten years the less euphonious 'Baggies' has been heard throughout the land) and which bird shares its name with the designer of the church of Saint Andrew by the Wardrobe, in the City of London (wren); that kind of thing, which I think, and you might, depending on how you view such things, disagree with me, is a lot more fun than a dreary rehearsal of the "astounding" facts contained in the Guinness Book of Records

One of my questions, however, did give me pause; I had decided to ask what was substantially wrong about the lyrics of the Vera Lynn hit song The White Cliffs of Dover; but then suddenly wondered whether people would know who she was (still going strong at 90, I read in an interview in The Guardian not long ago). I need not have worried: at the mention of her name, David and Luis launched into a spirited if rather alcohol-fuelled rendition of We'll Meet Again, and people all got the answer to the question, I think, which is that the American lyricists did not know that the bluebird as a species does not exist in Britain, despite the word being used, as Antony pointed out, as a nickname for Cardiff City, and as I added, a brand of toffees. Curiously enough, I now realise, the Toffees is the nickname of Charlton's opponents this afternoon in a game switched from yesterday after someone realised, less than a month ago, that the Grand National would clash with it. Don't these people have calendars?

Charlton 0 Reading 0

Darren sits down in astonishment after failing once again to get through the Reading defence

Meanwhile, on the telly upstairs, watched by no one at all, Charlton were finding it hard to break through the Reading defence, though by and large not having much difficulty in keeping them out, so Charlton's fourth clean sheet in a row, and their second no score, though a series of goalless draws from now till the end will not be enough, I fear. Yesterday's Sheffield United result has blown everything wide open, and Charlton are still in danger, and really have to work hard for as much as they can get at Goodison today; they have won there before quite a lot, anyway, so it is not unheard of.

Magnanimity

2007-04-09T18:52:00.000+02:00

Manchester City 0 Charlton 0

Darius Vassell and Herman Hreidarsson

Manchester City manager Stuart Pearce said both before and after this game that he thought Charlton would stay up, and has behaved throughout the pre and post match days in a most unusual way for a Premiership manager in that he has not moaned about dropping a home point, and in fact hinted that the outcome was satisfactory for both sides, and vaguely sounded as though he was doubly satisfied on that account. All in all a most reasonable man, unlike, as I say, many Prem managers (though not Pards or Curbs, of course), especially for someone once known as 'Psycho'. And certainly unlike, for example the dreaded Glenn Roeder of Newcastle, (ask any Burnley supporter about him), who, as Frankie pointed out, joined in this game of praising lower-table opposition and saying they will stay up, which he did after Newcastle had beaten Sheffield United on Saturday.

Of course this result means that Charlton, who had been reported in the press as having finally got out of the relegation slots, were able to stay out of them, for the time being (mustn't tempt fate). In any case, the main reason they had got out was that they had played on Friday and most of the others were playing on Saturday. I had hoped to get a piece in during our 22 hours outside relegation slot misery to celebrate this, but then Newcastle (inspired by Spotty, do you think?) beat Sheffield United and Charlton's 17th slot took on a more solid appearance.

Frankie Valley was hurt that Roeder had said that the Blades would stay up, but hadn't said that about Charlton, but when you come to think about it, Newcastle had just beaten Sheffield United, whereas they had lost to Charlton. It is easy to be magnanimous in victory, even though our quiz rivals the OFs have never managed to acquire that particular skill.

Once again, I am in the position of getting a piece in before Charlton go into action again. Home to Reading tonight, which means that while I am asking quiz questions downstairs, it will be on TV upstairs. The other results are in; and Manchester City have won 3-1 at Fulham, showing that virtue can bring its rewards for Stuart Pearce, while Wigan have picked up a point at Aston Villa. But Charlton's destiny is now in their own hands; if they keep picking up points, all will be well.

Just look at the difference 3 wins can make; 10 days ago I was worried about my other team, Burnley. This afternoon they beat Cardiff 2-0 to make it 3 wins in 9 days, and a points total of a safe-looking 51 as against a dodgy-looking 42. It can be done.

Let's hope so. Good luck to my teams this evening then, as of course the quiz team swings back into action, as indicated above, after a short break for Holy Week, which is when people in Spain take their Easter holidays.

My picture is for those friends who watched the Spain - Iceland game with me two weeks ago, and wondered which one Herman Hreidarsson was, when all along he hadn't been playing. I nicked the photo from the Sporting Life report, and have just noticed that it wasn't taken during Saturday's game; Joma stopped sponsoring Charlton's shirts over a year ago.

Parkinson

2007-04-06T02:53:00.000+02:00

Phil Parkinson on Wednesday after announcing his decision

I am to be quiz master for half of next Monday's quiz, along with Jimmy, and I am duly doing a bit of research here and there. It is very much frowned on to lift questions from quiz books, and especially so if you do not actually understand why the answer is what it is. For should Luis, to pick someone entirely at random, point out that the flag of the People's Republic of Psychomania no longer has a candy-striped pink and purple motif, having changed it a few hours ago for something a bit more revolutionary, something by Jasper Conran perhaps, then you are on the back foot and life is quite uncomfortable for a minute or two.

I once made the mistake, not of lifting questions per se from a quiz book, but of creating a round of Geography questions, which the OFs are pretty good at, using an out-of-date gazetteer. As my geography, in common with that of my team, is not all that hot, I thought these questions were all right, but in fact there were a few changed names, altered locations for capital cities and so on. I have not attempted to set a Geography round since then, and probably never will.

However, when faced with the task of finding questions, I have to confess that I do make use of published quiz books, and online quizzes, too, not to lift the questions, but to get an idea for a theme (and well, all right, the odd quiz book question has been known to get through, but only if I am sure I can defend it, and of course that it is suitable for our audience).

One that won't be going out on Monday was this one, from a book based on the television programme, University Challenge: "Who was born Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg on the kitchen table of a holiday villa called Mon Repos?"

The answer, which most of you will get if I add that it was in 1921 and that he is still very much a part of British public life today, is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, but such has been the run of events this week around Charlton, and the online sports pages, that the first person with the name Philip who flashed into my mind was Charlton's assistant manager Phil Parkinson. But Phil gives the impression of being such a solid north-countryman that there is no way his parents would have been staying at anywhere called Mon Repos. And anyway, if you are called Phil Parkinson then you are obviously from the north of England.

Phil has been in the news this week, for it seems that he told Huddersfield Town that he would leave Charlton and take up their offer of managing them. That, at any rate, is Huddersfield's side of the story. Phil's side, which obviously I take, is that he told Huddersfield that he was happy with their set-up, and their offer, and would go home and discuss it with Mrs Parkinson, and maybe Charlton again, and then let them know.

The next day's Yorkshire Post then came out with the story that Huddersfield would 'unveil', as modern parlance has it, Phil as their new manager at 9.30 that morning. But what in fact happened was that Phil got up early and phoned Huddersfield at 8.30 to say that after due consideration, he would be staying with Charlton, despite his living, as Wyn Grant pointed out, in Yorkshire; as does Mrs Parkinson, no doubt.

To me the most interesting thing about the story, however, apart from relief that he wasn't leaving, was that until he told Huddersfield he wasn't joining them, this was the first I knew about it. Huddersfield had been reported as wanting him after they sacked their previous manager, about three weeks back, but there was no indication that Phil was interested. And where this story differs from others of its type is the total absence of build-up and speculation. None of the stories about the 'race' to become the Huddersfield (or Terriers, as they are apparently called) manager, and this kind of stuff. Are the BBC and the rest slipping?

Charlton 1 Wigan 0

I was pleased to learn he isn't going, as it is widely accepted that he is just as responsible as Pards for the revival in Charlton's fortunes, which continued, a trifle luckily, if The Guardian is to be believed, against Wigan last Saturday. Paul Jewell, the Wigan manager, was widely reported as being very cross about Darren Bent's 86th minute penalty. The strange thing is that as soon as I saw that Charlton had gone 1-0 up as a result of an 86th minute penalty, I knew he would be; it was the first thought that came into my head. I scare myself sometimes.

Manchester City away tomorrow, which, if it produces a win, will be a major step forward; I am not, as I have said before, in the prediction game; Charlton must just do their best and try to win as much as possible, and they ought to be all right.

I will leave you with links to a couple of the sillier stories on the BBC this week; the first was the riveting news that Alex Ferguson hoped for an away goal in Rome. This would have been more of a news story if he had come right out with it and said he was fed up and hoped they got thumped 4-0, but anyway.

The other was a headline that made my pulse quicken for a moment; it said that ZZ was going back to China at the end of the season. But when I read the story, it just said that when his loan period expires, he will return to his own club and then see whether negotiations can start for him to come to Charlton on a permanent basis. Well we already knew that, so where was the story? Mind you, I did click on it, so it worked in that respect.

The Rain in Spain (and other matters)

2007-03-29T19:17:00.000+02:00

Spain 1 Iceland 0

“Where’s the match being played?” Sam asked me when we crossed at the bottom of the main staircase in the Centre on Wednesday evening. Good point. I have noticed over the years that Spain makes the most of its varied geography when organising home international fixtures, and usually if the opposition is from a hot country like Morocco or Cameroon, the match will take place somewhere where Spain might benefit from the weather conditions. Thus, the African nations often find themselves playing in Galicia, the north western region of Spain, at Celta de Vigo, or Deportivo de la Coruña, where the weather is likely to be cold, wet and windy.

On the other hand, should the opposition hail from far northern climes, Estonia, say, or Finland, then they will probably be entertained down in Seville just after sundown, or maybe Málaga, or even in the Canary Islands.

So given that Spain’s opponents on Wednesday were Iceland, I checked it out, feeling sure that they would be playing somewhere a long way to the south. Of course to English-speaking ears, the name of Spain's opponents is synonymous with the cold, even though the name actually means 'island'. In Spanish, 'ice' is 'hielo', and Iceland, 'Islandia', which has no connotations of cold whatsoever. All the same, it is located well to the north, so I was quite surprised to find out that the game would take place in Palma de Mallorca. This information came to me from the website of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which also informed me that there was a strong likelihood that the match would be off, as it had been pouring down on Mallorca all afternoon, and the pitch had a lot of surface water.

There would, the report concluded, be a pitch inspection at 21.30, for the game was to start at 22.00, not terribly late in Spain, but what's the betting that all good Icelanders are snuggled down with their teddy bears by then? The report followed the new rule, which I noted three or four weeks ago, when the Charlton website published a picture of some empty seats to accompany the news that tickets were now on sale for the Watford game. This rule states that news stories on websites must be accompanied by a picture, however banal; and this one was no exception, as you can see: a fine view of Mallorca’s pitch, with rain falling onto it, and a TV cameraman quite possibly filming it, for otherwise why is he there? (I am aware that in these days of equality, it might be a camerawoman, but somehow it doesn't look like one, and the figure is in unrelieved black, too).

In the event, the game went ahead and I and a number of my work friends watched it at our usual bar. Had any of us been interested enough, the Andorra - England game was on down at the pub if we could have been bothered to take ourselves off down there, but we weren't, so we didn't.

We all agreed quite soon that the referee should have abandoned the whole thing, as small tidal waves were caused whenever any of the players changed direction, and long through balls became a thing of the past.

About 10 minutes in, I remembered Charlton defender Herman Hreidarsson, an Icelandic international, after someone wondered aloud who these guys were, and where they normally plied their trade. So I told my colleagues about him, and they asked which one he was; but I couldn't find him, not surprisingly, as I found out later in the week that he hadn't been playing at all. It wasn't easy to identify the Icelandic boys, anyway, because they did not have their names on their shirts. "Too long, probably", said Steve, but I thought they could have solved that one by accepting the fact that all of their names end in 'sson', and then they could just have shirts with the rest of their names on. The Spanish football commentator must have been relying on the Icelandic team to have their names on their backs, too, for he did not mention a single one of them by name. We enjoyed the game though, especially towards the end when it looked as though plucky Iceland might hold the Spanish side, but the result, I suppose was fair enough as Spain had dominated throughout. But who is the Iceland goalie? He was terrific.

Charlton 2 Newcastle 0

Ambrose, ZZ and Bent jumping for joy after ZZ's first goal for Charlton

Moving on to matters Charlton, which I have not written about lately, I am not going to trot out my usual excuses about marking exams or not having been too well. Sometimes a blog piece just doesn’t suggest itself. All I could think of after Charlton beat Newcastle 2-0, thirteen days ago now, (for although the foregoing stuff about the Iceland game was written the day before yesterday, I once more find myself delaying my lunch in order to post a piece before Charlton kick off again) was that I was very pleased, and it was great that new loan signing Zheng Zhi had done so well. That alone, in my opinion, is not enough for a blog, or indeed any other kind of piece, despite what the people in charge of the BBC Football web page might think. And especially so when I am usually among the first to lambast the BBC and the other sports sites for their non-stories of the "Ferguson hopes United will win" variety, or the other thing they do where they ring a player and ask him a question, and turn his answer into a news story: "Melchester Rovers third-choice goalie Jerry Finn thinks Arsenal can still come second in the Premiership".

So, I thought, I’ll store the picture of ZZ celebrating his goal until I have a hook, as we professional writers call it. Yet all I have found in the intervening period is a fascinating story that Michael Owen will stay on at Newcastle, "even if they don’t qualify for Europe".

Even if they don’t qualify for Europe? This would surely mean that they are just a couple of games and a goal or two short of doing so. Whereas in fact it is not entirely out of the question that Newcastle might end up qualifying for the Coca Cola League. As things stand at present of course, Charlton are more likely to do that, but then Charlton fans haven’t been talking nonsense about getting into Europe. Anyway, ZZ’s goal celebrations make a nice image, and so by way of compensation for my long absence, a second pic.

A six-pointer this afternoon in SE7, as Wigan are the visitors. Hope springs eternal.

Also, I have just started a ten-day break from the Centre, and decided a little while ago to stay in Madrid and sort things out around the house. Both Antony and John, and possibly Sam, will be around as well, and Rory and Sean, though off to Oporto, will be back on Wednesday. So it looks like being a reasonably enjoyable week, and there'll be time to blog a bit more too. Maybe a special quiz edition, as we aren't having a quiz this Monday.

Crikey, kick off in 10 minutes, and I'm starving...

Mother's Day

2007-03-18T13:25:00.000+01:00

I checked in with the Inspector's page (see helpful links, at right) last evening, to see if he had anything to say about Charlton's upcoming game against Newcastle later on, and found myself witnessing a minor tragedy. Obviously you can check it out yourselves, but to save you the bother, the gist of it is that several weeks ago, possibly inspired by Charlton visiting there pre-season, the Inspector decided to treat himself to a short spring break in Valencia, and went on line to check prices and dates, and came up with a great wheeze: he would take in Charlton's game against Newcastle on the Saturday, fly to Valencia on Sunday afternoon and be there in time for the Valencia - Santander match on Sunday evening. Perfect; two football matches (or ‘battles', as the mass media would have it) and a few days away.

For 19 March, tomorrow as ever is, is the date set for Valencia to go gay (in the old fashioned sense of the word) and celebrate its very existence with a non-stop display of fireworks, floats, booze and all the usual paraphernalia of a Spanish fiesta. The Valencia celebrations are known as the fallas, and I assume The Inspector knew what he was letting himself in for when he booked his flights, for, during the fallas, sleep is not a commodity which is readily available, as the bangers, crackers and rattles go on being deployed right through the night. Spanish people adore noise, you see. I myself don't, in spite of having lived here for more than thirty years, nor do I understand why they do, but there; not for me to question the ways of my adopted homeland.

But here's the tragic bit. Spanish TV puts out two games every Saturday night, and these are selected quite late on to assure that the more interesting ones figure. Now looking at this weekend's fixtures, Valencia - Santander doesn't look all that exciting, and yet it was selected to be shown at 7 o'clock yesterday. A stroke of genius, as totally against the form book, in-form Valencia crashed 0-2 to what the British media would describe as lowly Santander, thus commencing the ruination of my work-syndicate's pools coupon for this weekend. And then on top of that, also for televisual reasons, Charlton's game against Newcastle was switched to this afternoon at 1.30, when The Inspector will be on the plane. So instead of two games, he ends up with nothing.

But there has been a fair amount of bitter wailing on the various Charlton blogs and message boards, too, as the caprice of the television industry lands the Charlton - Newcastle match slap in the middle of Mother's Day.

My understanding of what this day is really all about dates back to a mid-sixties episode of The Archers, when Doris Archer was explaining to a young member of her family that the fourth (?) Sunday in Lent is Mothering Sunday, and it was when servant girls working in big houses were allowed to travel home and visit their mothers for the day. It was not meant to be an excuse for everyone who was a mother to be feted, taken out for lunch, bought large boxes of chocolates and sent huge cards bedecked with bits of satin.

But unfortunately for Frankie, and a lot more Charlton fans (and Newcastle fans too, perhaps) all mothers demand their due on this day, and woe betide anyone who objects to taking the missus out rather than popping down to SE7. And, as Frankie quite reasonably points out, his wife isn't even his mother, anyway.

So what will the lads be missing? It seems that Lisbie missed an open goal at Watford and Charlton had to settle for 2-2, although they had been 0-2 down for most of the time, so maybe the much-vaunted revival is not so certain as it looked after the West Ham game. This revival also rather depended on teams like Manchester City and the aforementioned West Ham continuing to sink into the mire, and yet both achieved unexpected away wins at higher-rated opposition yesterday - the first time in my life I've been sorry that Blackburn Rovers lost.

However, apparently Lawro (haven't checked this myself) thinks that Charlton are on for a 2-0 win; but it is feared that they will be without Darren Bent, who is injured again, or so people are assuming in the wake of the news that Preston's David Nugent might be (or by now might have been) called up for the England squad. It all seems to me that Charlton have a long way to go. And with neither The Inspector nor Frankie to cheer them on, things could get tricky.

My excuses for not having added a piece to the blog these past two weeks are the usual ones: pressure of work (those February exams) and the wretched cough and cold which in common with a high percentage of Madrid's population, I cannot shake off. I have, however, only missed one quiz, in late January, and am happy to report that it is in good shape, with lots of regular attenders and some new teams. As is the case with new teams, they haven't made much of an impression on the stranglehold of the three regulars. We ourselves are having a fairly useful 2007, having recorded two high-scoring victories (154 and 153) in the past few weeks, and our old friends the OFs, reinforced for operational reasons by both Rory and Edu, managed 153 in their victory last Monday, and even then one of them had the nerve to be triumphalist about what had been their first win in weeks. We have been without Sam, too, on a number of occasions, owing to family commitments, when he has been replaced by our new colleague Lesley, who has fitted in well.

As mentioned above, 19 March in Valencia is fallas, but in the church calendar it is the feast day of Saint Joseph, foster father of the infant Jesus. So when Spain was looking about for a suitable day to use as Father's Day, 19 March was what they chose, and so this year the English Mother's Day is immediately before Spanish Father's Day. And don't Spanish mothers have a day? I hear you cry. They do indeed, it is the first Sunday in May, the month of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Anyway, to all you mothers, or at least those where Mothering Sunday equates with Mother's Day, I hope you enjoy the accolades you feel you deserve, and while I am on the topic of congratulations, reiterated ones to my old friend Harry for his birthday yesterday, and to his two sons for theirs during the past week.

I leave you with a fascinating bit of news, a real scoop, from the BBC sports page a week or two ago:

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho was spotted taking his children for a burger in the MacDonald's in Clacton.

Terrific stuff.

Men of the Match

2007-03-03T14:19:00.000+01:00

Charlton 4 West Ham Utd. 0

The excellent Amy Lawrence of The Observer was rostered to The Valley last Saturday, and produced a cracker of a report, to go with a cracker of a performance by Charlton, giving us all hope, though of course we Charlton fans are ever cautious and we know we are not out of the wood yet, and that one swallow does not make summer, and that then again, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as Tony Hancock remarked.

Amy has in the past had a tendency to be distracted from the main story by irrelevancies such as Teddy Sheringham's birthday, Ashley Cole's debut for Chelsea, and Souleymane Diawara's gloves, but this time she turned in an excellent account of the game, which pleased me almost as much as the result itself. Another thing that pleased me about the report is the fact that she nominated one of my personal favourites, Jerome Thomas, as man of the match and gave him 9/10 for his performance in midfield, and on the wings, and of course for scoring two of the goals.

However, Jerome is, as one of the commentators on Frankie's blog remarked this week, not helping his reputation as Charlton's handsomest player by having grown half a moustache while at the same time taking the front part of his hair away, and so it is maybe just as well that the only pictures I could locate of Jerome were distance shots from behind. However, in the end I found this one, courtesy of the Kent Messenger, of the two Darrens enjoying a celebratory dance after one of the goals, which has a considerable degree of charm. A happy day, indeed. And now I look at the smile on his face, I am not at all sure if Darren Ambrose might not be about to take over the title of handsomest Charlton player, anyway.

And yes, once again my readers find me scribbling something on Saturday lunchtime as yet another Charlton match approaches. Those lovely bright yellow seats, featured in the blog a while back, and which were favourably commented on by Rory in the bar last night, are, even as I type, starting to fill up at Vicarage Road, as Charlton prepare to play Watford.

There are problems in defence, with Souleymane Diawara suspended, and Ben Thatcher and Marcus Bent are injured, and so Jonathan Fortune has been recalled from a loan spell at Stoke City, which makes you wonder why, then, Radostin Kishishev has just been loaned out to Leeds. Wyn Grant thinks he must be out of favour with Pards.

And in another astonishing loan move, which will be of interest to Charlton fans, comes the news that Francis Jeffers has proved such a hit at Blackburn since going there from Charlton last summer that they are loaning him to Ipswich. Ipswich manager Jim Magilton is reported as saying that Jeffers has cost a total of £10 million in transfer fees and has played for a lot of top clubs, and that that tells you what kind of player he is.

Indeed it does, though what I myself would deduce from it is that once the clubs realise how useless he is, they get rid of him quick. But thankfully Jeffers is not our problem any more.

As for other matters, David, once more I have to pass up on the quiz as I am still rather buried in exam papers. My plan is to get them all cleared by the end of today so that I can enjoy my Sunday. But time will tell.

Clashes and Battles

2007-02-24T15:55:00.000+01:00

I have been quite busy with our round of February exams at the Centre, and have thus been neglecting my blog, but today Charlton return to action, and I ought to say something before they do.

It is a bit late to run a heading with the scoreline reflecting the 0-2 reverse at Old Trafford, now 14 days ago, and there didn't seem to be very much to add to what other commentators, including Sir Alex F. himself, said, which was that Charlton are a much improved side, and will have a good chance of surviving. Thus, there being, as I say, nothing to add to that, for today's piece, I will return to a couple of the other remits of the blog, starting, as so often, with the media.

While perusing the BBC Football pages yesterday morning, in search of stories which really were stories, as opposed to headlines announcing the bleeding obvious ("Rafa salutes Liverpool win"; "Hughes disappointed at Blackburn defeat" and the like), however, I came across something which did give me pause. I was looking at the gossip section, where they repeat stories made up by the national press about future transfers, and throw in a few other quirky stories like the one about Roy Keane's dog finally moving up to Sunderland to join him, which I referred to a while back.

And I saw this:

Dundee lost out in a fixture battle with rivals Dundee United on the toss of a coin.

I don't actually find Dundee or Dundee United terribly interesting and can never remember which is which, though oddly enough I do know that one of them plays at a ground called Tannadyce, which has a nice, homely, Dr. Finlay, kind of ring to it.

But what set me thinking was the phrase "fixture battle". I wandered off at this point for a shave prior to showering and getting ready for my long day at the Centre, but as I deployed the Gillette Fusion, vibrating smoothly in my right hand (if you haven't got one yet, you don't know what you're missing), cutting a neat swathe through the shaving foam, I continued to mull it over, and then I realised that what was meant was a fixture clash. It must be. The two Dundees (I have had to check this) play in different divisions and the fixture compiler had accidentally scheduled the two clubs to be at home on the same day: a fixture clash, in fact, like a clash of interests.

But it isn't a battle, for heaven's sake. Regular readers will know that my opinion of the BBC football page has never been very high, but they do, more or less, use the vocabulary of the English language accurately, or they have done up to now. It is true that 'clash' and 'battle' are employed turn and turn about by sports hacks who are incapable of describing one club playing another as a 'match' or a 'game', but that doesn't mean that the two words are completely interchangeable.

And while on the subject of 'battle', when will the press and the media go back to saying that someone or other has died of cancer, instead of the invariable 'lost his/her battle' with it?

Anyway, talking of football matches, Charlton are at home to West Ham this afternoon in a game which has been eagerly awaited, and speculated about, by Frankie and his visitors, and the Inspector, but unfortunately not by me, for the reasons stated at the top.

So, with just over ten minutes to go before they kick off at the Valley, it is worth mentioning that hopes are high, as Charlton's latest form has been good, those defeats to Chelsea and Manchester United were fairly honourable (© Iris Murdoch) ones, and they have just had a winter break over here in Spain, though probably not Madrid as I didn't see them anywhere, and best of all, Darren Bent, Luke Young and Andy Reid are all expected to return to the team after what seems like ages.

I am not in the prediction game, but I suppose I can stick my neck out to the extent of saying that a win will launch a revival which will probably be successful, and a defeat, er... won't.

At the quiz last week David pointed out that I haven't written anything about it for a while, and he is quite right, as always (well OK; not always, they haven't won for a while). I had hoped to add something here, but I want to get this up on the blog site before kick off, really, so I'll include the quiz news with my reaction to this afternoon's result.

No News Today

2007-02-08T15:42:00.000+01:00

Charlton 0 Chelsea 1

Seats of the type reputed to be available for the Watford game

So, there we are, Charlton did not manage to get anything out of Saturday's encounter with Chelsea, and yet I, and the other Charlton bloggers and commentators, are not unduly depressed. And Pards isn't, either, as in his opinion Charlton gave a very good account of themselves, and in fact even independent accounts indicate that Charlton could have managed a draw.

So Charlton fans have nothing much to moan about, and (might it be as a result of Frankie and me warning about him?) honorary Bolton Wanderer and great personal Chum of Big Sam himself, referee Mike Halsey, for once did nothing against our interests. All the same, I still think that if referees have links with a football club, then they should not be involved in matches in their club's division, so Mr Halsey to League One, I say. But then maybe he supports Oldham, too, or possibly hates them...

I followed the match using Livescore, from around half-time, when 0-1 didn't sound too bad, and right up to the end there was hope that the score might turn to 1-1, but as I say, it was not to be on this occasion, but it was a reasonably hopeful performance, especially, as I said last time, as Darren Bent is still out, and Andy Reid as well.

As on most days, I also checked in with the BBC news and sports pages, and I fell to ruminating about this phenomenon called news. I was struck by a tag or banner running across the BBC main news pages, which told me that I could download something called The Best of the Ten o' Clock News.

Now I cannot imagine why anyone in their right mind would even want to watch the Ten o' Clock News, with its insufferable air of being indispensable, and its smug assumption that everyone agrees with its biased views, and its awful news readers and reporters who, whatever else they might know how to do, have never been taught to read aloud properly - to emphasise the important words and gloss over articles and pronouns - in the first place. And have they been specifically instructed to twist their lips and sound as though they are going to throw up every time they have to mention the President of the United States? It isn't that I have a high opinion of this man, either, but I do want the BBC to be totally impartial in what it says and how it says it, or it will lose its world-wide reputation for telling the truth - well I think that disappeared some time ago. And as for needing to download the best of it, do they think that, like other "best of" titles (Ken Dodd; Max Bygraves etc.) we might want to keep them and treasure them for ever and ever? Not very likely.

But news is, now, everywhere. And of course the days when, if nothing much had happened, the newsreader would simply say that there would be no news today, are but a folk memory. As with so many things nowadays, you don't evaluate your commodity and then look for a channel to get it across to people. Now there are loads of channels, and things have to be found to fill them, newsworthy or not.

This leads to increasingly ridiculous headlines. The BBC led on a story that experts had announced that the avian flu scare would have an adverse effect on sales of chicken. Well yes, most people could have worked that one out. There was a headline about José Mourinho, too. It said he was pleased that Chelsea had beaten Charlton. But he is the Chelsea manager; we imagine he is pleased, and we certainly don't need to be reminded of it, and is it really of any interest to anyone who is not actually living with him whether he is pleased or not?

Checking in a bit later with the League One page (looking for a home for Mr Halsey) I read that the cheery-looking manager of Cheltenham Town was pleased, for his side had won too, and, said the report, their promotion hopes had been given a boost. Now any side playing in a league will have their promotion hopes boosted to some extent by winning, as they will have three more points than they had before. But all the same, when I checked, I found that this win had hoisted Cheltenham to 21st position. It was four hours later before anyone got round to changing the headline to something about allaying their relegation fears.

And now this morning, after the England game, which I watched with some friends in an almost deserted, uninterested Spanish bar, comes the earth-shattering tidings that Steve MacLaren isn't too pleased. Well, like Charlton v Chelsea, it was only 0-1; no need to get too dejected yet, is there? Or maybe this is different.

But whatever the story, you can be sure that the BBC will be there, telling us the obvious, and also what people are feeling about it. And I regret to report that they are not alone. Logging on to the CAFC official page earlier, I saw that the second most important story of the day is that seats are on sale for Charlton's game at Watford in three weeks or so. The story was accompanied by a fine picture of... some seats, possibly, as they are bright yellow, the very ones on offer up at Vicarage Road. So as there were no nice pics of any Charlton squad members performing well against Chelsea, I thought I'd share them with you.

Hanging In(dent)

2007-02-03T16:33:00.000+01:00

Bolton 1 Charlton 1

Charlton's new Assistant Manager Phil Parkinson

Wednesday night is when I have a free period, in which I am responsible for helping people out on computer-related matters, and last Wednesday evening I was struggling with Microsoft Word, trying to set up a hanging indent for a worksheet I was trying to update, and my friend Alison next to me was trying to remove boxes and lines from an old worksheet to make it look less cluttered.

I was taught how to do word processing on Word Perfect, which embeds all formatting codes so that you can set up and remove exactly what you want. Word does not let you do this, and it is one of life's enduring mysteries that Word is market leader where this kind of program is concerned. What is worse, someone at head office some years ago decided that Word would be standard, and all copies of Word Perfect were outlawed. I still use it at home, but if writing anything at the Centre, I have to struggle with Word. I failed to set up my hanging indents, and only partially managed to help Alison.

I then realised it was ten past nine, and so paid a quick visit to Livescore, and discovered that Bolton had taken the lead after 6 minutes. I exclaimed in annoyance, and Alison asked what was wrong. "My team are 1-0 down already", I said. Alison isn't that interested in football and asked me who my team are. I told her; she misheard and said "Chelsea?". "No", I said. And repeated the fair name of Charlton louder than before, thus attracting the attention of Senior Teacher Kevin, a nice guy from Edinburgh, working a few feet away from us.

And though Kevin and I have been amicably acquainted for about five years, he didn't know where my footballing sympathies lie either, and turns out to have friends in London who also support Charlton. So we had a little chat and he asked me if I thought we'd stay up, and I said I thought we would hang in there, a locution which I wouldn't normally employ, but I must have been influenced by my problems with Microsoft Word.

But the reason I think we can stay up is that we have a new manager of proven capability, and an assistant manager whose name was touted back in the summer after he had brought Colchester up to the second tier of English football for the first time in their existence. I would have been glad to have given Phil Parkinson a chance then, rather than Iain Dowie, and now we have him on board, anyway, and Pards too. And the Bolton result (I was able to rejoice at TEK's equaliser to both Alison and Kevin before we departed homewards at 9.20) kind of sums it up, as it was achieved without any of the new signings, and no Darren Bent or Herman Hreidarsson or Luke Young - in other words with the same players who were underperforming during the first half of the season.

So I think we can be cautiously optimistic.

However, I write this just as Charlton are kicking off in today's fixture at home to Chelsea, No one expects this to be of any use to Charlton at all, and the Guardian actually has a main story on the return of inspirational John Terry, so the script for today has already been written. As so often, as far as the media are concerned, Charlton are there just to make up the numbers. And yet, you never know.

Frankie, however, is dispirited because we still have no Bent; Young or Herman, and because the referee is the well-known Bolton fan, Mark Halsey, friend of Big Sam and all that that entails. He will be annoyed at Charlton nicking that point the other night, so what chance have we got? At least that is the gist of Frankie's argument.

Well, we'll know in just over an hour or so, and nothing is a dead cert in football, anyway, though I must admit the odds don't look favourable.

Winter Break

2007-01-30T11:34:00.000+01:00

Charlton 1 Middlesbrough 3

Portsmouth 0 Charlton 1

A big hello to my faithful readership, as I return after a winter break. I haven't been away anywhere, and I haven't been ill (well actually these past three days I have had a very bad cough), but quite frankly there are only so many excuses one can invent, and after the Middlesbrough result my defences were truly down, and I even debated abandoning the blog, or at least revamping it to embrace a wider range of topics. This might still happen, as I have never claimed this to be an exclusively Charlton blog. It is my blog, and as Frankie pointed out to someone who was moaning last week about his, one can do what one likes on one's own blog.

Being so dispirited by the Middlesbrough result, I found myself uninspired even to think about the Portsmouth match, despite the acquisition of Ben Thatcher and the offloading of Djimi Traore, and in fact was fast asleep while it was happening, recovering from a late night out with visiting friends. On learning that Charlton's fortunes had turned, at least for now, (though I think they very well might have) I decided that I could take up the blog again, much in the same way as before, but once that was decided, there was the problem of what to do in order to reconvene.

Idly looking through the BBC sports pages, I discovered, as you do, a fascinating piece of news. This was part of the Owen Hargreaves saga. For some days the site had been prominently displaying headlines about whether Hargreaves would be signing for Manchester United. Not being interested in Hargreaves, and despite being a graduate of Manchester University, not all that bothered about United (though I do prefer them to City, actually), I didn't really register these stories until the sheer volume of them finally forced me to take notice.

Basically, the BBC were running the same story every day, and, as with eighteenth-century classical music, the same theme was recurring but overlaid with a slight variation. So one day we learn that Hargreaves was pleading with Bayern to let him go. Then he was quite happy to stay. Then he might consider coming at the end of the season. Then Bayern were annoyed at United for unsettling him. Then there was an amazing series based on days, in which we learned that the following Thursday, no Friday, no as you were, Thursday, no... early next week, would be a day on which United would find out if they could approach Hargreaves.

All froth, and then came the fascinating bit: Hargreaves would only consider playing in the UK if, like in Continental European leagues, there was a winter break.

So no doubt, under pressure from Manchester United, English football will be having an enforced winter break next season, and Owen can come to Old Trafford, and there might be room for some proper news stories on the BBC website. Though I very much doubt it. But it gives me a lead in for restarting the blog, at least.

Mind you, the winter break, like garlic, is one of those things much espoused by UK-based writers who are convinced that everything, automatically, is done better on the Continent, and in fact this is not necessarily so. I can see that a winter break might be a good idea in places likely to experience bad weather, like Finland and Norway, but here in Spain we have had our worst winter weather in the past week, and the winter break took place over Christmas and New Year. Not only that, everyone was bored rigid during the holidays with no football on anywhere, and don't forget that the winter break means that the season ends in late June in non-World Cup years, which in Spain doesn't matter as there is no traditional summer sport to take the centre stage. You can hardly count bullfighting, after all. The cricketing authorities, not to mention Wimbledon, would surely be up in arms if this were to be the state of affairs in England.

Anyway, my winter break is now officially over. The quiz team have been doing all right, although last week we slipped to a third place result, and last night I don't know as I was in bed with the aforementioned cough (very slightly better, thank you) and have heard nothing from my team today so far.

The much-vaunted transfer window is about to close, too, and there have been rumours that Curbs is about to 'swoop' as the BBC page would call it, for Darren Bent, with £14 million, or £15 million, or even £17 million being the price. No doubt he thinks that £17 million might tempt Charlton, but I would think that this would only be true if they could immediately spend, say £11 million of it on someone just as good, and with less than two days of transfer window open, they aren't going to find anyone just like that, even if whoever it was might want to come to Charlton, anyway. Furthermore, Alan Pardew has announced that there is a good chance of Darren being in the line-up for the away fixture at Bolton tomorrow night. Charlton have not, as we know only too well, had a good season thus far, but they have already beaten Bolton twice, once in the league, once in the Carling Cup, so here's hoping for three in a row.

Transfer Window Dressing?

2007-01-13T05:03:00.000+01:00

Nottingham Forest 2 Charlton 0

Are Darren and Garry related? I think we should be told.

Those friends of mine who read my blog on a fairly regular basis think they have detected a trend. This is roughly that whenever Charlton have lost, and especially lost badly, as they did in Nottingham last weekend, then I am much more loath to put finger to key than when there is good news to celebrate. I have considered what my friends say, and my answer is "up to a point", for who would not wish to share his joy with the rest of the blog-reading and writing public when there is something to shout about? And as at the moment there isn't all that much to write home (or anywhere else) about at Charlton, then my absence from the web this week finds its explanation.

But of course this is not the whole story, and may indeed not be any part of it, for of course the holidays are over, I have returned to the Centre, and unlimited time for writing is not available to me, especially in this first week, as the routine hasn't kicked in properly yet.

The sorry tale of Charlton's defeat by Nottingham Forest is well-documented by now, and since then there has been a lot of speculation about the transfer market. As I stated last time, it rather looked as if Darren Bent was on his way, though Pards at first said he wasn't, and then that he might be, and now, again, that he isn't. There have also been rumours that one of my particular favourites, Jerome Thomas, might be off to Fulham. This has not been substantiated and there doesn't seem to be any reason why the club might want him to go there either.

And now today comes the news that Ben Thatcher, a character who was in the news for badly injuring an opponent not that long ago, has been signed from Manchester City, and that Djimi Traore has been signed by Portsmouth.

I was reminded of Traore this week, after Liverpool's sensational defeat against Arsenal in the League Cup. People at work were speculating that it was odd that Rafa Benítez doesn't seem to understand cup competitions, especially as over here in Spain they aren't regarded as all that important. And I suddenly remembered that he put a reserve team out a couple of years back when Liverpool were drawn away to my other club, Burnley, in the FA Cup. The match had been postponed due to heavy rain and so was a midweek catch-up job a couple of weeks later. Rafa, in his first season at Anfield, decided that away on a wet Tuesday night to a lower-league side didn't merit sending anyone important, and sent what was effectively a reserve side, which duly lost 1-0, the goal being a rather spectacularly silly own goal. Scored, I suddenly remembered, by a young player called Traore. Hmm.

Harry Rednapp thinks he can make something of him at Portsmouth, and let's hope so, as by all accounts he is a nice young man; but please don't let him come good till after Charlton's trip to Fratton Park in two or three weeks' time.

Oddly enough, the media have not been terribly critical of Charlton this week, and there have been numerous reports that, what with the appointment of Phil Parkinson and some timely tactics by Pards, Charlton might well climb out of trouble, now that they only have the league to bother about. Well, maybe.

Later today, Charlton host Middlesbrough. I read a very interesting story on the BBC, or was it F365? It said that Middlesbrough manager Gareth Southgate will be telling his team to try and win. Fascinating, the things these professional writers find to report about.

The picture is one I came across the other night, after the Forest defeat. Obviously I was looking for something which didn't show Charlton conceding goals, and I found this one of Charlton's Darren Ambrose and Forest's Garry Holt, and what I thought was how incredibly alike they are. Are they perhaps related? I think we should be told.

The Hopes and Fears...

2007-01-06T01:19:00.000+01:00

Arsenal 4 Charlton 0

Will we ever see anything like this again?

This will be the last blog written under the constraint of finding a heading based on Christmas carols. The Twelve Days of Christmas have run their course, and I am just finishing off taking down the Christmas decorations and cards.

Today's title is the one I used initially on the Christmas Eve blog, and then rejected in favour of something more joyful. Of course all lines about rejoicing and glad tidings are unavailable to me after Wednesday night at Ashburton Grove. So I had to search once again for more lines of gloom, though naturally there aren't that many in Christmas carols.

I started with my favourites. I am half Welsh, and I have inherited from my father that overpowering sentimentality where things like nice hymn tunes are concerned, and it is a proven fact that I can't listen very much further on than the third line of O Little Town of Bethlehem, especially if properly sung by a boys' choir, without the tears starting.

So last night, I decided to check the words to this and other carols that I like, and decided that Google was probably the best way to go about this. I was directed straight into something called the Cyber Hymnal, on which I ended up spending almost two hours looking at old favourites, carols and one or two hymns too. The site not only provides the words, but midi files of the tunes, and where a hymn or carol has more than one tune, this is also recorded and links provided.

I was quite startled, after clicking on O Little Town of Bethlehem, to hear a tune which was quite pleasant, but not the one that opens the old floodgates before the end of the first verse. More shock revelations were in the pipeline, though. Two alternative tunes were listed, and one of these turned out to be the right one, and to my amazement I discovered that it was arranged in the year 1906 by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, a composer who has written many pieces dear to my heart, and its name, of all things is Forest Green!

Regular readers will know (it is listed at the foot of the page, anyway) that my favoured Conference side are Forest Green, and the reason for this is simply that when they first appeared, I had no idea where they came from. It must have been in pre-Internet days, though it can't have been that long before. Anyway I asked various friends if they knew, and finally my old friend on Merseyside, Harry, found out for me that they were a rural outfit from somewhere in the West Country, he thought. By then I had spent so much time finding out who they were that I found myself caring whether they won or lost.

I subsequently learned that they are from the Gloucestershire town of Nailsworth, in the Forest of Dean, and which famous British composer was a Gloucestershire man through and through? Why, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, of course. So this has left me wondering whether the club owes its name to a fellow-enthusiast of my favourite carol. And although, as I say, I am keen on Forest Green, I have not as yet visited the Forest of Dean to watch them, so I now have this bizarre notion that they must run out on to the pitch to a cheery, jazzed-up rendition over the tannoy of.... but surely not.

As far as hopes and fears down in SE7 are concerned, there is a lot more to wonder about. Mainly whether Charlton will bounce back into the Premiership at the first attempt next season, as they did in 1999-2000, and whether Darren Bent will ever turn out for the club again.

Andy Gray of Football 365 thinks that both Watford and Charlton are dead in the water, and while it is not my custom to agree with or in any other way endorse what old pros turned sports hacks usually say, I can't help feeling he might be right on this one. For on Tuesday, one day before the Arsenal game, it was announced that Darren B. had a knee injury which would keep him out; he had hurt himself against Aston Villa and although he had struggled through to the end, this had only brought about complications. "Well, fair enough", I thought. "But who the hell is going to score against Arsenal if he isn't going to be around?"

Well the answer to that one wasn't hard to see. No one. And so it proved. Mind you, referee Mike 'Old Mother' Riley didn't help matters by sending Osei Sankofa off, either, and despite his appeal being rejected by the FA, who have also doubled his suspension for having had the nerve to appeal at all, there are many who were there who felt that Old Mother Riley went too far, but 1-0 down at Arsenal and reduced to ten men, none of whom was Darren Bent, after 31 minutes; well of course the score was going to end up like that; it's a miracle it wasn't any worse.

Running alongside all this has been the constant build-up of press rumours that Darren Bent will be leaving Charlton in the transfer window. The main reason for this is that the media don't like Charlton having any good players, and whenever they do get one, then he is relentlessly associated with each and every other club, until he becomes thoroughly unsettled and demands a move, as happened with Spotty Parker, and much good it did him. Our new manager nonetheless assured everyone that Darren was keen to stay and help save Charlton from going down. But then came the announcement that the crocked knee would be keeping Darren out of the FA Cup tie at Nottingham Forest tomorrow, coupled with the news that Liverpool have requested Charlton not to play Scott Carson, as when (I am sure they said 'when', not 'if') they get to the Cup Final, they might need him, and won't be able to use him if he is cup-tied.

And then the usual Charlton bloggers and their contributors began to smell a rat. If Charlton are planning to sell Bent, then he is going to be a more attractive proposition if he isn't cup-tied, either. And then it was announced that the injury, which no one noticed during the actual Villa match, would keep Darren out till February, and now Alan Pardew is saying that if he isn't going to have a goalscorer till then, he may have to sell Darren to get the cash to buy one, before the transfer window shuts again.

So, lots of fears there, but one or two hopes. The appointment of Phil Parkinson as Alan Pardew's assistant is excellent news for Charlton, but whether miracles can be achieved in the short term is another matter.

As for Forest (Nottingham Forest, that is), well Lawro thinks it will be a draw. What this means I hesitate to say.

Glory Be

2006-12-31T02:54:00.000+01:00

Charlton 2 Aston Villa 1

The heading for the current piece is still in line with the current policy during the 12 Days of Christmas, of using lines from carols. These two words are from one of the later verses of Once in Royal David's City, but of course they were pretty much what I felt like shouting out at about 1555 Madrid time earlier today, when, having resigned myself to another home draw, and nothing to cheer the upcoming turn of the year, I saw the Livescore readout suddenly change from 1-1 to 2-1. This was followed soon afterwards by the number 90, indicating that the game was still on, though in extra time, being replaced by the letters FT, standing for full-time.

OK, Charlton still have a long way to go, and Sheffield United's win over Arsenal later on was not really good news, but one thing at a time. Charlton have drawn, and won, the two games under our new manager Alan Pardew, who, God help us, was appointed only six nights ago. Yes, they were home games against clubs we might be expected to beat, but even games like these were not producing anything much earlier in the season.

So, in honour of our new manager, and by the way, he is, according to The Inspector, the manager, none of this 'head coach', 'management structure' business, I have decided to abandon the series of nice Christmas pictures from the Spiritwolf website with which I have headed the two previous Christmastide pieces, in favour of a shot of our new hero, and as you can see, Mr Pardew (to sound like an Evertonian for a moment) looks just like what a Charlton manager should look like: i.e. he is fairish-grey, not unhandsome, and blue-eyed, just like Curbs. Not only that, also like Curbs, his nickname is self-selecting: you take the first syllable of his name and add an s. What could be simpler? Frankie Valley christened Iain Dowie 'Monica', for some convoluted reason which you can find for yourselves on Frankie's archive if you are so inclined, and when Les Reed came along, Frankie dubbed him 'Lou'. This was not really in keeping with the way things have to be done at Charlton, and so the new manager and his name are a Good Thing (for even older readers).

At least now that Steven Pressley has signed for Celtic rather than Charlton, we will be spared any references to Elvis, though I have already seen two distinct mentions of Mr Pressley having left the room, during that brief time when he might have been going to become a Charlton player.

As for the game, well I have only read Frankie and The Inspector so far, and of course the BBC. The BBC, as is par for the course with them, emphasised that Charlton's second goal was a last-minute one, seeming as always to imply that it shouldn't really count, and that it was against 'ten-man' Villa, again rather implying that Charlton had had one of them shot, whereas if Mr Gareth Barry hadn't thought it a good idea to haul down Dennis Rommedahl on his way to goal (he invariably misses, anyway) then Villa would have ended the game all square, personnel-wise at any rate. However, even the BBC conceded that Charlton deserved the win, especially after being robbed on Wednesday night. Frankie and the Inspector are of the opinion that Charlton were still not terribly good, and Frankie went a bit further and said that Villa were the worst Premiership side he had ever seen, or something. Surely not?

All in all, much food for thought as the year ends, and we look to Tuesday and Charlton's first visit to the Emirates Stadium, yet another new lump of concrete with a silly name. What has Arsenal FC got to do with the UAE that they name their new ground after it? Eh?

PS: In response to rather fewer requests than I had hoped for, but there has been one, the reference to Mrs Freeman's cat at the end of the last piece is to do with the 'fifties radio serial Mrs Dale's Diary; Mrs Dale's mother was called Mrs Freeman (played, how these things stay in one's memory, I can hear the announcer reading the cast list now, by Dorothy Lane); Mrs Freeman had a cat. He was called Captain. Pronounced, in the style of the day, "keptin".

Happy New Year.

Bitter as the Gall

2006-12-29T12:46:00.000+01:00

Charlton 2 Fulham 2

Alan Pardew continues to play Santa, and checks his transfer-window wish list.

My last blog was written, in line with the founding philosophy and therefore the nomenclature, late at night, or early in the morning, according to your lights. And it spent what was left of the night with the title 'Hopes and Fears', which I had applied to the heading at the commencement. However, before I actually got to the end of writing it, I found out about Charlton's new manager, and added a paragraph or two, and changed the caption on the Christmas picture to reflect the arrival of the new boss, and then I went to bed.

As is my custom on Madrid Nights, I always have another look at what I have written in the cold light of, er... noon, mostly, and in the case of the last piece, I made a lot of changes, corrected a couple of errors and the like, and then I remembered what fun it had been last year to give every piece during the 12 days of Christmas the name of a carol, and then try to bend whatever I was writing about to fit. You can check last year's archive if you have a mind to, but as Charlton were not doing all that well at the time (plus ça change) I was able to make use of titles such as In the Bleak Midwinter, and then when Charlton recorded that fine 2-0 victory over West Ham on New Year's Day, Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.

Thus, in the light of the news about Pards, as he is apparently to be called by the usual suspects on the various Charlton websites (see Frankie et al, links top right), I changed the humdrum 'Hopes and Fears', to the name of a favourite carol of mine, which was apparently written by two clergymen from New England round about 1849.

I also announced that I would try and emulate my feat of title-giving, this year, but and oh, how prudent, added that if this proved to be impossible, I would use internal lines from carols. And this is what I have done, here, after Fulham's late equaliser, courtesy of a ludicrous decision by the absurd Graham Poll, robbed Charlton of what sounded like three well-deserved points. I am not going into details here, as the Inspector has them.

However it is indicative of the atmosphere among the aforementioned usual suspects that, despite not going to join all the other football fans at the pub for the live game (our beloved landlady reported one day last year that precisely none of them turned up when a Charlton fixture was featured - and it was against Chelsea as well), I sat here at the computer and followed the BBC live updates page, which adds a few descriptive lines of the match and updates every two minutes. I only meant to check the starting line-ups at first, and then retire to bed with a good book (it was a very cold night) for the duration, and was indeed on the point of so doing when Bent equalised after 19 minutes, So I hung on and then by half time the score was 2-1, where it stayed, right up to the 94th minute (no one knows where Mr Poll got that number from, either, if it was he who decided this), just when I was promising myself a small bottle of cava to celebrate.

So the title, from the third verse of The Holly and the Ivy, explains itself.

Late news: Atypically, I am writing this in the morning, having begun around 9.50, and as I near the end, I discover that Charlton have just signed China captain Zheng Zhi on loan till the end of the season, and are quite likely to adopt homeless Hearts captain Steven Pressley, too, once that much-anticipated window opens, er, tomorrow?

So, two new captains. All Charlton need to do now is sign Mrs Freeman's cat (for very much older listeners).

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

2006-12-25T05:30:00.000+01:00

Is that Alan Pardew deciding who to put on the transfer list ready for January?

Well, finally I can sit back and take life easy for a couple of weeks. Term ended on Friday, and with it the ceaseless round of marking tests and exams, writing reports, and going out celebrating the upcoming anniversary of the Nativity of Our Blessed Lord on tides of booze. And since then I have been recovering.

I was happy enough about the upcoming festivities of course, and this year have decided to stay at home in Madrid, and not spend time queuing at airports for possibly non-existent flights (the fog in London threw quite a lot of my colleagues into a flat spin. Rob was so upset on Friday night, not knowing if his connection from Heathrow to Newcastle on Saturday would be on, that he had little appetite for his beer for a while, till his father rang and told him that it was OK, whereupon he more than made up for his previous abstemiousness - not that I am in a position to point the finger), and anyway all the security precautions last time I travelled were very off-putting.

I was also happy that, despite a late night with my quiz team mates after the staff dinner on Monday, we all reported fit for the Charity Quiz on the Tuesday, and put out a full team, and, as usual, won comfortably, again thanks to the excellent questions prepared by our old friends, the chief Old Farts themselves, Luis and David.

I am also happy that Christmas will be relatively simple - just a quiet dinner in the early evening with an old friend whom I have invited round, of home-made tomato soup, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and vegetables, and maybe ice cream, as I haven't done puddings and though I made a dozen mince pies a fortnight ago, they have been unaccountably consumed already.

And I am happy that Boxing Day is not a holiday in Spain and I'll be able to stroll out and get a haircut and do some shopping, and generally appreciate being on holiday, and also meet up for drinks in a normal way with the only other team member currently in town, Mush, and one or two other chums.

But of course, the way things have been down at Charlton have conspired to make me very unhappy indeed. I have been much too busy to write about any of it, even if I had been able to tell a better story of the whole sad sequence of events than the Inspector or Wyn Grant (see links, at right). But losing against Liverpool last Saturday was bad enough, as this is a fixture Charlton often win, and then there was the debacle against Wycombe on Tuesday. This was the night of the quiz, so it was just as well I had something to be pleased about.

And although it isn't Charlton-related, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Real Madrid get thumped 3-0 at home by Recreativo de Huelva, Spain's oldest football club, on Wednesday night. (Incidentally, has it never occurred to anyone to wonder why there is only one oldest football club per country, England's of course being Notts County? Who did they play against?)

The Middlesbrough match again gave me some hope - they aren't much good, we won this one comfortably last season, and so on, and the law of averages alone might have brought about a change in the series of disasters, but it was not to be, and I felt rather like someone having a series of blows rained on him; after a while you know it is happening as a whole but individual blows are not perceived separately.

And now, having read in the Observer earlier yesterday how awful Charlton were, I discover that Les Reed, despite signing a new 3-year contract not long ago, has been replaced by Alan Pardew, apparently in line with what the players wanted, who has signed a 3½-year contract...

The commentators who have broken ground are rejoicing (well it is Christmas Day) that Charlton have a proper manager again, and I hope it will be the case, rather than a member of a 'management structure', as Iain Dowie was. For we have a management structure at the Centre, and in my opinion it really is not the best way to achieve success, whatever the actual members of it might think.

Anyway, a press conference at The Valley tomorrow, then Fulham on Wednesday, and a little bit of peace on Earth and good will to all men in the meantime. As last year, for all blog pieces between now and 6 January, I shall try to force the title of a well-known Christmas carol to fit whatever it is I am talking about; failing that, I might find a relevant line at least. As it was not long after midnight on that holiest of nights that the news of Alan Pardew's appointment was vouchsafed unto me, today's title was a breeze.

A happy Christmas to you all.

Unveiling

2006-12-16T11:48:00.000+01:00

Tottenham 5 Charlton 1

There is a rather nice bit in one of E.F Benson's Lucia novels, where Georgie, usually the most patient of men, suddenly tires of Lucia prattling on (though of course he doesn't dare mention it) and wishes that he could treat her as if she were a parrot, i.e. throw a large piece of green baize over her. He imagines himself asking one of the servants to fetch Mrs Lucas's baize, and then covering her with it to shut her up.

When he was prepared to listen to her again, 'unveil', I think, would have been the word he would have used.

Another use of 'unveil' I recall, was, as a schoolboy, a Catholic one, in England, at Easter, when all the statues, holy pictures and crucifixes, which had been covered over with purple velvet during Passiontide, were joyously unveiled as the parish prepared to celebrate the Resurrection.

And then one read (by now I was at university) that Dame Sybil Thorndike was coming to unveil a plaque on the wall (or in the foyer) of our new University Theatre, and thus set it in motion, notwithstanding that it had been in use, featuring myself among others, for a couple of months anyway.

So I know what 'unveil' means: to remove a cover and reveal something prepared previously; a bit like those fifties TV cookery programmes, or Blue Peter with their 'here's one I made earlier' ethos.

But about five years ago, or maybe even more recently than that, I started to see references to clubs' new signings being 'unveiled', the one sticking in my mind most being when half of the city of Newcastle took the afternoon off to go and greet Michael Owen, whom I bizarrely imagined standing motionless in the centre circle at St. James's Park, shrouded in purple velvet, waiting for the covers to be whisked off at the tug of a drawstring by some local personality, to the rapture of those devoted fans, who, as we are constantly reminded, are massively keen on their club, as if this were somehow unusual.

Anyway, feeling glum after Les Reed had replaced one good player with one bad one, thus turning a 1-2 deficit which looked as though it could be pulled back, to a 1-5 reverse, I went in to the Centre as usual on Monday. Mush said he'd been on the point of asking me round to his place the night before as Spanish TV were showing all the Premiership goals,... "a high percentage of which were scored against Charlton", I finished for him before kicking him in the shins (not really).

Mush added that the BBC and all the other media had decided that Curbs was going to manage West Ham once Pardew got the boot, which they had, conveniently, also predicted. Remembering all the confident assertions about Charlton's next manager, all of which were wrong, a couple of weeks back, and in the early summer, I took no notice of this until later in the week when I read on the BBC that West Ham would be unveiling our beloved Great Man that afternoon. Again that weird image, this time of Curbs, draped in purple velvet, silent, still and awaiting the call, flashed through my mind, but this time the media had for once got it right. But at least Curbs did not jump ship for West Ham. They had been approaching him off and on for a long time, and the time is now right, in the sense that rightly or wrongly, and a lot think the latter, West Ham ditched Pardew after a 4-0 defeat.

So Curbs is unveiled, and Pardew is out of a job. Many think it would be fitting if he came to Charlton, as they think Les Reed is not up to things. Many wouldn't hear of this as Pardew is an ex-Palace player. And then anyway Les Reed signed a new contract to take him through to 2009.

I write this on Saturday morning, an increasingly frequent phenomenon; maybe I should change the blog name to Madrid Saturday Mornings, though it doesn't have the same ring to it. Charlton face Liverpool at 1245 GMT, a match which Lawro thinks Liverpool will win 3-0, and as he never usually predicts heavier losses than 2-0, things down Charlton way must look bad to him. But then, as en ex-Liverpool player (though not a Scouser as I have seen him described on Frankie's page - he's from the Preston area, like me), maybe he would say that. I am not going to sit here repeatedly pressing the F5 key on Livescore; I am going to do some of the weekend shopping before coming back for brunch and an afternoon's exam marking.

I close with slightly more personal news, in that as we approach both Christmas and the end of term, I am up to my eyes in reports, exam marking, Christmas cards and letters, and still fighting off the remnants of my cold, which has struck down most of my quiz team mates, too. Mush and I are all better now, but Antony has it really bad, and John isn't too good either. Sam seems OK, and Hugh too, I think, but it is a virulent one, all the same.

Without Antony, we narrowly defeated our old rivals and chums 112-111 in a low-key quiz last Monday, and we await Tuesday's charity do with eager anticipation, and a hoped-for clean bill of health.

Un Año en el Infierno

2006-12-07T03:10:00.000+01:00

Sheffield United 2 Charlton 1
Charlton 1 Blackburn R. 0

Radostin Kishishev celebrates Talal El Kharkhouri's winner against Blackburn

The title, literally translating as 'One (or A) Year in Hell', was part of one of the questions I forgot to use in Monday night's quiz. As I mentioned the other day, I was doing half of the quiz-mastering, under our new arrangement whereby two people perform each week, on a kind of rotation basis. This rotation is quite planetary, in that certain satellites recur every two or three weeks, and then people like me, or Mush, appear approximately every six months, and our old friends David and Luis of the Old Farts turn up just once a year, like Santa, around Christmas, when they do the traditional Charity Quiz (book your seats now, for 19 December).

[I know 19 December is a Tuesday, but our team is being very kindly accommodated by the other quiz guys and gals, as the 18th is the date of the Centre's annual Christmas bash, an event which no one wishes to forgo.]

And as I also mentioned in my last, I have been suffering from what my diary for last year indicates is my annual winter cold and cough. Monday dawned bright, clear and awful for me, as despite my resting up at home all weekend, my chest was still tight and my nose runny. I did not want to leave my bed; I had a long and difficult day at the Centre, Monday, for various reasons, being my worst teaching day. But usually one knows that a jolly evening at the quiz awaits at the end of it all.

But I considered everything; I could phone the Centre and quite truthfully say I was unwell, but then how would my lovely little 4 Juniors get their grammar and vocab test, for which they would have been diligently swotting all weekend, as I had the original here at home, where I had been revising it? They wouldn't want to spend another week worrying about the thing, so I couldn't leave them in the lurch, and then if I pulled out of the quiz, Alex or Tony, two of the inner planets, would be forced to spend a working day trying to put together some questions.

Of course I could send my questions to someone and ask them to be read out, but that would not be too satisfactory either; if you ask questions, you have to defend them against the customary barracking that emanates from the Old Farts, the rest of us being too polite, and also modify them if you realise that no one has any idea of what you are asking them. So no, not really.

There was nothing for it but to go through with it. My classes went well, the walk to the Centre made me feel a bit better, the Juniors finished their test in record time, and got good marks, and don't have to worry, and I got through my final class, with a slight temperature and a bit of tightness in my chest accruing by the end.

Then Mush announced that he was going home as he felt awful; in fact he felt much like I did. But I had decided to go ahead, there was nothing for it, and I rounded up John and Antony and we got a cab to the pub.

Once my fellow inquisitor Alex arrived, I begged to be allowed to be first on as I wasn't sure if the voice would hold out, and I started in.

It is not my purpose to give a minute description of the whole thing, but after a quick general round featuring questions, or answers which contained the letter Z, I went into a round solely about football.

And it was a disaster; my friends will rush forward here and declare that this is not so, but they are very kind and polite, and the more I look at this round, the more I wonder what possessed me. I asked a Liverpool question, knowing that there were a couple of fans in the room, but I did not ask anything about the glorious times these two boys have enjoyed while watching Liverpool; I asked how many years the club had spent in Division 2 in the fifties and sixties, to remind them that it has not all been life at the top. Of course they didn't know, and neither did anyone else (8, from 1954-62). They didn't know because one of them wasn't even born till 1974, and the other about ten years earlier, maybe. And anyway they weren't interested. I asked other questions which a 1974-born Manchester United fan couldn't answer either, though it only concerned the number of post-war managers they have had.

Then I looked at my list of questions and realised there were only 9, not 10. This was appalling, and I could have sworn etcetera... I hastily decided on asking which of the three promoted clubs in the Premiership had never been there before, and that was that, and I moved on to my other rounds, which do not concern us here.

It was only much later that I realised that question 10 had been there all along, attached to question 9, and with its number removed, by the mysterious gremlin which controls Microsoft Word, the worst word-processing program I have ever used, which by virtue of corporate dictat, is the only one available at the Centre.

The question was "About which Spanish football club was the book Un Año en el Infierno written, and why did it prove to be a bit of a misnomer?" The answer is Atlético de Madrid, and their seasons outside the Spanish top divison. The book title is a misnomer as Atlético Madrid spent more than just one year outside the top flight before securing their return. And if I had asked it, it would have upset my team-mate Hugh, a very keen supporter of Atleti, and who, oddly for an English guy, does not support any other club, anywhere.

So why was I, when I looked back, filling up my quiz round on football with the kinds of things people would prefer to ignore? And of course it was quite obvious when I thought about it some more. It is that my beloved Charlton seem to be heading for Un Año en el Infierno themselves, and my choice of questions was being subconsciously influenced by this.

The other bloggers and commentators had nothing to say after the disastrous performance at Sheffield United, except that we might as well get used to being one division lower down next season, and by no means certain to bounce back out of it like last time, There were no excuses; I used the word 'abysmal' to head my piece about the Reading game; this was worse, apparently.

I spent Tuesday evening in a merrier mood with some of my colleagues. Wednesday, 6 December is Constitution Day in Spain, and a national holiday; Friday, 8 December is the Catholic feast of the Immaculate Conception; and for many people all over Spain, Thursday, 7 December is a 'puente', or 'bridge', where two proper holidays are made into something better, and attached to a weekend, by just turning an inconvenient day into a 'bridge'.

This year the Centre decided we would get the lot, i.e. even my Saturday-working colleagues will have the day free, and so Tuesday was a bit of a party night, and it was enlivened by the transmission on the Centre's local bar's TV screen, of the Barcelona game, which almost all of us wanted Barcelona to win.

I will have to deal with this phenomenon another time, but briefly, most Brits in Madrid prefer Barcelona to Real Madrid, as dyed-in-the-wool Madrid fans, of whom we meet very many, are just so awful. Their Barcelona equivalents probably are, too, and I imagine our British colleagues living up there will favour Madrid on the same principle, but anyway, if Barcelona are playing, then usually we want them to win.

We happily watched them do this, and qualify, had a couple or five beers, wished those friends of ours who were Britain-bound bon voyage, and I happily wandered out into the rain and got a taxi home.

On arrival, I logged on to see the other Champions' League results, and it was not until that moment that I remembered Charlton's home game against Blackburn. Denial or what?

I had no time to worry about the score, for the joyous news was already appearing in front of me. And a quick scan of the usual suspects indicated that the win was deserved, too.

So what now? Is this the turn-round we have been waiting for? (And against my hated Blackburn, too) Or are we still bound for our own Año en el Infierno?

I do not know, but at least I feel happier about things. And I don't have to return to work till next Monday, either.

Laid Up

2006-12-02T15:57:00.000+01:00

Charlton 1 Everton 1

Luke Young in action against Everton

I have been busy this week; I am writing questions for the quiz this coming Monday, when, in accordance with our new constitution, I will be asking fifty per cent of the questions.

There was also a visit from my old friend Annie, the travel writer, last seen on my trip to Barcelona in August, so I never really got round to writing anything about the above game, though this is as much due to there not being much to say as to the extra calls on my time.

Amy Lawrence in The Observer started by saying that Everton deserved more, but said that by the end Charlton might easily have won, so I don't know what to make of that.

I, and the rest of the usual suspects, thought that a draw was better than losing, that Dennis Rommedahl could be really good if he had a bit more confidence, and that Andy Reid looks a very promising prospect. Hard luck, also to Herman Hreidarsson who was booked and then debited with an own goal during one five-minute spell.

And then Watford went and lost at home to Sheffield United the other night.

Charlton did not have a league game during this week, but that will be rectified this coming Tuesday with a home game against Blackburn Rovers.

As I finish this, Charlton are due to kick off at Sheffield United, and all I can think is that it would be wonderful if Charlton could win these next two games; everything would take on a different perspective.

But I have gone down with a rather nasty attack of flu, or a cold, whatever, so once this is posted and I have had a bit of brunch, having staggered out to do the weekend shopping, I am off back to bed. If Charlton get a positive result in Sheffield, then it might buck me up to such an extent that I write about it. We shall see.

The quiz team won again though, after a lapse the previous week, but this was largely due to our old friends the Old Farts carelessly throwing away a 27-point half-time lead.

Abysmal

2006-11-23T14:06:00.000+01:00

Reading 2 Charlton 0

Mark Robson and Les Reed have an awful lot to do

When, dear readers, is a blog not a blog? This old-fashioned riddle formulation comes to mind this cold grey Madrid morning (yes, we do get them, just not so many as other places) as I try to make sense of the crisis at Charlton. The various other bloggers, including an excellent writer called New York Addick, have explained it all so trenchantly and effectively that for once I feel redundant, where Charlton are concerned, and thus today's blog piece is not so much a blog piece as a kind of clearing house or phone exchange pointing to other places. (See helpful new reference links list, at right).

The consensus is that the way Charlton played at Reading on Saturday was their worst performance since the 1-6 home defeat to Leeds during their relegation season (Leeds's, not Charlton's, though they both seem to be having one of those right now), and that assistant-coach Mark Robson and Les Reed, nice chaps though they are, have got a hell of a task on their hands. For once, the Charlton bloggers and commentators were harder than some of the media. Jon West of The Observer wrote a fair and unbiased piece.

And the quiz team tumbled to our first defeat in six outings, though we only had Antony for half of the evening, as he was, under our new double quizmaster system, asking the questions in the first half, joining his own team in the second. And Hugh, being a trifle under the weather, was not with us either.

All the same, 'abysmal' is perhaps too harsh a word for the quiz team. Not, though, for Charlton.

Saturday Morning, 11 a.m.

2006-11-18T11:29:00.000+01:00

Les Reed (left) and Peter Varney

Quite a shock, the news of the departure of Monica, as Frankie (see helpful new direct reference links, right) had christened Iain Dowie. And before the usual fatuous media speculation (I saw one reference to the "race" to become Charlton manager) about Glenn Hoddle, Alan Pardew (currently in charge at West Ham, anyway); Billy Davies (doing perfectly well at Derby); and even the return of the sainted Alan Curbishley, could get off the ground, the club firmly announced that they had made one minor adjustment to the coaching and management structure, and that the Dowie affair had been building up for some time.

Mihir Bose, once of the Burnley Express, now of the Daily Telegraph, has the story.

The Charlton directors Peter Varney and Richard Murray have spent a lot of time and invested a lot of money in this venture, and although Curbs is credited with the invention of the new Charlton of the late 20th / early 21st century, they have been keen to point out the importance of their role at the helm. And they, aware that things were not well within the club, and not just in the league table, carried out a complete consultation of all staff, in confidence, and the upshot was that Mr. Dowie had to depart. The Kent Messenger also has a good, brief, readable account, here. (And as you can see, it's where I got, and mostly get, my pictures from).

The general feeling is that Les Reed, dubbed 'Lou', by Frankie, in a startlingly original move, will be the right man. The media don't see it this way, for, as well as feeling peeved about being deprived of days of pointless speculation, they regard Hoddle as a sad loser, and would love to see him and Charlton, whom they also see in the same role, make their way right down to the Conference together. The media have also complained that Les Reed is not a proper manager, although a man who has the breadth of experience, and qualifications, that he has, and is also 50-odd, and has been in the game for years at the highest levels, is more of a proper manager in my books than all these unproven ex-internationals like Gareth Southgate, or Roy Keane, whose appointment at Sunderland the press were very thrilled about. They find him fascinating, as witness this priceless snippet from the BBC page this morning:

Roy Keane will be reunited with a key figure next week when his dog Triggs moves up to the Sunderland area with the rest of the family.

I am posting this prior to departure for two or three of the many fine supermarkets in Madrid's 28015 and 28010 districts, to do the weekend shopping. I do not know what this afternoon's visit to Reading will bring, though obviously I am hoping that Les Reed gets a fine start to his new position, but as Wyn Grant (see right, again), points out, not everything is going to rest on this one first game.

PS: I think there was a Miss Triggs at my primary school, who left a year or two before I went there. Can Keane possibly....? No, of course not, and now I'm getting interested, too. Not.

PPS: Mainly for John, if he reads this, I know that putting morning and AM in the same phrase is a tautology, but it is a slight reworking of the title of a Simon & Garfunkel album.

Hey, ho, the wind and the rain

2006-11-14T12:25:00.000+01:00

Wigan 3 Charlton 2

Darren Bent (above left) scored Charlton's first goal

During the course of our fifth consecutive win at the quiz last night (this one was after tie-break questions had merely prolonged the stalemate, and the outcome finally depended on a solitary question, the first correct answer to be shouted out to secure it, and Hugh did it for us), Mush turned to me and remarked on the fact that Charlton had lost again. He is a QPR fan, I think they won this weekend. I like Mush, of course, as I do all my team-mates; they really are mates and all that that entails. So I told him the truth, and it is that I am running out of excuses.

There have been the 'bedding in', like transplanted lobelias, of new managers and a lot of new players, there have been injuries; there have been tough fixtures for the start of a season - all the biggest clubs have been played now. And Newcastle.

So away to Wigan, after four games without defeat, and the results against Man City and Bolton indicating that perhaps the Lancashire / North West jinx is broken, we were entitled to expect something; maybe a draw, at any rate. Neither I nor my fellow-bloggers and commentators expected Charlton to lose; that was right out; a draw minimum, and very possibly a win. Jerome Thomas and the two Bent boys (no relation) would be available, and Andy Reid, and Faye, and Souleymane Diawara, and Luke Young of course, and Scott Carson, who has been magnificent in keeping the goals out this past month. What could go wrong?

Yet, what did I find on returning from the supermarket? (I had to go in the afternoon as the evening was earmarked for my oldest chum's birthday celebrations. Well he's my oldest chum in Madrid, at any rate) I logged on for the half-time scores and bloody Wigan were 2-0 up.

OK, Charlton pulled one back, and that gave me hope for a little while, but then it went to 3-1 and Marcus Bent's 89th minute goal was but a consolation. Losing 3-2 looks reasonable on paper. Only, you still don't get any points for it, and Charlton are once more sole tenants of that bottom slot, even Newcastle having scraped a point against Man City.

I didn't get round to reading the accounts till the next day, my friend's birthday celebrations having gone on late into the night, and a jolly good time we all had, too. The consensus was that Wigan's first-half goals were mainly down to the fact that it was a blustery wet afternoon, and this helped the ball into the back of the net. These helpful conditions, of course, are only favourable to local sides. Just, in fact, as I said last year about the Blackburn game, which you can get to here, so I don't have to go through it all again.

My title comes from William Shakespeare. I thought I remembered it from a school production of Twelfth Night many years ago, but I put the above words into Google and it led me to the correct source, King Lear. Mind you, before I reached any mention of England's, and the world's, greatest writer, I had to wade through about five pages of references to Madness and other contemporary music icons. Music does really rule everyone's lives these days. No one seems to be able to do anything unless it be to the accompaniment of heavy thumping noises and tuneless wailing. But, as Antony often says, 'don't get me started'...

The full quote is:

He that has and a little tiny wit--
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,--
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
For the rain it raineth every day.

and I think there's an awful message for Charlton there, especially in the light of this morning's shock horror headlines, and perhaps for the smaller clubs everywhere.

For I had just about roughed this piece out when I went on my daily visit to the BBC Football page, to discover that Charlton have sacked ~~manager~~ head coach Iain Dowie.

I think they might have given him a bit longer, but the official line is that his fierce man-management techniques have destroyed morale down at Sparrows Lane.

So once again, or at least until someone at Chelsea breaks wind unexpectedly, as one contributor on Frankie's blog put it, Charlton are hitting the headlines.

And the usual dreary suspects, including, God help us, Glenn Hoddle, are being touted, and Billy Davies, sixties girl singer turned dour Scottish Derby County manager, who didn't get the job in the summer, is also in the frame, as they say.

But I must take advantage of the fact that here in Madrid, for the time being, the wind and the rain have ceased, and I have to do the weekly wash (from the week beginning 30 October, that is)...

So there'll be more on the Charlton managerial crisis in a day or so.

Winning Ways

2006-11-10T01:29:00.000+01:00

Charlton 1 Manchester City 0
Chesterfield 3 Charlton 3 (Aet. Charlton win 4-3 on penalties)

Jerome Thomas avoids a successful sliding tackle from Joey Barton,
as a small minor planet seems to cross the Valley touchline,
during the Manchester City match.

Once again, the headlong rush of fixtures has caught me out; I had a slightly fuller social programme last weekend than I usually do, with it being Bonfire Night, as indeed I shall this coming weekend, as it will feature, among other things, the birthday of one of my oldest and best friends.

Guy Fawkes Night is not, of course, a Spanish thing, despite Fawkes apparently having had a Spanish mum, but another old English friend, who has some land around his house, some 20 miles outside the city, usually provides a few fireworks, and a fire, and a Guy, and English sausages (easier to get nowadays than formerly) with bubble and squeak afterwards, all washed down in splendidly non-English style with good quality cava.

And as we watched the flames leap into the sky, despite the constantly falling rain. I felt reasonably content, even though all I knew about the Charlton - City game was the result, for Charlie's bonfire party had started at half past seven, and I had had to leave the house almost as soon as the results came in.

Yet the result seems to have been fair enough, with Scott Carson again being outstanding in goal. And as my friend and colleague Caroline drove us westwards away from the city in the pouring rain, Charlton rose off the bottom of the table, only to return there a couple of hours later when Sheffield United won at Newcastle, which surprised me much less than it did most people, for as you know, I don't consider the Barcodes, as Wyn Grant calls them, to be all that much cop, and I never have, much. (I suppose in this day and age people actually see barcodes much more than they see magpies, so the change of nickname is in keeping with our times).

"Not to worry", I said to myself, "West Ham are sure to get thumped by Arsenal tomorrow, and if there is more than 2 goals in it, then the Hammers will be bottom by Sunday evening". But that didn't happen either, though on the whole I consoled myself with the thought that it doesn't matter if Charlton are bottom of the table now, as long as they aren't too near it by April next year.

Tuesday night brought the League Cup game at Chesterfield, a League 1 (old Division 3) side who had already knocked out two Premiership sides. West Ham are one of these and I cannot for the life of me remember the other. Anyway, I was reasonably confident about this tie, despite Charlton's lousy record against lower-league sides in cup competitions. But as I logged on at the end of my Tuesday night class, before leaving the Centre to join colleagues for a beer or four, I noticed that with 37 minutes gone, Charlton were losing 1-0. I put it out of my mind, though, and concentrated on enjoying my evening, checking the score on arrival home some time after midnight, and there we were. Apparently Scott Carson saved the day, as well as two Chesterfield penalties.

On Monday night our Quiz Team were without Sam, on a training course in Eastern Europe all this week, and I managed to get our old friend and team member Frank, now managing another Centre of ours some miles outside the city. He proved to be a perfect sub for Sam, and we swept cheerily to our fourth victory in a row, which pleased us, and displeased some others, as you might expect.

So winning ways it is, for the present, and it looks as though Charlton's North West jinx is broken, as Charlton's only league victories have been at the expense of Bolton and Manchester City, and next up on Saturday it's Wigan's ~~historic~~ JJB Stadium, owned by a rather disagreeable ex-Blackburn Rovers full-back called Whelan. I don't do forecasts, pointless exercise, but sometimes I have a hunch.

Though this time I haven't; I hope Charlton will do well, but I don't feel up to pronouncing any further on that score.

And I chose the picture at the top mainly because I was struck by how very much footballs have changed in appearance, and as I say, that one looks like a small planet. Perhaps it was visiting SE7 to fill us in on what the stars have in store for us.

Time Travelling

2006-11-01T23:44:00.000+01:00

Newcastle 0 Charlton 0

Glenn Roeder realises that he and his team aren't all that wonderful.

This was the first time Charlton have come home from an away game with anything under their belts; there have been two League Cup victories, and a win and a draw in the League, but all at The Valley, until this repeat of last season's score was achieved at St. James's Park.

I wasn't all that surprised, as Newcastle, as I am constantly telling you, aren't that good. OK, I know Charlton aren't, either, but there was no reason for anyone to be surprised at this scoreline, and it did lift my spirits a bit until I read the reports, which were not encouraging. Newcastle dominated throughout but couldn't score the goals they needed.

Spotty Parker was particularly disappointed, of course, but then he has to prove, to himself as much as to anyone else, that he has in any way advanced his career by walking out on Charlton almost three years ago. He made some comment to the effect that Newcastle had dominated so much that it was unfair. I was reminded of that famous occasion on 15 April 1963. Tottenham Hotspur beat Liverpool 7-2 that day. The legendary (though in my view it was Bob Paisley who did the really good work in those days) Bill Shankly was asked to comment. Prefacing his answer with that famous Scottish wailing sound of his (like a set of bagpipes starting up) he said: "if Jimmy Greaves hadna scored three goals, and we'd scored three more, we'd have beat them easy".

Anyway, I read a few reports, and checked in with Frankie Valley and The Inspector, and one fact did begin to emerge. Scott Carson's goalkeeping skills had been paramount. So the truth of the matter is that Newcastle dominated in midfield yet were always thwarted by Scott Carson.

This realisation took me back in time to Easter Monday 1962, when I persuaded my father to give his new car a run out across the county to distant Blackpool to watch Burnley play there. I had been with my cousin Richard to see the reverse fixture at Turf Moor on Good Friday, and Burnley had won 2-0, and had looked as though they might well repeat the performance on the Monday. True, they went to Sheffield on the Saturday and lost 2-0 to United there, while Blackpool were beating Manchester City 3-1, but I still felt optimistic.

To my surprise, my father agreed, I think more out of a wish to drive his new car a greater distance than usual, and of course he paid for everything, so my pocket money did not have to be depleted by train and bus fares and the 1/9d or whatever it cost boys to get into Bloomfield Road. We sat in the stands, too.

The final score was 1-1, mainly thanks to a brilliant display of goalkeeping by Burnley's Adam Blacklaw. Dad, who was quite a mercurial character in his way, tried to take a rise out of me on the way home by saying that Blacklaw had saved Burnley from a heavy defeat. This was odd because he supported Burnley, too, and had managed, along with cousin Richard and my old friend Frederick, to talk me into at least going to Burnley's matches even if I wasn't going to cede the club first place in my affections.

However, although only about 13, I came up with an entirely logical answer that shut my dear old dad up. I pointed out that Blacklaw was a member of the Burnley team, and therefore if he had been more instrumental than most in keeping the Blackpool goal tally to one, then this was just as effective as Burnley's leading scorer in those days, Willie Irvine, hitting a hat-trick. You wouldn't get people, I argued, saying that a centre-forward's hat trick had saved the day; ergo, the goalkeeper is part of the team, albeit the last bastion of the defence, but still.

And thus it was with Scott Carson at Newcastle. He is, this season, anyway, a part, and quite an important part, of the team, and thus Charlton's result, in my view, was fair enough. There are still questions to be asked, like what needs to be done for Charlton to start creating chances and scoring goals, but a point is a point.

Quiz Night this week was a little different, in that our friends the OFs, severally on account of school half term (which we at the Centre do not enjoy), family commitments generally, and a business trip, were simply not there. A scratch team of occasional visitors and two of our own Centre colleagues therefore occupied the famous Round Table, and did about as well as its customary occupants. Our third win in a row, then.

Gutted

2006-10-28T18:24:00.000+02:00

Charlton 1 Bolton Wanderers 0

I first encountered the word 'gutted' when I was about 7, reading a local newspaper report (7-year olds were more advanced in those days) of a fire at a warehouse somewhere along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal; the warehouse was gutted, the report, er... reported.

Although I had never seen the word before, and did not, either, make the connection with the gutting of fish, not something that went on much in the Forest of Bowland, it was quite clear to me that the word meant that the warehouse would not be storing anything in the foreseeable future, and quite possibly never again. These days of course the word, still in use for fire-destroyed buildings, and still the past tense of the verb 'to gut', is more often than not found in the mouths of football people after they have been sent off, bitten, denied a penalty, or, as in this case, when they have just lost.

For, boys and girls, it is not I, your Charlton-loving Jonathan Blake, who is gutted, not at all. Charlton's match against Bolton, dull though it apparently was, did have one bright spot, the Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink-assisted goal by Marcus Bent (above), and Charlton are through to the next round of the League Cup, when they visit Chesterfield. It was Big Sam Allardyce on this occasion who claimed to be gutted, and quite possibly his referee chums Lee Mason and Mike Halsey were, too.

And on Monday evening our quiz team had beaten off a late challenge from the Old Farts to stand firm and win by 124 points to 122. The OFs didn't say they were gutted exactly, but one of them, encountered three days later in a Madrid night spot, still sounded rather as if he was.

Anyway that's it for now; short and sweet, as Charlton matches are happening so thick and fast I can hardly keep up.

Kick off at Newcastle was five minutes ago.

All Manner of Things Shall be Well

2006-10-25T23:06:00.000+02:00

Charlton 0 Watford 0

Jerome Thomas shrewdly gives Lee Mason a wide berth

One of the best-known landmarks in Glasgow is the St. Enoch Centre, which is a huge shopping area constructed on the site of the former St. Enoch station, originally the northern terminus of the Glasgow and South Western Railway. This company and the Caledonian Railway, owners of Glasgow Central station (or "Welcome to Glasgow Central", as it is now apparently called), were incorporated into the London Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923, yet the two stations continued to function side by side, not much more than a quarter of a mile distant, right through the formation of British Railways until round about 1962, when someone finally realised that all the railway traffic to and from the south of Glasgow could be catered for in one station, and St. Enoch was closed.

I was quite interested in railways at the end of the 'fifties, and occasionally went train spotting with my cousin Richard, or my friend Tony, sometimes the pair of them together, to Hellifield, the nearest station to us on the Settle and Carlisle line. Hellifield isn't a town, just a small Yorkshire village which happens to stand at the junction of two railway lines. The amount of traffic was not great, but on summer days, it was an attractive notion to spend a few hours there in congenial company watching the railway activity and waiting for the four big trains of the day. Two of these, one in either direction, were The Waverley, a train which ran between Edinburgh Waverley and London Saint Pancras. On this train you would probably get one of Leeds Holbeck shed's 19 Jubilee class engines. The other two trains were the Thames-Clyde express (called that in both directions), which linked Glasgow to Saint Pancras, and which, unlike other Glasgow expresses, which terminated at Central, ran to, and from, St. Enoch. This train used to be hauled by one of Holbeck's five Royal Scot class engines, but in early 1960, Holbeck acquired some A3 locomotives (the famous Flying Scotsman is the only surviving one) from Heaton shed in Newcastle, and they began to run through Hellifield on their way to St. Enoch.

At this time, and many years later, when I started visiting Glasgow regularly and buying things in the St. Enoch Centre, I had never given much thought as to who Saint Enoch actually was. I suppose I vaguely imagined a middle-aged saint with a moustache and a slight Birmingham accent, complaining about coloured immigration. But as I say, I didn't give it much consideration at all.

The title of the blog piece is a phrase which I keep running across everywhere nowadays, and the other day I looked it up, and found that it is attributed to one Julian of Norwich, another saint. Being the age I am, I pictured this one as being very English-looking in a fair-haired, nineteen-fifties sort of way, serious and decent minded, like the Julian in Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, going round Norwich being saintly, and coming out with this remarkably comforting statement, which I feel we can still apply to the situation at Charlton.

But it just goes to show how misleading names can be. For this summer, in a Scottish newspaper, I spotted a reference to Saint Enoch, who was not a middle-aged moustachioed saint with a Brummy accent at all, but a young girl! As is the case with most young girls, she grew up and in fact had a son, who became Saint Kentigern, aka Saint Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow (and also the name of an A1 class locomotive, as a matter of fact).

And then I looked up Julian of Norwich, and swipe me! Julian of Norwich turns out to have been a woman too.

I mention all this because not long before Charlton's game against Watford last Saturday, I noticed that the referee was one Lee Mason, of Bolton, and I began to have a vague foreboding; one thing is that I do not care for the forename Lee very much; I haven't met very many with this name, and those I have, I have disliked, by and large. And as for the famous ones: Lee Marvin (Wandering Star alone is reason enough not be keen); Lee Harvey Oswald, well, I mean to say. And then Mr. Mason turns out to be from Bolton (like Mike Halsey, who is proud of being regularly invited to go training with Big Sam and his boys and who once pretty much single-handedly caused West Bromwich Albion to walk out of SE7 with a 4-1 victory under their belts).

So I wasn't optimistic about Lee Mason, and this time my instincts were not misplaced. OK, you might argue, as have the other Charlton bloggers, that Charlton should have despatched Watford anyway, but Charlton have lost confidence in front of goal, and the obvious penalty, and the less obvious one, might have set things moving once more in the right direction. But it wasn't to be. The Charlton bloggers who were at the game thought that Mason probably doesn't train with anyone, as he mostly remained in the centre circle and made his decisions at random, the linesmen being so bored they'd gone off into a trance.

The Observer has a decent account, and the general view of one and all is that despair should not set in yet a while, and indeed, as Mother Julian of Norwich was wont to say: "All Shall be Well, and All Shall be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall be Well". Though what Saint Enoch would have made of it all is anyone's guess.

STOP PRESS: Most of the foregoing was written on Monday, and logged as a draft while I tried to find some picture links. Since then we have won at the quiz once again, and Charlton have beaten Bolton in the League Cup, thus making Charlton Bolton's unlucky opponents for 06-07. We just need about 9 more teams to develop a similar relationship with, and All Manner of Things Shall be... well, work it out for yourselves.

A Breath of Wind

2006-10-21T16:06:00.000+02:00

Fulham 2 Charlton 1
For some reason last Monday night, Mush, John, Tony and I had extremely bad luck when trying to get a taxi from the Centre down to the pub where the quiz takes place. It is not, as the crow flies, much more than a mile, but we aren't crows, and after a long day, which Monday is for all four of us, a shared cab at approximately €1 each is a luxury we have come to regard as an automatic right. So, having got clear of the premises, and once John and I had smoked what we agree are our most enjoyable cigarettes of the week, we started to look expectantly down the road for our hoped-for conveyance.

One drew up right in front of us to drop someone off, so we waited while the lady in the back fiddled about with her handbag, purse and so on, and then hunted for the right change, and finally took another minute to get her stuff together and get out. We moved forward and signalled that we would take the cab on, but the driver signalled back to the effect that we wouldn't, and drove away. Two minutes after that, another one was sweeping up the hill when a figure shot out of a side street and flagged it down right in front of us. The next one to approach abruptly turned into the aforementioned side street as soon as we waved at it.

But we did get one in the end and we reached the bar at about 9.50 to greet Sam, already there as Monday is his day off. I was in the middle of relating our cab misfortunes when I broke off, realising that the television was showing Charlton's attacking moves from the first half, it now being half time. Charlton, I have to say, looked very good, Jerome Thomas was back, and Dennis Rommedahl looked incisive; but it seemed the score was 0-0 for all that.

But I felt quite cheerful as we trooped downstairs to the jazz-club-like cellar where the quiz takes place, took our seats, greeted our sixth team member Hugh, who, finishing earlier on Mondays, had had time to pop home for a bite to eat, and started in.

After three rounds or so, Mush told me he had a feeling we might win, and I couldn't disagree; I was also, of course feeling the same about Charlton at Craven Cottage.

Not long after that, our beloved landlady came downstairs to collect empties and take orders for more drinks, and I asked her how we were doing. "Oh, I've been meaning to tell you", she said, and my hopes rose. "You're losing 2-0". They sank again. Apparently Fulham had altered their tactics radically for the second half, and the Charlton coach failed to notice, or at least that is what I have read.

But our quiz team won quite handsomely, with 19 points more than the much-vaunted (by themselves) Old Farts. And I didn't even find out about Charlton's consolation goal till I got home.

So, continuing with my analogy from last time, the quiz team got some wind in their sails and moved away from the Doldrums; and here's hoping that same wind might now reach becalmed Charlton as they kick off against Watford at The Valley in about 9 minutes' time.

Doldrums

2006-10-15T03:53:00.000+02:00

I have always rather liked this word, even though its meaning isn't all that positive. My first encounter with it was in its figurative sense in some children's story or other, and it was only when I was en route to failing O Level Geography that I came across its true meaning, some winds (or more accurately, a lack thereof) in the South Atlantic (Pacific?) (well I told you I failed it) which don't do very much, in that if you are stuck in the Doldrums, you are immobilised, though always with the underlying implication that there will be a solution eventually.

This is what life is like right now. I am over the hectic pace of the beginning of term; I have met my students, mainly, at least twice and in some cases four times, and things are beginning to fall into place, but of course this is the way things are now going to be for quite a while.

And Table Five, our quiz team, are also in a bit of a rut. David and his fellow Old Farts will claim that we are going through a bad patch, but that would as yet be an exaggeration. Last Monday (for we are happily back to Mondays again) they won with a total of 144 points; we had 138. But there were two other teams: Edu's, who got 142, and a scratch side made up of our very own Antony; his visiting parents, and a couple of other people. This team got 141 and thus we came last out of four teams, and the Old Farts had won for the second week in succession (or 'on the bounce', as the sainted Alan Curbishley would put it).

You would have thought, from the way they carried on after this, that they had won the Champions' League together with the thing that whoever wins the Champions' League gets to compete for afterwards (Liverpool played in it last year and I neither recall nor care whether they won it or not, whatever it was), while simultaneously condemning us to a few seasons in the Unipart League. And yet whenever they are going through one of their exceedingly frequent bad patches, what they get from us are expressions of sympathy, in true British fashion: a tight-lipped "hard luck old chaps" and the subject changed swiftly to something more congenial.

But then, they are very fond of quoting something I first heard in an early episode of Yes Minister: "in victory, malice, in defeat, revenge". This has, for them, become akin to one of those dreary mission statements which abound in modern Britain, like "Moving People Round the Community" painted on the sides of buses, presumably on the off-chance that someone might see a bus and not know what it is for.

There have been five quizzes since we restarted, and we won the first one, and have given a reasonable account of ourselves most of the time, and 138 points, anyway, is quite often a winning score, even if it wasn't last week. But there is a slight feeling amongst ourselves that the team is in the Doldrums, for all that.

And then there's Charlton, stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. The basic arguments here are that Charlton's opening fixtures have been relatively tough, which is true enough, and that there have been injuries, which there most certainly have, and that if the results are studied, most of the defeats have been by the odd goal.

All the same, people are beginning to regard Charlton's next outing, at Fulham tomorrow night, coinciding once more with Quiz Night, as a kind of indicator of whether Charlton will ever get out of the Doldrums. If they lose at Fulham, then there is no reason, the logic runs, why they should not proceed to lose, albeit honourably, a bit like Sunderland often did last season, practically everywhere.

But if the quiz team don't come out on top on Monday, I don't think it will indicate anything quite so serious, though maybe we should start work on finding ourselves a mission statement of our own, and then we can start dishing out the abusive comments along with everyone else.

Normal Service will be Resumed

2006-09-27T11:12:00.000+02:00

This year I decided to emulate the great Frankie Valley, who disappeared from our computer screens for two whole weeks while on holiday with his family back in August. I have just returned to Madrid after my customary couple of weeks in Scotland, with a weekend in England thrown in, and as I was visiting an old friend who is not into computers, so very much not into them that he doesn't even possess one, I decided that a holiday should be precisely that: a complete break from routine. Routine in my case, here in Madrid, as the title of the blog indicates, involves a lot of hours online, particularly at night when all is silent.

My Big Decision was prompted by my mobile phone. I only recently acquired one of these, as living alone I never need to ring the house to say I'll be late back, or tell people about any train I might happen to be on, or anything. But pressure from my friends, who are keen that we should all have the facility to adapt social arrangements on the fly, linked to my recent trip to Barcelona, finally pushed me into doing something that I had actually meant to do for ages, and I took the plunge.

Once I had the thing, it occurred to me that it might be useful in Britain as well, and so it was, in a limited way, as mobile phoning when outside your contractual country doesn't come cheap (well it doesn't come cheap at all, come to that). But what did amaze me was that, about ten minutes after I logged on to the UK version of my Spanish provider, which I did while waiting for the train down to Ayr about 45 minutes after landing at Glasgow Airport, the phone vibrated in my pocket, signalling a text message. This came from the said Spanish providers (I'm not doing any free advertising), and said that if I texted a number to them, or maybe dialled it, can't recall, I would thenceforth be able to ring my Spanish contacts at the normal rate.

At first I thought this was great, but on reflection I realised that I didn't want to do this at all. The whole point about a holiday is being in a different world, so much though I love my friends in Madrid, I had no intention of ringing them for a chat, and by the same token, I decided, I could also try to avoid computers as much as I could, except maybe the odd quick trip to the library to check emails, every three or four days. And so it turned out.

However, Charlton have been in action, albeit not very profitably, and the quiz season has begun, and I have experienced life under a total smoking ban, all of which have given me things to write about, but with the start of our full term just two days off, it might take time. But as it says up top, normal service will be resumed, as soon as I can get round to it.

Chelsea pip 10-man (for a few minutes) Charlton

2006-09-11T07:20:00.000+02:00

Chelsea 2 Charlton 1

Souleymane Diawara made his debut, too; the gloves look quite normal to me...

I suppose I hadn't expected Charlton to win this; people don't expect their clubs to come away from Stamford Bridge with much, and yet last season Charlton did come away with a point, after the league encounter, and after winning on penalties, a ticket through to the next round of the League Cup (not sure who sponsors it - is it still Coca Cola? It's not Milk, anyway).

So, like The Inspector, who wrote that he had not been prepared to spend £48 just to sit in a tin shed at the wrong end of the Fulham Road, and who admitted to actually being in bed asleep during the first half, I also elected to lie down and read. Suffering from the beginnings of a cold and also nursing a slight hangover as I was, I actually fell asleep and didn't get round to checking the results until 35 minutes after full time. At first glance, 2-1 didn't seem too bad. OK, no points, but no disgrace.

And in fact it wasn't really till Sunday that I found myself making the rounds of the various reports. Obviously even the most pro-Charlton writers could not get round the fact that Chelsea had run out the winners, but I am now convinced that it was a much more close-run thing than some would have had us believe. The BBC implied that Chelsea had run riot, without bothering to explain why the score was only 2-1, but then sort of went back on themselves and admitted that Charlton made much more of a game of it in the second half, which is what the Charlton bloggers seem to agree on.

Another source reported that Chelsea 'cruised to victory'; this is just plain wrong; in my book no one can cruise anywhere unless there is a clear 3-goal difference; which there wasn't; it was 1-1 for a while.

Amy Lawrence in The Observer allowed herself to be distracted by the fact that Ashley Cole came on after 64 minutes and made his Chelsea debut. She devoted quite a lot of her report to this event. In fact it was round about this stage in the game that Charlton's newest and fifth most expensive (ever) signing, Souleymane Diawara, went off. He'd been making his debut as well, but nowhere have I seen even a passing reference to this, except, to be fair, in Amy's report, in which she noted that he was wearing "wolly gloves", whatever they might be.

And it was while he was off injured, and Charlton down to 10 men, that Chelsea scored their second, and winning, goal.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if it had been the other way round, and Chelsea had conceded a Charlton winning goal while temporarily reduced to 10 men. Would the management and directors of Chelsea be banging on the doors of FIFA headquarters to get this kind of thing put a stop to? I think Mr Kenyon and company very well might. And there certainly would be a lot of comment in the media about it, but of course it was Charlton who were down to 10 men when the goal was conceded, so it was hardly mentioned; I didn't even find out about it till late last night, perusing what might have been the ninth match report I looked at.

As things were, Charlton went on to equalise, but it was disallowed, and then Scott Carson saved a Lampard penalty. So there we are, no points, but no disgrace either. Three points from four matches, and games against Man Utd and Chelsea in amongst those. Well I am not expecting Charlton to win the ruddy Premiership, but there does not seem to be any reason to start panicking yet awhile, either.

An Opening for Curbs

2006-09-07T13:12:00.000+02:00

Alan Curbishley last year

Our beloved ex-manager is still with us in very many ways; the publication of his autobiography, which according to one of the blogging fraternity is disappointingly bland, has resulted in a spate of newspaper articles and radio interviews, and has culminated this morning in a report on the BBC that the great man will be ready to return to football management in October.

The media will be delighted, for, as I have stated on other occasions, whenever there is a management vacancy, the media immediately clamour that Curbs is 'set' or 'poised' (those magic verbs which are used to report on things which haven't happened, and which in fact frequently don't happen at all) to take over. In the past five years, while under contract to Charlton, where he did very well, he was 'linked' (another meaningless verb, in my view) with Tottenham; Liverpool; Middlesbrough (repeatedly and I cannot think why); Manchester City (for Christ's sake!); Aston Villa; West Ham (at least he played for these last two) and Newcastle, and there might well be others.

The premise behind all this is that Curbs is an effective manager, one of the best native English managers around, so why was he still managing little old Charlton, when there are all these wonderful 'big' clubs where he might do so well?

Leaving aside the fact that Manchester City and Newcastle aren't necessarily bigger than Charlton, anyway, though it might depend on your definition of 'big' of course (mine equates with 'consistently successful' rather than 'supported by a lot of people'), and Middlesbrough certainly aren't, it does raise the question of what a manager's job is. Iain Dowie is not Charlton's manager, but the head coach, a precise description of what he is supposed to do, and there seem to be other people in charge of performance management, man management, woman management, paper clip management, and so forth, much like in organisations everywhere else.

The media who constantly rush to associate Curbs with any Premiership job they perceive to be about to come up (and to be fair, they were doing exactly the same with Martin O'Neill) seem to be impelled by a view that if you give a manager who has proved his worth an unlimited budget, then you will get something quite wonderful.

Now while it is true that a good manager and an unlimited budget can produce the goods, it is not by any means automatic. Very often good managers prove their worth by performing miracles without much money; by using their player management skills to turn average boys into good footballers (both O'Neill and Curbs fall into this category); the real stuff of which managers are made; after all, cheque signing is a skill we all possess.

So it is most interesting to read this morning that Curbs, having been 'linked' with the recently vacant Villa job, and the possibly soon-to-be-vacant Middlesbrough job (again), or even the Newcastle job when they realise that Roeder is useless, insists that he was having a six-month holiday as he needed a rest. Though there is a rumour that his contract with Charlton stipulated a six-month hiatus before managing again, and there's another rumour that he is still on Charlton's books till the end of the month.

Be that as it may, Curbs has today announced that he is ready to manage again soon. So the media can get their Middlesbrough, Newcastle and maybe even Man City theories out again. But what is this we see? A few lines into the story, Curbs says he is not necessarily going to be interested in a Premiership job, as in the first place there aren't any vacant, and he doesn't want to be the reason for one of his mates getting the shove, but also that it is a hard life, and that just football management might do.

He won't be short of a bob or two, anyway, and he has never struck me as the greedy type, so if it is pure bottom-line football management that he is looking for, I have the very thing. Regular readers of this blog may have looked at the bottom of the page and read the list of football teams and other outfits that I am keen on, and it just so happens that an organisation dear to my heart is in dire need of someone of the stature and ability of Alan Curbishley. Languishing very near the bottom of the Conference are Forest Green Rovers, who sacked their management team a few days ago. Now what a golden opportunity for Curbs (and Mervyn Day, who seems to be waiting for Curbs to get a job so that he can be nominated as his assistant) to show the world how to manage.

Get yourselves up to Gloucestershire lads, and see if Forest Green can't be gracing the Premiership by the autumn of 2010.

That really would be a managerial achievement with a vengeance, and who better to achieve it?

A Shot in the Arm

2006-08-31T18:18:00.000+02:00

Charlton 2 Bolton Wanderers 0

This handsome young man is England goalkeeper Scott Carson, 20 years old, and on the books at Liverpool FC. However this season he is on a one-year loan to Charlton, where he has been given the squad number of 38, and made first-choice keeper. The number 1 has not been allocated to anyone, and it is rumoured that Charlton's other keepers Thomas Myhre and Stephan Andersen might be highly discontented with these developments, and that Andersen, in fact, might have departed by the time the transfer window closes tonight.

It was Scott who played a great part in Charlton achieving this result; he not only saved a penalty when the score was 0-0, but having palmed the ball out of the path of the back of the net, he had the presence of mind to scramble after it, gather it up and get it out of the way of any marauding Bolton forwards. These actions inspired Charlton to greater efforts, with the result that when they in turn were subsequently awarded a penalty, Darren Bent was able to score with confidence, as he was later to do from a non-penalty situation (or 'open play' as the BBC football site refers to it), thus registering Charlton's first proper league goal this season, later on.

Charlton had been playing with ten men after referee Mike Dean sent Herman Hreidarsson off for elbowing Bolton's Kevin Davies, who had, so the BBC reporter said, been elbowing everyone in sight with impunity up to then. Now the BBC hardly ever sees things from a Charlton point of view, so I feel that if they say this, it must be true. Eventually, numbers were evened up midway in the second half when Davies was dismissed for elbowing for the umpteenth time.

My friend Harry wrote to me from his home on the Wirral a day or three afterwards and reported that Mr. Allardyce (Everton fans always refer to football managers as "Mister"+[surname]) had been very cross about this dismissal, but I had already read on Frankie's blog that Allardyce seems to think that using your elbow to gain height is a permitted tactic for forwards to use against defenders, or, as he probably really means, Bolton forwards to use against opposing defenders.

He calls this practice "leveraging", though probably means "levering". "Leveraging" is a malformation from the noun "leverage", meaning "purchase", in the grip sense of the word, and is much used in the business, financial and management world, though I, along with other non-speakers of management bollocks, do not know what it means, and clearly, neither does Mr. Allardyce.

I note that referee Mike Dean is also from the Wirral. When I was younger, referees were always perceived to be strictly neutral, but now some of the Charlton bloggers think that providing a north west referee for a game involving a London side and a north west one is wrong, and I must say I am inclined to agree; Dean did seem to be biased, they thought, mainly because he sent Herman off the first time he tried a spot of "leveraging", while allowing Davies to get away with it a couple of dozen times before doing anything about it.

All this in the context of the famous north west jinx that has dogged Charlton for over a year. But finally the jinx is broken, and the reason is alluded to in the title - an injection. To fight something, you mobilise your antibodies by injecting a little of the problem into your system. And where does our fine young goalie hail from? Why, Whitehaven. You cannot get much further north west than that and still be in England. And is there something significant in that Charlton's opponents in the forthcoming League Cup tie are Carlisle United? Maybe Scott has joined us just in time.

And for those who would point out that he played in the 0-3 defeat by Manchester United, I would point out that it is well-known that the body's initial reaction to a vaccination is to fall ill with a mild form of the problem until the antibodies kick in, which is, I submit, what has happened in this case.

Boo Boys

2006-08-26T13:24:00.000+02:00

Charlton 0 Manchester United 3

My trip to Barcelona was most agreeable, thank you, and as I had rather foreseen, I did not have access to a computer. My friends had made vague noises about an Internet café somewhere, and there was always the Barcelona branch of my employers, but I am on holiday, and I reckoned that if I did find a computer, I would spend hours and hours looking at the same pages that I look at when at home, and thus waste the opportunity to wander through the streets of old Barcelona and enjoy the benefits of a break from routine.

So it was that the night of this latest debacle found me in the company of two charming ladies, both of whom have been close friends of mine for years, wining and dining and strolling round the Barrio Gotic, and I only fleetingly had time to wonder how things were going in SE7.

On returning to the hotel I flicked through the TV channels to see if I could find Sky Sports, but they didn't have it, so as I was tired after a long day's travelling and my evening out, I left it at that, and it wasn't until the late morning of the next day, when I found myself in the Ramblas with all the other tourists, and saw the stacks of foreign papers available on all the newsstands, that I was able to discover what had happened. I have got out of the habit of reading newspapers since the Internet came into our lives a few years back now (crikey, in fact it is almost ten years, I now realise) and so it didn't occur to me to buy one, but I did glance at a few back pages until I saw the result. Oh well, 0-3; did anyone expect much more? Charlton's last league game but one had been against Manchester United, in mid-May, and that had produced a 4-0 thumping.

At this stage I still had vague notions of dropping into an Internet café, had one presented itself, so ruefully resigned myself to finding out the details later. If Charlton had won, or even drawn, I might well have been tempted to buy a paper, but as things were there would have been no point. I knew what the reports would be like. The media will always rejoice when things go the way they expect them to, and that means that whenever Manchester United play teams like Charlton, Manchester United win. If I read a report about a Charlton defeat, what I am looking for is consolation: we played well and were unlucky; the referee was against us; two of their goals were offside; that kind of thing. But I knew that €3 or so for an English paper would not have procured me that kind of information.

There would be Manchester United triumphalism; personality stuff revolving round one or more of their famous players, and if Charlton's angle were taken at all. it would just be pointing out that after 2 games, Charlton are bottom of the table and what price the new manager now? (Of course in the old days, before computers made calculating league tables instantaneous, no tables were printed in the papers till 3 games had been played, as they were utterly misleading, and remember, at this stage last season Charlton were top with 6 points out of 6).

But in fact I did get to see a paper in the end. I joined my friends for lunch, and one of them slightly shamefacedly said she'd been tempted by a scandalmongering headline on the front page of the Daily Mirror about Victoria Beckham, so while she went off to powder her nose before we paid the bill and left the restaurant, I scanned the report.

Yes, it pointed out that Dowie was having problems, but of course the real news story, which I hadn't thought of, was the fact that it was Cristian Ronaldo's first away appearance in the UK since the winking affair during the World Cup. Apparently the England-supporting Charlton fans booed him every time he touched the ball, so, the Mirror journo was able to use the 'silencing the boo-boys' technique, so beloved of unimaginative sports writers, last noted by me when Spotty brought his Enormous Vast Huge Big Club, Newcastle United, to town in the spring.

And any information that might be a consolation to me was lacking, and yet, as The Inspector points out, things were not all bad.

Anyway, this afternoon, it is Bolton at home, and of course last season there was a jinx which meant that hardly any points were amassed at the expense of Lancashire / Manchester / Merseyside clubs, and Charlton's recent record against Bolton is not good in any case. But as always, one must hope for the best.

Premiership History

2006-08-22T16:21:00.000+02:00

West Ham United 3 Charlton 1

Just 3 minutes after the penalty, too

OK, the headline is misleading, for this is not going to be yet another doom and gloom piece about how Charlton simply aren't going to get any points out of any of their encounters this season, and will thus become part of the Premiership's, er, past.

Admittedly, losing at West Ham is dispiriting, as it is a fixture in which Charlton frequently get something, and of course next up, tomorrow night, it's Manchester United, which no one thinks Charlton will get anything out of at all; might as well rest the lads and put the youth team out then, I suppose.

And of course it is all a matter of perception: if you add the unknown quantity of the new manager, the indifferent performances in pre-season friendlies, the West Ham game, to the general perception of Charlton as a club who have unaccountably got themselves up in the Premiership, don't really belong there, and soon will be on their way back to the Fourth Division where they belong, then they will not be expected to win anything. And six years unbroken membership of the Premiership has not altered any of this, as far as the media is concerned, and it seems to have spread to the fans as well. (And of course there is my old friend Mark, a Londoner and one-time QPR triallist, who wondered last year why Charlton were playing Manchester United, it having not penetrated his consciousness that Charlton were a Premiership side at all).

But if Charlton are part of the Premiership, there is no reason to assume that they aren't going to get anything out if it; doom and gloom may well have their place in the scheme of things, but not yet.

As for Saturday, well Charlton took the lead, through a penalty, which the BBC Football page, never one to find anything nice to say about Charlton, described as 'dubious'. Other people have described West Ham's second and third goals as 'dubious' too, but not the BBC. And then not three minutes after Charlton's first penalty of the season (and there have been seasons when we're talking months, rather than minutes, for Charlton to be awarded penalties), new signing Djimi Traore rather spoilt his Charlton debut by being sent off. To be fair, the BBC pointed this out, and referred to 'ten-man Charlton' in the rest of the report, and even managed to imply that Carlton Cole's last-minute goal was somehow not as valid as other goals, especially with him being a substitute; do they think he still plays for us?

So wherefore, I hear you cry, the Premiership History referred to in the title? Just this: the report mentions that Teddy Sheringham came on during the second half. Now, as you might recall, the BBC football writer (or do they have more than one?) thinks that Teddy Sheringham is much more interesting than anything else; remember when West Ham played Charlton in the spring? The events of the game, the hopes and aspirations of the two sets of fans, were as nought compared to the fact that it was Sheringham's 40th birthday, and that therefore he should have been allowed to score a goal, Thomas Myhre meanly preventing this from happening.

Well this time it was pointed out that when he took the field, this made him "the oldest outfield player in Premiership history". Am I alone in regarding this apparent milestone as rather convoluted? Not the oldest player, as there have obviously been goalkeepers, and not in British league football history either (I remember seeing Stanley Matthews, aged maybe 48, playing for Stoke at Bury in a midweek evening match when I was a boy), just Premiership history. But the Premiership has only been running for thirteen or fourteen years, and in any case why should it have a separate set of statistics from everything that went before? It is this kind of thinking that prevents people from considering Charlton, Portsmouth, Fulham, etc. as proper Premiership clubs, but apart from that, it might well also lead to a lot more spurious soccer milestones (the youngest gay black number 17 to appear under floodlights since 1998, and the like).

So let's make Premiership History history, to paraphrase something or other.

I am off to Barcelona for a couple of days, and am uncertain of computer access, so whatever the outcome of Charlton v Manchester United tomorrow night, my silence should not be interpreted as anything more than that.

All Set

2006-08-19T03:05:00.000+02:00

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!

Christian's Names

2006-08-10T23:01:00.000+02:00

On the heels, as it were, of Djimi Traore and Amady (also reported as being called Amdy, and I don't know which is right) Faye, came the news of the signing of Christian Bolanos (above), a Costa Rican international, who, it has been proudly stated, was recently with Deportivo Saprissa, so, one assumes, he must be good.

Well, if they say so, and everyone seems to be very pleased about the new signing, as they are about the other two, though I have no more heard of Deportivo Saprissa than I had of Germinal Beerschot a couple of days back, and incidentally, than I have of Future European Champions (that'll be the day) Newcastle United's opponents, FK Ventspils, in some European competition or other this evening.

However I noticed one thing; in my fellow-blogger Nelson's piece about Christian, the name appears as Bolaños, not Bolanos. I know that to the average English-speaking reader, this is not going to make any difference, but Nelson lives in an Iberian Valley, as indicated by his blog name, and he will, as I do, know the difference. The letter Ñ is part of the Spanish alphabet in its own right as distinct from the letter N, and is pronounced as N+Y, as in Viva España, for example, and on Spanish keyboards it appears in its own right too, in that the small and capital versions have a proper key of their own. Most of the time, mis-spelling a word by using N rather than Ñ doesn't really matter as the Spanish are used to people doing that, although care should be exercised when writing someone a New Year card, as the word for 'year' (año) is very similar to the word for 'anus' (ano).

Christian's surname is a new one on me - in more than 30 years living in Spain, and almost 40 of learning and using the language, I have never encountered either version of the name, and Christian is not a usual name here in Spain, either, though the word 'cristiano', meaning a Christian, does exist.

Anyway, that's three more new names to conjure with when talking and writing about Charlton, and there is a general feeling that things are looking up.

Germinal Beerschot 1 Charlton 2

And this is Kelly Youga, another recent Charlton signing, who scored the winning goal in Antwerp. The Inspector has some of the details. Next, Utrecht. And then Upton Park.

Any Warmer?

2006-08-08T18:24:00.000+02:00

Welling 1 Charlton 0
Charlton 1 New Zealand 1

The friendlies that Charlton and everyone else are playing before the season proper gets under way, always provide food for thought. The one thing I always wonder is what criteria apply when choosing one's opposition, and having looked at some of the games which have taken place over the past three weeks or so, I am still very much in the dark.

Traditionally, certainly in the north-west of England where I grew up, there would be local friendly games, between clubs who were presumably er, friendly. Thus Burnley would often play against Blackpool, a club with which excellent relations were always maintained, even to the extent of passing on cast-off managers; and the lower division sides would usually arrange games between themselves, there being no shortage of Third and Fourth Division clubs in the region.

As far as I can remember, these friendlies would number no more than two or three, and as I say, the opposition would be roughly of the same calibre, and then the season would start. It was highly unusual for a club to play against one from outside their area, and as for a club from another country, well, I am talking about the fifties, when to those of us in the north of England, even London might as well have been just outside Cape Town for all the chances were of us ever going there.

The other thing I remember about these games is that the result would be pretty much what one would expect. How times have changed. Charlton's collection of opponents thus far has ranged from Millwall, in the same part of the world but two divisions below, to Hibernian far away in Edinburgh, and playing in a different league, albeit one allegedly of the same quality, and then out here to Valencia who play in what the British media call 'La Liga', as if it were some kind of specially invented footie word in the same way that 'Premiership' is.

[In fact the words simply mean 'the league', and the bit of it in which Valencia play, and Barcelona; and the Madrids, and plucky little Villarreal, is actually called 'Primera División', which translates to 'First Division'; would that such a situation obtained in England.]

After opposition from top-tier clubs in two other countries, came an actual country in the shape of New Zealand the other evening, though not before what is usually the annual curtain-raiser, at neighbouring Welling, had taken place.

The results are as you see; Charlton should have won at Welling, not lost, and it is useless for anyone to protest that there were only about three regulars in the side as it shouldn't have mattered, given the difference in league status between them. Charlton apparently struggled against New Zealand as well. The Inspector has the details.

Frankly I do not know what is going on; the new head coach, as we have to call him to avoid confusion with all the other managers running the place now, has, rightly, some will say, been giving all his new players, whom, after all, he does not know, a try-out, but surely that kind of thing could have happened inside training sessions at Sparrows Lane. The fact is the fans have no idea what to expect when the Big Day arrives and Charlton run out onto the pitch at Upton Park for their first league game under the new ~~manager~~ coach.

So, in other words, and hence my title for the piece, for all these so-called warm-up games, are the team any, er, warmer?

I mean, last year one of the friendlies produced an 8-0 scoreline at Aldershot, with Darren Bent getting five of them, and on the opening day Charlton won 3-1 at Sunderland.

On another point, of course living in Madrid I won't be able to get to The Valley this season, or not much more than once or twice, at any rate, but like many another, I was dismayed at what The Inspector and his correspondents had to say about the new announcer at The Valley, and also the music (!) that accompanied Marcus Bent's goal against New Zealand (being celebrated above). The fact is that public music has long ceased to be a facility provided by shops and other organisations to improve the appeal of their environment for customers and visitors, and is now just a recreational perk for the staff, who play their own favourites very loudly. Browsing in Waterstones, Liverpool a few weeks back, I had to leave as I simply could not stand having to hear Macy Gray or someone similar, bawling away, seemingly right above my head; how you are supposed to concentrate on choosing your books with that racket going on I cannot imagine.

Anyway, the series of friendly warm-ups continues this evening as Charlton visit a team I admit I had never heard of, called Germinal Beerschot, who play in the Belgian First Division. A fellow-blogger, also based in Spain, has an explanation of the bizarre name of tonight's opposition. This team finished 7th last season, so again the match might be a pointer to what lies ahead; or it might not, of course.

In July the Sun is Hot

2006-07-30T17:09:00.000+02:00

~~Manager~~ Head coach Dowie and some of his players in Valencia on Friday

Valencia 3 Charlton 1

As I mentioned last night, I couldn't find anything about this match until I followed a link on the Charlton web page which led to me to BBC Radio London, and finally to ex-Charlton favourite Scott Minto and an unidentified commentator, reporting from the Mestalla at half time in this match, which kicked off late.

When I tuned in, the commentator (who was very good, I just never found out his name) was interviewing Richard Murray about an agreement signed between the two clubs, both of which are sponsored by Llanera, a Spanish property group.

Scott Minto and the commentator went on talking about this agreement for quite some time, as the second half did not begin till about ten minutes to twelve. This was due to the completion of a rock opera which had started a couple of hours before kick-off, for Charlton's visit was just part of a long open-day at Valencia, in which the players were presented to the fans; the official club photos were taken; the rock opera was performed, and the Valencia regional anthem was sung by a well-known singer, at least according to the Spanish paper El Mundo, on whose website I read this story.

I had been listening to the commentator for a long time before I discovered that the half-time score was Valencia 2 Charlton 0, and the commentator's explanation for this, which was that it was hot. As there seemed to be no sign of the game restarting, the commentator began to talk to Minto some more about the agreement, which as far as I could tell, might mean Charlton reserve and youth players having a season now and again with Valencia's youths, and vice versa. They both seemed to think this would be a Good Thing, though the more I think of it I can't really see why.

It was hot here in Madrid, too, and I opted to lie down in my bedroom, where there is an air-cooling machine, and continue reading a novel, rather than listen to the second half commentary.

I kept an eye on the clock though, and at about 12.35 I came back through here and tuned in again, just in time to catch the very end of the game; Gonzalo Sorondo had pulled one back for Charlton, and Charlton had been much more determined and gritty, but Valencia had got their third as a result of a rather unfortunate bounce about five minutes from the end. And anyway, it was very hot, and so Charlton could be excused somewhat, and the commentator and Scott Minto both thought that Iain Dowie could be well pleased with his players.

I am beginning to wonder; I didn't, as I hinted yesterday, think of Hibs as true Premiership level opponents, yet Charlton lost there, and while Valencia are a top side in a top league, if Charlton have any pretensions to improving, they might have done better.

However I have not been able to find out more. The Observer doesn't mention the game at all; the BBC page finally put a report on after lunch today, but it isn't a report, just a couple of sentences which anyone in possession of the score, names of scorers and times of the goals, plus a little background information, can put together. So we learn that "ex-Liverpool" player Morientes scored first, and that Silva scored at the end, but there is no mention of the unfortunate bounce.

El Mundo had a description of the evening - the photos, and the presentation of the players, and the rock opera, before ending with: "El acto se cerró con la interpretación del himno de la Comunitat Valenciana por parte del cantante Javier Vila." (The event closed with a rendition of the Anthem of the Comunitat (autonomous region) of Valencia by the singer Javier Vila). And if you believe El Mundo, everyone presumably went home. But they didn't, even though it was hot. But el Mundo made no mention of any football being played, and not a single mention of Charlton flying over from London, or the agreement, or anything. I know it was the Madrid edition of the page, but even so.

My title is a line from the extremely amusing "Song of the Weather", written and first performed in 1963 by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. The song consists of couplets bemoaning the English weather month by month, and each line was sung alternately. Thus for July, Swann (I think) sang the line I have used as a title, and then:

FLANDERS: Is it shining?
SWANN: No it's not!

Full lyrics here, if you're interested.

And of course the point is that the sun wasn't shining during the match last night, and the temperature was probably around 77 - 80 degrees (Fahrenheit, which I prefer to use - it's a free country and although friends and acquaintances get very cross with me for using it, and tell me that the young people won't understand it, I don't care, and anyway they use it in the USA, and if young people want to know what I mean they can look it up, as I have had to do for years with Centigrade figures until I finally took the trouble to learn the whole lot by heart), so the Charlton players can't have suffered that much, and it is a myth, too that just because you live in a hot country, you feel the heat less. You get better at shutting it out of your life, of course, but it still feels hot, and it is July, after all.

So I reckon that Valencia, one of the best teams in what some consider to be a better league than the English Premiership, were worth their victory and no excuses.

The Lothian Question

2006-07-30T01:37:00.000+02:00

Jerome Thomas last year

Hibernian 3 Charlton 2

It is a few days since this game, but what with marking exams in the run-in to the end of the summer course yesterday, I have been a bit pushed for time, although that isn't the only reason. There are times when the general idea is there, but it is hard to find a decent title. And this week, I was a bit stuck for anything much to say, and although I had thought of making some kind of reference to the Edinburgh Festival, which is almost topical, I couldn't really work it in with what happened, and then The Inspector went and used the idea, anyway.

Abandoning the Festival idea, my next thought was to call the piece 'Randolph Crescent'. This is a thoroughfare in the centre of Edinburgh which houses (or did) the YWCA, which has a theatre in which many years ago I appeared along with other members of my University drama group in a fringe show; and one of Charlton's goalkeepers is Darren Randolph, you see, but then, the link was pretty tenuous and in the end Darren didn't play in the match, anyway.

And then I remembered Janis at work a while back asking if anyone knew what the Lothian Question was, as it was something that had come up in her Political Philosophy Ph.D., which she was doing in her spare time when her teaching, her husband and her son allowed her to, and this gave me my title, and a hook to hang the piece on, as well.

The Lothian Question is the one about whether, now that Scotland has its own parliament passing laws about what can and cannot (mostly cannot) happen in Scotland, Westminster MPs representing Scottish constituencies ought to be allowed to vote on matters purely concerning England.

I don't think they ought to, but they don't see anything wrong with it, so that's the way things are and will probably stay. That need not concern us here, though, but it does remind me of a topic which crops up regularly about twice a year: that Rangers and Celtic be allowed to secede from their league and join the Premiership, where they would enjoy stiffer competition, and do better in Europe and so forth.

When this is mentioned, as it is in the press every year, many people declare themselves to be in favour of the idea, stating, as someone did last year, that the Prem would be a lot more 'fun' if Rangers and Celtic were allowed in, and boring clubs like Fulham and Charlton were chucked out to make room for them. This writer asked us to imagine a Rangers v Newcastle Premiership fixture and seemed to think that in so doing he had proved his point beyond argument.

Actually I can't think of anything more boring than Rangers playing Newcastle, but then unlike the English media I do not find Newcastle United interesting, nor have for the last 50-odd years during which they have won practically nothing. (I know Charlton haven't, either, but we don't go banging on about how Great Big we are all the time).

Others point out that it is one thing to run away with a league like the SPL, and quite another to be in the Premiership, and suggest that Rangers and Celtic might not survive there. Others still, say, and these are the ones I agree with, that if Rangers and Celtic want to play in the English leagues, then they should apply for membership of the Conference and work their way up.

For if truth be known, it is not known whether the standards of Scottish football are the same as English. Celtic and one or two other teams do get a run out in Europe, and do progress a bit, but it is not easy to know how they would manage in the English league. Of course people point to the huge numbers of supporters the Glasgow clubs can command, but so what? The matches still have to be won. You can't expect to be handed league titles, as I have said before in connection with Leeds and Newcastle, just because you have a lot of supporters; if that were the case all this needless football could be done away with and points awarded according to how many fans the clubs could sign up.

So, finally getting to the point, it was interesting that Charlton should continue their pre-season games with a visit to Edinburgh to play Hibs. Would it be a real contest, or would Hibs prove to be superior, or would Charlton run away with it?

The final score was a bit of a reverse, as Charlton had been 0-2 up at one point and then the the half time score was 1-2. News of the game was hard to come by, though I did manage to listen to two laddies from the Hibs fans' website commentating on the game; I found this near the end, when the score was by now 3-2. They thought Hibs had looked good, and in fairness as it was the Hibs fans' website, that was all they were bothered about, especially with their season about to start. But the scoreline doesn't tell Charlton fans anything. Hibs used their usual side, but made a good few changes, OK. But Dowie replaced everyone at half time, except James Walker, and brought on a lot of untried youngsters who were thought to have done well, considering. So I submit that nothing has been proved about football's Lothian Question, not by this game at any rate.

Bad news was that Jerome Thomas broke a bone in his foot, and thus did not travel out here to Spain, where earlier on this evening Charlton kicked off in the late Saturday heat for an away fixture against Valencia.

Finding news of this is not easy either as the usual score update pages don't do friendlies, and Spanish TV isn't carrying the game, either.

But I finally located the end of the commentary on BBC London, and can thus report:

Late Score: Valencia 3 Charlton 1 (Sorondo)

Knowing Your Onions

2006-07-22T13:30:00.000+02:00

The media had quite a lot of fun yesterday at the expense of Darren Bent, who sliced into a tendon in his finger while cutting up an onion for a sandwich. Many of the websites and papers marvelled at the fact that Darren was making his own food at all. Lots of them were surprised that he was making a sandwich out of onions, and there were sly digs to the effect that with him only being a Charlton player, an onion sandwich might well be the limit of Darren's culinary ambitions, unlike, the implication seemed to be, the glamorous cosmopolitan young men who play at Chelsea and Arsenal, who presumably rarely move away from rocket trimmed with garlic shoots, and the obligatory warmed goats cheese (a revolting substance in my view) which, along with roasted red peppers (and I'm not over-keen on them, either) seems to represent the epitome of continental chic in the eyes of British-based commentators.

A person who calls himself Mediawatch, and who refers to his wife as Mrs Mediawatch, and who is to be found on a site called F365, helpfully reproduced an advertisement for an onion slicing machine, along with the tart (sorry) comment that having just signed a lucrative extension to his contract, Darren could well afford the £21.99 and get himself one.

And even dear old Frankie Valley got in on the act, with a very tongue-in-cheek piece about how the safest things to make and eat are porridge and custard, and that no man should ever contemplate cooking anything else.

But Frankie, like many another, made the mistake of assuming that if Darren was cutting an onion, then he must have been making an onion sandwich. But onion sandwiches don't exist, do they? I mean it is not a normal thing to make a sandwich out of raw onions and nothing else.

Now I don't actually have any inside information on this, but it is my belief that what Darren actually was doing was adding a bit of raw onion to, as it might be, a beef sandwich, or a salad sandwich, and as this is something I often do myself, I do not feel the inclination to sneer.

And anyway, cutting up onions is not an easy job; you need both hands; one to hold what has to be a fairly sharp knife, the other to position the onion. If, as I also found out the hard way five years ago, the onion is quite a fresh one, with a tight skin and flesh, then the moment when the knife meets the curve of the onion can result in the knife failing to cut into the onion, and instead forcing it away to one side, so that the blade then slashes down through mid air and makes contact with the other hand. I got off with a flesh wound that day.

The early media accounts reported that Darren had actually severed a finger, though this was revised to his having injured a tendon, later. But what surprised me was the view taken by the Daily Mirror among others, that Darren's injury would mean him being out for six weeks.

I found this hard to believe. Darren isn't a goalkeeper. Surely he could wrap his wounded hand in something while playing. OK, maybe a few days resting it completely first, but the Mirror etc. were off, listing all the matches Darren would not be scoring goals for us in.

Wyn Grant, however, did point out that there might be some risks in Darren's playing until he's all better; he might fall at an awkward angle when tripped by a Premiership defender (perish the thought), but all the same, six weeks seems a bit much.

And then the above picture appeared, courtesy of a selection taken by Clive Richardson at Sparrows Lane, Charlton's training ground, yesterday morning. It shows Darren (centre), hand swathed in bandages, er, training, or getting ready to. One of his team-mates, whom I cannot identify at this distance, seems to be checking his other hand, just in case.

And then it was announced that Darren, hand presumably well-strapped up, would be playing in today's friendly against Millwall.

But in the end he didn't.

I will leave you there for now, for, as the fates would have it, I am off to chop an onion as the first step in constructing a meat and potato pie for supper. I'll let you know how I get on, and I don't want any rumours going round about how JB likes nothing better on a Saturday night than an onion sandwich.

Late score: Millwall 1 Charlton XXII 4.

(Charlton put out 11 different players in each half. XI A made a 1-1 draw in the first 45 minutes, and XI B won 3-0 in the second period. What this proves I hesitate to say).

Performance Management at Quiz Night?

2006-07-21T13:19:00.000+02:00

We managed to get together the basic three traditional teams, including our long-gone friends the Old Farts, for one final summer quiz, before everything reverts to normal in September, and we have quizzes on Mondays again. My team were almost complete; Hugh is, we trust, coping with the joys of fatherhood for the first time, but Mush; John; Sam and Tony are working on the Centre's morning summer course, and I am working on an afternoon summer course at a sister Centre round the corner, just for a change of scene, so we were all able to get along. And we got Frank, too, one of our ex-members who doesn't have time to be a regular attender, and whom I am working alongside this month.

One of the problems we have faced in education in recent years has been the attempt by those in charge to introduce performance management for teachers. We feel that what is possibly (though not necessarily) suitable for office workers cannot be applied willy nilly to all kinds of employment: you cannot talk of productivity in teaching, not really; the speed and efficiency in which students assimilate knowledge cannot be universally quantified, and thus attempts to implant performance management just cause irritation and distress. Artificial targets and objectives are difficult to achieve, and yet these are arbitrarily set by managers who manage because they are in love with management as a philosophy, rather as a means of getting any useful work done.

I mention this because since I last wrote my blog on a regular basis (and with Charlton playing Millwall in the first friendly of the season tomorrow, this time I am back and am staying), Charlton have a new manager (pictured, not as handsome as the old one, but then...) , who is increasingly being referred to as the coach; this is because there are other characters in the set-up as well, and apparently there is, or is going to be, an ex-rugby league player who is to be the performance manager, in addition to the depressing-sounding general manager - football, who was appointed almost as soon as the sainted Alan Curbishley had boarded the plane for the first leg of his round-the-world trip.

And the thing is that although it all sounds impressive, appointing large numbers of managers doesn't really work. There is a lot more "management" in English teaching than, say 15 years ago, and in my view, to borrow a neat phrase from the late Sir Kingsley Amis, "more means worse".

And I notice that for all the managerial razzmattazz, the bookies don't reckon that Charlton will end up much higher than the relegation slots, although as they also seem to be touting Middlesbrough and Newcastle for success again, that doesn't really amount to much.

And the one thing that has baffled me throughout the Curbishley departure saga is this: a Premiership club from London needed a manager; loads of well-known Italians, Dutchmen and so forth were on record as fancying a spell of management in the English league, and by that they would mean Premiership, not Halifax Town; yet none of these fancied Charlton, as far as we know. So presumably when Gianluca Vialli, or Claudio Ranieri, or Sven, or Ruud Gullit say they'd like to manage in the Prem, what they really mean is that they'd like the Chelsea or Arsenal jobs. I would have thought that a debt-free London Premiership club would have been an attractive bet, but of course with Charlton, there is always the spectre of failure lurking round the corner, and that wouldn't do for these managers. And then there's the money. Managers, they're all the same in the end, aren't they?

And the quiz? Well my old friend Mark, a television producer, also came along for a look, and within half an hour was declaring that the format had limited appeal, and what we needed were flashing lights, roulette wheels, buzzers and young ladies in tight gold lamé knickers.

But the quiz is real life, not television, and that's why we like it so much. So for heaven's sake don't let the managers get their hands on it.

Late score: Our team 143: Edu's team 132; Old Farts 118; but it was nice to have them back.

Back Again

2006-06-11T21:24:00.000+02:00

I have been writing the blog for just over two years. and have lately been asking myself some searching questions as to why. In other words what do I get out of it?

It started mainly because I discovered that it was possible and easy to do, and I enjoyed writing, as I have always enjoyed writing; also I felt, at the time, that not enough people were writing about my football team. Through it I have got to know, virtually at any rate, such luminaries as Frankie Valley and Inspector Sands, pseudonyms just as mine is. And this has been something I have derived pleasure from. At the same time, my other main subject, our quiz team, has been riding high and low, and my team mates and one or two rivals, not to mention our charming and beloved landlady down at the pub, have been reading it; and then there was my friend Harry. [Hello, Harry!]

Harry and I go back many many years, having first met at university, and despite my having lived over here in Madrid since the seventies, he and his wife and family have always remained close to me. He too, though a late convert to the joys of computing, has read the blog, and even reads The Inspector and Frankie, despite being an Everton fan.

I telephoned him last evening to arrange about a forthcoming trip to the UK, and we chatted a bit about life, and the World Cup, in which we are not as interested as we once might have been, and then he said, in a tone that was almost accusing, "you haven't updated your blog for ages".

And this gave me a bit of a jolt. For of course I haven't; the last time I wrote about anything was when the English media were informing us (it is their mission to inform, after all), that Billy Davis was 'poised' or 'set' to become Charlton's manager inside three or four days. I didn't believe that at the time, either.

So I have been thinking about why I haven't been posting; the normal excuse is that as we approach the end of the academic year, marking exams and writing reports takes up a lot of my spare time, but then this is a task that happens at the end of every term, so it isn't the reason, and anyway that job is mainly going to be occupying the coming week, rather than having taken up the past two.

And of course, the football season is over; I always found that the fact that Charlton had played a match acted as a spur to get something down about it before there was another one, and I usually managed that. But last year I managed to write about things after the season had ended.

But it is fair to say that once last season had ended, and I had had a rant about Liverpool's 'greatest comeback of all time' in the Champions' League final (does no one remember Charlton v Huddersfield in late 1957? That really was the greatest comeback of all time), I was mainly writing about the quiz team. And the quiz has been in a state of flux lately.

This was because the much vaunted change to Thursday had driven away our oldest rivals, who simply stopped coming after a time; their cessation was gradual, but finally things reached a point at which they were no longer expected to be there, and the quality of life down in the cellar bar where the quiz takes place, was no longer so good; it wasn't the same without their sarcastic comments and cheery banter.

Without the rivalry, and knowing that David and Gitte used to read the blog, there seemed little point in reporting how many points we won by, or lost by (for there are other teams who can beat us, it just isn't as traditional).

However, we managed a good turn out last Thursday for what was the last quiz for a while. Hugh and I were question masters; a couple of old friends came to replace us in our team, which won with a respectable 136 points, and I had phoned David and he managed to get down, too.

It is the last quiz for the present, on account of the World Cup, as quiz players want to watch the games, and the pub will be full of supporters, too. We might dip a tentative toe in the water a couple of weeks down the line, but that might be that for the time being.

But the good news is that we revert to Mondays in September, and things might get back to normal.

As they will here soon; look for my views on the latest happenings in SE7 in a matter of days, now.

Professionalism

2006-05-25T14:52:00.000+02:00

Billy Davies - didn't he have a couple of hits in the sixties, dressed as a girl?

[Thursday afternoon]

Here in Madrid, English teachers such as myself fall into two main categories; there are those of us who mostly work on a fixed site, in what might be called an academy, a school or even an institute, whither we repair every day to give our lessons, and those who work as independents, giving what are called 'private classes', which means they usually spend the day trailing round the city between appointments, most of which take place in offices of one sort or another.

The law of demand means that the two groups' timetables are very different. Private teachers give classes to people in their place of work, generally, and these people, top executives, government ministers and the like, not infrequently elect to start their working day with a vigorous bout of English, more often than not at eight o'clock in the morning.

Fixed site teachers, on the other hand, cater for the great majority of people who do not receive English classes at work, and for university students and kids (who often need more English than they get at school), and this means that English classes have to take place after hours, and it is for this reason that if you work at a fixed location, you will almost always be teaching from the afternoon right through the evening, sometimes until as late as 2230.

If this sounds like a dreadful prospect to those of my readers attuned to the 9 to 5 mentality prevailing in the UK, then I can only assure you that once you get used to it, it is fine. Life in Madrid doesn't stop until about two or three in the morning, so once work is over there is still time to go for drinks, dinner, even the cinema, and of course to the quiz, and be able to get home on the underground, which doesn't stop running till about 1.45 a.m. And of course we don't have to get up at the crack of dawn, either; crack of noon is more the thing in my case. So this is why, today, at 1437 local time here in Madrid, I am happily seated at my computer, finishing my second cup of coffee of the day, with an hour or so to go before I need to start moving workwards.

I have been emulating the great Alan Curbishley for a week or more, and taking a small sabbatical from the blog. It was either that or try to write something about the quiz, but this is in such a state of flux that I became discouraged (sorry David), and the alternative was to try to say something about the process of selection of Alan's successor as the manager at Charlton Athletic.

But of course, had I done so, I would have been falling into the same trap that I criticised the media for in my last blog, i.e. creating so-called news, and comment, out of absolutely nothing.

I have to say, unfortunately, that no one picked up on my attempt to start a rumour about Claudio Ranieri, so wherefore today's blog then? Well, it has been inspired by the fact that I have a couple of hours free, and by the nagging feeling that on a blog, ten days' sabbatical is probably quite enough, and now, mainly, by what the media pages and all-day current affairs stations call 'breaking news', meaning news that they want to tell you, but which might be a hoax, or full of errors, or something, but which they are terrified someone else might try and reveal to you before they do.

The breaking news is that Preston North End's chairman has this morning announced that Charlton Athletic have told them that they are not pursuing their interest in PNE manager Billy Davis.

Now if you rely for your Charlton information exclusively on me, then you won't even have heard of this guy. This is because, just over a week ago, the papers and media pages were all convinced that Peter Taylor of Hull was going to get the job, even though he hadn't applied for it and even though Charlton had not approached Hull City's directors. Nevertheless the media decided that he was our new man, and then got peeved (see last posting) when nothing had happened four days after they had decided this.

Taylor then said he wasn't going to Charlton, which the media reported as him having turned them down, though there is no evidence that he had been offered the job at all. The next thing to happen was that Preston told the Lancashire Evening Post that Charlton had asked permission to talk to Billy Davies. This was about a week ago, and indeed an interview took place on Monday. The media then told us that Davies would be appointed on Monday afternoon. This came and went; we have had three more days of reports about Davies thinking, talking to the missus, making his mind up and so forth, plus speculation about which Preston players he would bring down to London with him (I liked the idea of David Nugent), and now it is Charlton who have said they are not interested.

Of course the media have their replacement lined up. Adrian Boothroyd is obviously staying at Watford; Phil Parkinson is not being released from his contract at Colchester, but guess what? Iain Dowie has resigned as manager of Palace and Palace chairman and Charlton-hater Simon Jordan says he doesn't mind what Dowie does as long as he doesn't go to Charlton.

So now the media have stated that Dowie will become the Charlton manager on Monday (what is it about them wanting things to happen on Mondays?).

It might be Claudio yet, though, as the Charlton board have behaved with total professionalism (the chairman of PNE said so this morning) in the way they have conducted their interviews, and the media are completely in the dark.

You read it here first (I can't see why this matters, but the media are very keen on it).

Charlton's New Manager

2006-05-16T12:40:00.000+02:00

I hereby formally link Claudio with the Charlton job; how long before this is reported as a solid fact?

This past weekend I was reading, as usual, the various football websites and a couple of newspaper ones - and guess what. There was not a single mention of Charlton Athletic in any of them. the media had absolutely nothing to report about anything happening down in SE7.

It seems that the old fashioned way of choosing a successor to Alan Curbishley is being adhered to, and this is certainly not the way in which the FA dragged out the whole boring saga of the new England manager. In other words, Charlton placed an advertisement (in the Daily Mail, for some reason - Frankie Valley thinks that probably all the best managers' wives must read it) for a new manager. They set a closing date which has now passed; they plan to conduct a series of interviews, quite properly asking permission of any relevant club board where necessary, and will then announce their choice. Chairman Richard Murray refuses to set a date for this announcement.

So, nothing to do but wait then.

Not good enough for the news media. They decided who might be the next manager; they came up with Mick McCarthy (lives in Bromley, as I said last time); Glen Hoddle (London boy, rumoured to be getting the shove at Wolverhampton, just the man to lead Charlton back into the wilderness where, in the view of said media, they belong).

Then it occurred to them that Charlton might well try to appoint a good manager, though obviously they aren't going to tempt the likes of Big Sam away from Bolton, nor yet the recently-promoted Steve Coppell down at Reading. And seemingly Paul Jewell would rather stay at Wigan. So the media came up with managers who have done well in the lower leagues; Phil Parkinson (Colchester); Adrian Boothroyd (Watford) and Peter Taylor (Hull).

These last three have all been described as having been 'linked' with the vacancy, and have all been described at one time or another as 'favourites' to get the job, too.

However, on account of the non-transparent selection process which is going forward, it is clear that these links and reported favourites are total speculation.

Today's media breaks the silence by rather peevishly stating that Hull haven't heard from Charlton as yet about being allowed to approach Peter Taylor, almost as if Mr Murray had promised to have a new man in place by this week, which he hasn't. Nor is there any evidence that Taylor interests Charlton, anyway. This is a story which is riding on the back of the fact that Andrew Mills, the new General Manager - Football (a discouraging-sounding title from the World of Business) has associations with an agency which represents Taylor.

In any case, if Adrian Boothroyd's name is one of those under consideration, Charlton might well have to wait till after the Championship play-off final, which is obviously going to influence what Boothroyd might wish to do next.

And it may well be that there are other applications from less likely people. Did I not read about six weeks ago that Claudio Ranieri wanted to come back and manage in London? And in fact hasn't Gianluca Vialli's name been put forward, rather like that of Mick McCarthy, on the grounds that despite being Italian, and despite not managing a club at present, he still lives in London?

But whoever it is, I reckon that we might have to wait a bit longer for the announcement; there's no need to rush things, after all. May isn't out yet, and I am sure the Charlton board don't want to be stampeded into a hasty decision just because the media are getting impatient. Hope not, anyway.

Not with a Bang, but a Thumping

2006-05-08T16:46:00.000+02:00

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.

Bugger Blackburn

2006-05-01T13:59:00.000+02:00

Charlton 0 Blackburn Rovers 2

Curbs applauds the Charlton fans

The Inspector used this title for his piece (not with the name 'Blackburn' of course) about the previous Saturday's 1-4 defeat at Bolton, and I have appropriated the idea, and with good reason, as you will see.

Of course, the shock news that Alan Curbishley will not be continuing as Charlton's manager after the end of the season eclipsed most other things. but although Curbs's decision, announced a few minutes before the match began, and all the fuss, speeches and so forth, at the end, occupied most of the media's attention, and mine, of course, as I was, and still am, stunned almost into speechlessness, there was the other matter of a league fixture to be played, and it was against Blackburn Rovers.

This season they have thumped us 4-1 at Ewood Park; they have come back from being 2-0 down at the Valley to win 3-2 in the League Cup; and now here they were again, looking for a win to bolster their campaign to be in the UEFA Cup next season, and they got it. A reasonable account of the whole thing can be found here.

Whether Charlton's weak performance was because of the injuries and suspensions, or sheer shock and disbelief, I don't know; for apparently the players themselves knew nothing of Curbs's intentions until five minutes before the announcement was made to the spectators.

So Blackburn had it easy, and as I say, bugger Blackburn. I might well be unique in the world of football supporters in hating them so much, for, as I have mentioned in these pages before, I went to primary school in a little country town not far from Blackburn, where you either supported the Rovers, or Burnley, somewhat further away, but still a more attractive proposition to the discerning boy football fan, in my view. And in any case my father; my uncles; my cousins and many of my friends followed Burnley, so it was easy to fall in with them, and even watch them quite a lot, as in those days London might as well have been in New Zealand for all the chance there was of ever going there.

And the thing about Burnley fans is that they hate Blackburn Rovers, and I began to hate them, too. But I was in my heart a Charlton fan. They were my first love, and I put up with the good-natured bantering of my father, and persisted in being more concerned about Charlton's fate than Burnley's, which is why the events of a particular Saturday afternoon fell out the way they did.

I now take you back to the morning of 26 April 1958. Charlton have been down in the Second Division for one season, and are in second place, with one fixture remaining. They have 55 points. Just above them, with a better goal average, are West Ham United, also on 55. Just below these two are Blackburn Rovers on 54, and Liverpool (yes, in Division 2) on 53. As it is still 1958, teams get two points for a win and one point for a draw. Also, only two sides are promoted and relegated between the First and Second Divisions.

Liverpool's goal average means that, barring a cricket score in their home game with Barnsley (yes indeed) at Anfield, they will be denied promotion for a while yet. West Ham have to travel to Middlesbrough, but of course most of the attention is based on The Valley, where Charlton are at home to Blackburn.

I still have nightmares about the afternoon spent alone, pacing round and round the kitchen of our eighteenth century cottage not far from the Forest of Bowland; the red and cream diamond pattern lino became imprinted on my brain (I can still visualise it perfectly) as I stared at the floor and listened to the radio commentary (unusual in it not involving a Division One game) on the second half of Charlton v Blackburn.

The final score, to my disbelief and dismay, when a goalless draw would have sufficed, was Charlton 3 Blackburn 4, which meant that Blackburn vaulted over Charlton to 56 points, and gained promotion to Division 1. And it would be many years before Charlton came that close again.

Liverpool only managed a 1-1 draw with Barnsley; West Ham won comfortably 3-1 at Ayresome. And Burnley beat Newcastle 3-1 at home that day too; probably that's where my father was.

So bugger Blackburn, I repeat.

As for Alan Curbishley; I cannot improve on all the eulogies that there have been, and when the time comes that he wants or needs a top job in football, I am sure there will be one available to suit him.

And as for his replacement; I need to mull things over a bit longer; there'll be more musings before long.

... And into the Myhre

2006-04-24T13:36:00.000+02:00

Bolton Wanderers 4 Charlton 1

It seems that no one expected much from this fixture, and that no one cares. The Inspector reports that Charlton relied on a weakened midfield and defence belting the ball, Fourth Division style, upfield, and hoping that Darren Bent (Marcus is one of the wounded) might latch on to something, but unfortunately Charlton's penalty was the only thing he hit home.

And Thomas Myhre's reputation, acquired during the spate of goalless draws, for keeping clean sheets, has disappeared as well, as he was at fault on several occasions, and a 'bring back Andersen' movement seems to be starting up, and only rightly as I feel he was unjustifiably dropped after a small dip in form, earlier in the season.

For myself, I never expected much; Bolton always do well against Charlton; all visits to the North West have been fruitless this season, barring the 0-0 at Anfield not so long ago, and of course with six regular first-teamers unavailable through injury, or in the case of Herman Hreidarsson, suspension, there was going to be little Charlton could do. And Bolton are still in with another chance of playing in the UEFA Cup next season, too.

As with the Middlesbrough games recently, the media interpreted the fixture as some kind of competition between potential England managers, which of course none of them was. The BBC, true to form, reported that Charlton had played badly (well they did) but omitted to mention the missing six. The Kent Messenger not only picked up on the Lancs / North West jinx, but pointed out that the last time a 0-1 deficit to Portsmouth was converted into a 2-1 win, the very next outing was to the North West (Blackburn), and a 4-1 thumping ensued.

But as I say; I knew this in my heart; I didn't even bother to find out what Lawro thought; even he must have got this one right.

Out of the Fire...

2006-04-22T10:42:00.000+02:00

Charlton 2 Portsmouth 1

The BBC said that Portsmouth were 'coasting to victory' after 76 minutes, and sounded rather peeved that Charlton started to turn the game round at this point (Bryan Hughes's goal, above). But then the Beeb are always peeved when Charlton do well. And how a 1-0 lead away from home can be described as 'coasting to victory' is a mystery to me.

The other thing the BBC pointed out is that Charlton had five injuries by half time; but the way they reported this was strange indeed; the phrase was something on the lines of "Charlton could hardly keep their players on the field", implying, I would think, that the injuries were somehow Charlton's fault, and not, as seemed more likely, Portsmouth's.

OK, when I read the other reports, including those of my fellow bloggers - Charlton fans who actually went to The Valley - it did rather seem that no one expected the 76th minute turn-round; but that's football; the game lasts 90 (well, on average 94) minutes and everything that occurs within that time, counts.

Harry Redknapp went back to the south coast complaining that he had been robbed; that Portsmouth had been brilliant, but that is just nonsense. Of course he wanted to win; of course his team were in the lead for a long time, but as Frankie Valley pointed out (and he was there) if that display was Harry's idea of 'brilliant' then no wonder they're in danger of going down.

So, just as on that fateful day when the absurd Lawro advised everyone to go shopping with their mothers-in-law rather than watch Portsmouth v Charlton, a 0-1 deficit was turned into a 2-1 win, and Charlton achieved another double, and also reached a points total of 47, one more than last season, and with three games left.

Mind you; these three games are against Lancashire's finest; i.e. Bolton, this afternoon, who never give anything away to Charlton; then Blackburn at home, which should be winnable, and then Manchester United away, where the most Charlton can hope for is another of those enjoyable 0-0 draws we've been having so many of. Though it doesn't now look as though United will be having one final fling at wresting the league title away from Chelsea, not any more.

And now we are without Herman Hreidarsson for the rest of the season as he has been handed a three-match ban (he pleaded guilty to elbowing Luis Boa Morte); and Luke Young won't be fit, at least for this afternoon. And there are other injuries as well - Spector with his dislocated shoulder for example, but if you believe what you get from the BBC, Charlton have no one but themselves to blame.

Slump After All?

2006-04-17T13:38:00.000+02:00

Fulham 2 Charlton 1

Towards the end of March, I celebrated Charlton's last win, over Newcastle United, by declaring that maybe the annual spring slump was not going to happen; even last week, on my arrival on Merseyside to be greeted with the news of the 0-0 home draw against Everton, I was still reasonably contented.

But now, nine days later, things look very different. I referred in my comment on the Middlesbrough cup-tie that Charlton were looking like they had done a year ago, when in the space of two months they achieved just one solitary league point. In saying this, I meant that Curbs was ignoring the younger talent he has available to him, and relying on players like Bartlett and Holland, who were of course key figures in that famous two-month slump of 2005.

For the Fulham match, and possibly in response to bloggers such as Frankie Valley, some changes were made, including the return of Darren Ambrose, though my personal favourite, Jerome Thomas, did not get a run out till 60 minutes had elapsed.

However, although Charlton gave a reasonably good account of themselves, they were no match for, nor yet had any equivalent of (and how useful it would be if they had) Luis Boa Morte, who scored both goals. The 2-1 scoreline was reached by half time and Charlton could have made progress in the second half, including an attempt at the end by Marcus Bent (showing disbelief that his attempt has failed, above). It was not to be, however, but not really that much of a disgrace for Charlton, who played quite well. Even the BBC were reasonably fair about this (but see below), though a better report appeared on the Telegraph web page.

This afternoon, Charlton entertain a resurgent Portsmouth in SE7. The last time we played them was the famous occasion when the absurd Lawro said that going shopping with one's mother-in-law might be preferable to watching it. On that occasion Charlton came back from 1-0 down to win 2-1. Today, following Birmingham's defeat yesterday at Aston Villa, Charlton are mathematically safe from relegation, and unlikely to qualify for anything you get for finishing higher up, apart of course, from the right to play in the Premier League next season, currently being celebrated by Sheffield United and Reading, and the loss of it, bemoaned by Sunderland. Portsmouth are by no means certain to be there, either, so this is what they will be playing for. Charlton's favourite goalie for the last six years, Dean Kiely, transferred to Portsmouth earlier this year, makes his first return to The Valley, too.

So with Charlton certain to finish between 7th and 17th, the prize for which, as I have said, is Premiership football next season, and Portsmouth not yet certain to be enjoying this, one wonders if Charlton will be able to rise to the occasion more than their opponents. Some bloggers say they don't mind what Charlton manage to achieve any more, but I do; I still want my team to win, and also to attain the highest position possible, as I don't see the Premiership merely as a stepping-stone to something else; it is an end in itself and the higher one can finish, the better.

One final point, which I omitted from my last report: as I was in the U.K., I learned about the Middlesbrough result from the BBC: on the radio news at ten o'clock on Thursday night as we drove back up the Wirral from North Wales, where we had been having dinner; and then a slightly longer account with a clip or two of some goals, on the television news during one of the breakfast shows next day. Both the radio announcer on the Thursday night, and the girl reading the news on Friday morning, read the news using the same tone of voice and general attitude as when an English side has knocked some Albanian or Moldovan outfit out of the UEFA Cup. "Middlesbrough are through to the semi finals of the FA Cup", drooled the girl, over clips of two of their goals (none of ours), for all the world as though London's Charlton Athletic were some bunch of no-mark filthy foreigners from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, and the whole of the United Kingdom should rejoice. And yet Michael Grade, a non-executive director of Charlton, has something to do with the BBC, doesn't he? Maybe he has instructed his staff to knock Charlton at every opportunity in order to avert accusations of favouritism.

Favouritism for Charlton from the Beeb? You're having a laugh.

Not Much Time for Disappointment

2006-04-14T20:32:00.000+02:00

Middlesbrough 4 Charlton 2

As I mentioned in my last, I have been in England, and I had supposed that I would spend Wednesday evening watching this game on my friends' television, but as things turned out, I didn't. A family birthday led to an invitation to all of us to decamp down the Wirral to Mold in North Wales, the land of my fathers, for a celebration meal, and in all honesty I think I had a better evening than I otherwise would have, from what I can gather.

It is not just that Charlton failed to progress in the Cup, but more that they are beginning to look rather like they looked one year ago, and that is the worrying thing. There is more speculation going on about whether Curbs will stay, and there are even people who think he might be well advised to go. The Inspector's page, and the people writing comments there, will furnish the details.

For myself, I have been so busy packing and getting myself safely back to Madrid, which I did, earlier today, that I have had little time to be disappointed, although I suspect I am, just the same. I'll see how I feel after the Fulham match tomorrow.

Minds on Other Things?

2006-04-09T21:23:00.000+02:00

Charlton 0 Everton 0

It seems that Charlton are preparing themselves for the quarter final of the Cup replay at Middlesbrough on Wednesday; top scorer Darren bent was rested, and the others, even Jerome Thomas, (above right) weren't able to make much of a difference.

For my part, while the match was taking place, I was sharing some white wine with an unexpectedly-encountered lady friend of mine on the EasyJet flight to Liverpool, and I am writing this on the computer located in the back bedroom of my old friend and Everton fan, Harry, somewhere on the Wirral.

As is his wont, he collected me at the airport, and one of the first things he told me was that it had been a 0-0 draw, and I was glad, really, as in the first place Charlton didn't lose, and in the second, any other result would have gone some way to spoiling the weekend, perhaps. It now looks fairly certain that both clubs will stay around for another year of Premiership thrills and spills; and the other good thing about all these 0-0 draws is that this time last year they would have been x- 0 defeats, where x is a number greater than or equal to 1; so thank goodness for Thomas Myhre, whom Harry says Everton must have been barmy to let go.

I hope to take in some of the quarter final game on Wednesday, and will write about it afterwards, though maybe not till I get back to Madrid, scheduled for Friday afternoon.

Mean Myhre Spoils Teddy's Big Day

2006-04-04T15:32:00.000+02:00

West Ham United 0 Charlton 0

It was Teddy Sheringham's 40th birthday on Sunday, and this, if you read the BBC website sports reports, is what this game was all about. The reporters working for the BBC continue to ignore any intentions or desires Charlton Athletic and their long-suffering supporters (don't they pay their licence fees just as much as everyone else?) might have.

Elsewhere, when the result became known; the usual stuff started. Some reports used the customary 'ground out' structure, implying, as I have said often before, that the goalless draw had previously been agreed on. However, not everyone said this, and from reading quite a number of other reports, proper professional ones, I am able to conclude that it was a lively, well-fought game in the spring sunshine, and the result was fair.

The BBC, however, were not having any of this; Sheringham came on to play the second half, in their view the most exciting bit of the entire proceedings; and Thomas Myhre then spoiled his birthday, they implied, by making a point-blank save near the end and thus depriving Teddy of a goal to celebrate it with. Both Myhre and Charlton were made to look mean for not making the great man a present of a goal for his Big Day. Pathetic.

Of course I and many others mainly remember Sheringham for his part in the Hong Kong 'dentist's chair' affair in which Paul Gascoigne and various others, and of course the Birthday Boy, had a jolly time forcing industrial quantities of neat spirits down each other's throats. Oh, and I seem to recall that he played for Manchester United; and Tottenham; and maybe someone else; and now he is at West Ham; and he is still playing at 40. Reward enough, I would have thought.

In fact Dennis Rommedahl (on the right, above) forced as many as four corners in as many minutes at one stage in the match. Unaccountably this was not mentioned in the BBC report, at all.

And is there something slightly derogatory in the BBC's use of 'point blank' to describe Myhre's save from Teddy's shot? Maybe in their eyes it will come to join last-minute goals and anything positive done by a substitute as appearing not quite to count. At least where Charlton are concerned.

Anyway, there are other people in the world; Sheringham wasn't the only person to have a birthday on Sunday; many Charlton fans, statistically, must have had; and anyway mine's coming up fairly soon; what about me?

A victory by three goals or more would have dropped West Ham's goal difference, and raised Charlton's, by enough to have put us ahead of them in the league; was I alone in hoping for a 1-4 result? Quite possibly; but 0-0 is better than losing, and I am glad to see that Charlton are not in the mood for giving anything away right now; there is a reasonable chance of exceeding last season's points total of 46 in the remaining games.

But the BBC won't like it, you watch.