Abject
The nice thing about supporting Charlton this season is the improvement it makes to your vocabulary. Each weekend you are forced to find new ways to express just how bad we are. An online thesaurus suggests abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, bad, deplorable, depressing, dire, disgusting, distressing, dreadful, fearful, frightful..... yep, we are all of those.
I was a little early in calling on Curbs to leave after the Wigan away game with one anonymous reader telling me, "I'm sorry but to think that getting rid of Curbs is the answer is madness." This was before Murphy and Smertin had left, and of course he indeed stayed to try to turn it around. We however limped to the end of the season, and now I think I'm in the vast majority who realised the time had come. Risky perhaps, but it certainly wasn't madness.
Whatever persuaded Sky to screen the Man Utd-Charlton game is beyond me. I don't tend to feel much sympathy for Spurs fans but this was a ridiculous example of outright pandering to the Man Utd hordes from Basingstoke to Brighton. Thankfully we are spared the sight of a slighly above-average Spurs side in 'Champions' League competition as opposed to an Arsenal side that oozes class, but I think even I'd have preferred to have watched the drama unfold at Upton Park.
I'm looking at the league table and wondering how we accumulated 47 points to finish 13th. The only explanation I can come up with (other than a fixture list that allowed us to build some early momentum) is pure unadulterated luck. I've seen enough live and on TV to tell me this and the post-match comments of some opposition managers after losing to us backs it up....Steve Bruce: "We created chance after chance and can not really do any more than that"; Harry Redknapp: "We deserved to win. There was no doubt about that, we were by far the better team."
Unfortunately not only will Curbs have failed to have beaten Man Utd whilst Charlton manager, he'll also have failed to arrest our usual end-of-season slump. We took just 9 points from our final 9 games and won just 4 of our final 17. I've been 'fortunate' enough to have seen four of our final seven games on TV, and I'm going to have to reach for the thesaurus again because they've represented some of the most repugnant performances I think I have ever seen from the club, with no goals scored in the process. We seem completely unable to complete the most basic passes or undertake simple defensive tasks. United could have won by any score they liked today but the four goals they did score were avoidable.
If the rumours about Luke Young moving to West Ham are true (and frankly who could blame him?) then how long before Darren Bent concludes he is bored of chasing lost causes? The best pass our best player received all day was from a United player. I don't have any easy solutions to this mess but the only realistic one I can find is to clear out the deadwood (at least five players on the pitch today should have played their final game for the club) and focus on signing a dozen of the best young prospects in the lower leagues.
It's important for Charlton fans when appraising the new manager to appreciate just how little he has been left to work with. Whilst genuinely excited about having a new man at the helm, I am equally terrified about our prospects for next year. If we continue to rely on good fortune, which in my opinion we have during this campaign, then it will eventually come back to bite us. 'Thanks Curbs' indeed but you stayed a year too long.
posted by New York Addick @ 4:55 PM
5 comments
Spot on mate. There are in my opinion only about 5 premiership quality players left in our squad and it would not surprise me if Young and Bent moved on as well...we are in big trouble next season in my opinion and need to find a manager who will have the conenctions to be able to bring in the right players, sadly i have no idea who this is...
We have far too much dead wood in the squad and could do with having half the players and twice the quality. Player targets for me would be Lescott, Bowyer, Kirkland & Gera, that lot would prob set us back £8m or so and we would still need another 3 players at least
If we can just hold onto Bent for 1 more season, he'll keep us up and allow the transition to be slightly easier.
Having said, as long as the new boss can give us a side that can pass and has some guile about it I won't mind watching us regardless of division.
So long Curbs and thanks for all the Kish.
Interesting that you put Marcus Bent on that list - it's probably a bit premature to judge what he can do but I'm confident we paid way over the odds.
Why do you use Murphy leaving as an example of Curbs bad management?? In fact he was dead right to drop the out of form whinging twit.
Spurs lost a large number of players from food poisoning yesterday - where was Danny Boy in this crisis. He was firmly on the bench as usual.
Smertin accuses the club of a lack of ambition. No we had loads of ambition but we were relying on Smertin (and Murphy to carry it off in a bog way. Think he let us down not theother way round.
I didn't blame Curbs for Murphy and Smertin's departure - instead I wanted to point out that there were already danger signs during our Nov/Dec slump when our two best central midfielders were still at the club. I find it worrying that Curbs claims we turned it around in 2006 by winning 4 from 17!