Worth the Wait

I had to wait fully seven hours after kick-off before this game was shown in full on Setanta USA. We have just moved into our new apartment and hence I approached the unpacking in the style of Scott Parker (enthusiastically moving from box to box), whilst studiously avoiding the result.

Given that I had plenty of time to ponder it, I reckon that was about as long as I've ever spent without knowing a Charlton result. Ironic really, given that I got to see it in the end in full.

Knowing that a Charlton match has finished but not yet knowing the result puts me in a sort of 'never never' land. You know you're still existing because it hurts when you pinch yourself, but it's difficult to immerse oneself in the usual trivialities of life. I recall being told that I was being 'disrespectful' to the Brazilian rainforest and its inhabitants in 2000 when I managed to get enough BBC World Service reception to learn (just 15 minutes after full-time) that Charlton had beaten Middlesbrough 1-0 thanks to a Matty Svensson header. How can you be expected to give a monkeys about the monkeys in such circumstances?

As usual I was the only person in the pub interested in the game; it's almost like a throwback to those Full Members Cup ties at Selhurst Park when the attendance didn't reach four-figures. The downside of course is that it's hard to persuade the landlord to let you hear the commentary and hence I was forced to watch what turned out to be a heroic performance to a soundtrack initially of the Beach Boys, Eagles and Foreigner.

Ok, I'll begin by stating the bleedin' obvious: today's performance was immense. In terms of pure guts and an absolute determination to salvage a victory in adversity, this could be compared in my view with the 4-3 win at Villa Park in 1999 for example. Until today I thought that some of Dowie's management speak was dangerously close to David Brent's, but no longer. I even had tears in my eyes in the closing stages, and it wasn't just because those tearjerkers par extraordinaire Coldplay suddenly boomed from the jukebox.

How could you pick a man-of-the-match from Carson, El Karkouri, Faye, Kishishev or Bent for example? And frankly you could make a case for any of their teammates too (Hreidarsson aside, more about him later). I'll even declare a 7-day moratorium on any criticism of Bryan Hughes (though he should have been sacrificed not Ambrose).

Football, like sport in general, is an emotional rollercoaster because you don't know the outcome in advance (unless it's the Tour de France). So if I'm brutally honest, when Faye accidentally clipped the ankles of Diouf which surely meant another defeat was on the cards, I wasn't espousing the heroics of the team, but bemoaning the idiocy of one of its members.

I've been able to watch the Hreidarsson elbow several times from several angles, and I wish Dowie would take a leaf from Stuart Pearce's book and stop trying to defend the indefensible. It's pretty obvious what occurred - Davies gave El Karkouri a whack a couple of minutes earlier, and the Herminator decided to take out some Icelandic retribution, despite the fact that his Morroccan counterpart had dusted himself down, smiled and got on with it. They should dock him two weeks wages and distribute a pound to all the spectators. Davies is a pain in the backside to play against but his style is hardly subtle; surely the last piece of advice Dowie gave to his defenders would have been, "..don't get riled..." On another day, Hreidarsson's lunacy could have cost us the game.

Fortunately on this day, a perceived injustice merely served to fire us up, particularly after Carson's penalty save at which point you sensed the players began to believe. I'll probably wind up a few readers now just like Davies winds up opposition defenders, but our subsequent penalty was an outrageous dive in my view. I don't think Darren Bent is a 'natural' diver, more an opportunistic one, and what better time to test a referee than when you know he will be aware he owed us a decision?

The problem with Mike Dean is that he is one of those referees who only has 95% conviction in his decisions, and thus that nagging 5% plays on his mind thereafter, impacting his decisions. It's only human nature of course, but it's a terrible trait for an adjudicator. The Pakistani furore this week about Darrell Hair completely missed the point - they should show Inzamam al-Haq a video of today's game to see whether he would prefer an umpire without the courage of his convictions. The outcome is even more farcical.

As soon as Dean had completed his 'levelling up' by sending off Davies (and yes I thought it was soft) we looked comfortable, and Bent's nicely taken second sealed a wonderful victory, and so tonight the world seems a better place suddenly. Is that Arsenal below us in the table?