Putting Out the Garbage

Do you remember that run of nine 'winnable fixtures' that began at Fulham on Oct 16? You know, the ones that we were going to burn through in a blaze of glory? Well I hate to break it to you, but it ends tomorrow night and we've accumulated all of six points from the first eight of them.

In case I haven't depressed you enough already, here is another way of looking at our predicament. I'm going to suggest that we will need 42 points this season to ensure safety because the Premiership is so compressed from 3rd to 18th. In other words we need to find 33 points from our final 23 games at an average of 1.43 points per game.

After the completion of the 23rd game of the 2000/01 season, we had accumulated 32 points. If we then take a look at every subsequent game thereafter, and see each as the final game in a new 23-game sequence (ie. eliminating the first game in the prior sequence), then we can create 221 sets of 23-game sequences culminating in the heartbreaking defeat at Sheffield United last Saturday.

So in how many of those 221 sets of 23-games do you think we accumulated 33 points or more? The answer is just 51, or 23.1% and perhaps not surprisingly none of them either began or finished in either 2005/06 or 2006/07. So the challenge facing Les Reed and his underperforming squad is to somehow produce form over the remainder of the season which is superior to any form produced by Charlton since 2004/05, and to most form produced since we returned to the Premiership.

For the sake of completeness the last set of 23 games which produced 33 points or more ended at Aston Villa on 20 April 2005. And finally since you asked, the best 23 game sequences we have produced since 2000/01 generated 39 points (it happened three times in 2003, ending 22 Feb, 2 Mar and 22 Mar respectively).

Many fans have pointed out, probably correctly, that Curbs would have produced better results with the current squad than either Dowie or Reed has managed. That viewpoint however, in my opinion, is both lazy as well as obviously being irrelevant given that it seems his departure was mutual. I mention the former because Curbs would have had the benefit of 15 years with his feet under the manager's desk, and all the helpful familiarity and built-up respect that sort of tenure engenders.

Hence if you hold this view, then ergo you also must strongly believe that Curbs would have been able to walk into any other struggling Premiership club in the summer, been handed a £12m budget, and been able to seamlessly guide them out of trouble too (Everton? Villa? Man City? Newcastle?). Personally I just don't believe it (though I suspect in fairness that none of the aforementioned quartet of clubs would be holding up the Premiership in that scenario).

It's also reasonable to assume that Curbs would have dealt with some of the garbage left behind from last season better than Dowie/Reed, because after all it was his garbage. Some of it was put out for the dustmen at the end of last season (Jeffers, JJ, Bartlett, Bothroyd etc..), but some continues to remain today (Holland, Hughes, Lisbie, Fortune etc..). Meanwhile, some of those in whom we perhaps had greater confidence head the list of our most disappointing performers this season eg. Ambrose, Rommedahl, Young, etc..

I think it's worthwhile reviewing the Charlton team that took the field coincidentally against Blackburn last season in Curbs' final home game in charge: Andersen, Sankofa, Powell, Perry, Sorondo (Fortune), Ambrose, Holland, Hughes, Kishishev (Sam), Bartlett (Lisbie), Bent D. I've put it in bold type because it was such utter garbage merely emphasising the difficult job that Dowie was given, and now Reed. I'm not suggesting that Curbs lost his focus necessarily; indeed he may have been the figurehead as the club suffered the type of natural loss of momentum that most companies suffer during their lifecycle, but to exonerate entirely is wholly unfair to his successors. Regular readers of this blog will know this is a viewpoint I adhere to very strongly.

Others have pointed to the 'magical £12m' given to Dowie, that would (under Curbs' leadership) suddenly have transformed the weak squad above back into a solid midtable team again. Luckily one can easily review the final £12m that Curbs spent as a guide to how it might have been spent: Bent M (£2.5m), Ambrose (£900k), El Karkouri (£1.0m), Murphy (£2.5m), Jeffers (£2.6m), Bent D (£2.5m). As Meat Loaf might have said, 'one out of six ain't bad' (he tried to get rid of poor Talal remember). Admittedly he might have got it all to gel better than Dowie/Reed have, but then again I reiterate he would have had the familiarity with the club and the legacy players.

The Blackburn game is live on TV here in the US which ordinarily would fill me with excitement, but right now it feels me with some dread. Indeed I suspect it's a feeling shared by many of the more locally-based fans whose absence might well produce our worst home Premiership crowd for sometime. Following on from Blackburn's dire attendance on Saturday (16,799), my long-term 'Premiership in decline' thesis seems well on track. More evidence existed in the banks of empty seats at Everton (32,968) and now Man City (35,915), and the inability of either 'Boro (31,238) or Wigan (22,089) to sell out for the visits of Man Utd and Liverpool respectively.

At the time of writing, Killer (KillerWatch© -£282) had not yet offered his unique perspective, but I will nudge him towards another home draw to keep us rooted to the foot of the Premiership. NY Addick predicts Charlton 1 (Bent M), Blackburn 1 (Emerton)