Blogger's Night

As has been well-documented elsewhere, the club invited an assortment of bloggers and other pundits to The Valley last night for beer and sandwiches with Peter Varney. It must have been reminiscent of those old meetings between politicians and trade unionists, with Varney cast as the power broker and Frankie Valley as Arthur Scargill.

It was one of the rare occasions during the past three years when I've wished I lived in London, but then again I suppose I wouldn't have a blog called New York Addick (and probably no blog at all). It is frustrating (albeit understandable) that last night's discussion was strictly off-the-record, but hopefully a similar event will be organised (perhaps a convention of International Addicks, held somewhere like the Bahamas).

Pedro 45 has written a summary of the evening's events, although tantalisingly left unanswered the single question that keeps me awake at night - do the players and management actually read the blogs? It would be surprising to me if the management (especially the Board) didn't at least visit a selection of them from time to time. Combined with the comments left by readers, and the message boards like Charlton Life, they represent a solid cross-section of real time customer views, which are likely far more valuable than any club-initiated market research.

This type of progressive initiative is very typical of our special club, and helps to explain just why Charlton does have such a wide array of interesting and knowledgeable bloggers. I think it takes a certain type of person to have developed a fanatical passion for Charlton given everything we have been through in the past several decades. One of those confessed fanatics (Chicago Addick) discussed this in more detail here.

Given the difficulties we have had on and off the pitch since last May, I think in general the tone across the various blogs has been restrained, and from a personal standpoint there is only one post I genuinely regret. It was written in the aftermath of the Wycombe defeat, and thus might be considered 'mitigating circumstances'.

If you want to see an example of a club where the relationship between the fans and Board is slightly less amicable, check out the excellent TopSpurs website. It is written by Jim Duggan, a fanatical Spurs fan and arch cynic, and someone with whom I have had several pleasant correspondences about our two clubs and football in general. When a Charlton blogger sees fit to write the equivalent of, "..I hate them (the owners) more than I hate Arsenal.." and "..Spurs are a zombie which died a while back and has been taken over looking similar to what it was before but dead inside..", then we'd all better be careful about what's in those sandwiches.