Burnley preview

The euphoria from Tuesday night, has rapidly been replaced with the grim reality of having no recognised centre backs for the trip to Burnley.

Charlton fans of a certain age, will not need reminding that Turf Moor was the scene of a 7-1 defeat in February 1983.

The defensive situation is truly ridiculous, and has been an accident waiting to happen all season.

By my reckoning, we have ten players who could reasonably start in central midfield (Holland, Bailey, Semedo, Wright, Zheng, Ambrose, Spring, Soares, Shelvey, Racon), but just two recognised central defenders.

Who is accountable for this state of affairs? It again suggests a 'systemic' failure within the club, given we've been limping along with just two centre halves for several weeks now.

If there's any consolation, it's Burnley's own problems. Five consecutive defeats have left the Clarets with a negative goal difference, and threaten to leave them with nothing to show from highly promising League and Cup campaigns.

At their best, and as proven by outstanding home performances against Arsenal and Spurs, they are an exciting fluid outfit. The fixture at The Valley meanwhile was a game of two halves, Luke Varney's late miss rightly effectively ending his Charlton career.

My current proprietary safety models suggest that we need 26 points from our final 17 games to stay up. This implies we need say seven wins and five draws, thus permitting us to lose another five games.

Whilst it's thus easy to look at this fixture and view a point as a 'bonus', but defeat as somewhat inevitable, in truth an away fixture at a troubled out-of-form side represents an excellent chance to notch up one of those seven wins. Harsh perhaps, but true (even with no defenders).

I think Parky will line them up as follows: Elliot, Moutaouakil, Holland, Youga, Basey, Bailey, Spring, Soares, Sam, Ambrose, Burton. Subs: Randolph, Racon, Shelvey, Gray, Dickson.

NY Addick predicts Burnley 3 (Eagles, Blake 2), Charlton 0. Att: 12, 289.