Looks like Ben Alnwick will be signing for Riga...

seriously_red said:

Airman Brown said:

seriously_red said:

We stayed up... All the rest is noise!

I'm sure the junior employees who were made redundant to save money this summer will be glad to hear it, especially as "budget is not an issue now". But haven't you been telling us all year that it is the major issue because of FFP?

We move on in hope, because that is the nature of football fans, but we don't forget the past and we particularly shouldn't allow Richard Murray to rewrite history.

Why is Murray so scared of Katrien Meire meeting Peter Varney, do you think? Probably because he knows his revisionist history of the last six years will collapse like a house of cards.

On the one hand you bemoan Richard Murray "constantly bringing up Varney" but isn't it you who brings him up on Charlton life approximately once a week!
The previous owners (with Varney) appointed Powell and built a squad to get us out of League 1. They then kept us there with reducing losses and sold the club as a going concern.
As far as I'm concerned non footballing staff matters are never fair game for public discussion... And I mean never. It is you who chooses to leak and leverage redundancies at a time of your choosing to fit with your agenda.
Clearly you would have had a field day if we had been relegated. Ideally under Duchatelet we will move further and further away from the bottom six.

This is just drivel, isn't it? We both know and so do many others that you are Murray's stooge and that various other people on here post information from him on a less gullible basis. Murray is a constant presence on here, he just hides behind other people. Remember I worked with him as local sports reporter and editor for nine years, as well as supporters' club secretary, and then as the club's head of comms for five. I know exactly how he operates. I think he did great things for the club and have duly credited him, including in my revised book this month. He and Martin Simons are the reason we got back to The Valley, never mind what happened subsequently. I don't and won't allow what happened post 2006 to colour my views about what he did before that, but Murray is not just his public persona. Few of us are.

Most people who worked at The Valley during their time know what the previous owners were about, whether or not they left as a result. They did a great deal of damage to the well-being of the club, the business, its staff, the infrastructure (by neglect) and they came close to wrecking the team again, but they managed to get out in time - largely thanks to Dennis Wise, improbably. If we had been relegated it would have been a complete disaster and I am not sure if the club would ever have recovered from it, so no I wouldn't have "had a field day". I thought it was a terrifying prospect. Duchatelet's installation of Riga may have been crucial, but we don't and can't know. People will look at that through their own preconceptions. His interventions in team matters, on the other hand, were foolish and pigheaded. The fact he got away with it doesn't mean they were all acts of genius, as any sensible person would acknowledge.

What needed to happen once the previous regime were out of the way was a rapprochement between the club and all the people who care about Charlton, which goes well beyond ex-employees. I am not convinced by Duchatelet because of what I've seen and heard, but I am open-minded. Unfortunately, Murray stands in the way of any constructive engagement because he cannot accept the reality of what happened or his role in it. He is frantically spinning a false version of the past to protect his reputation, including bad-mouthing Peter Varney privately and publicly as the cause of the problems. And some people are taken in by him.

People like Peter and myself will always be Charlton fans. We and many others have a great deal of knowledge and experience about how the club works and we'd always be happy to share that with people in control who want the club to be a success, not for personal financial gain but because we love Charlton. That's the same reason that so many of us put hours of time into the club in the 1980s and 90s to get it back to The Valley and build it up again when it had, or indeed set up the first Charlton website and Valley Express.

If you were the club's new CEO, wouldn't you find it useful to talk to your long-serving predecessors, even if only to increase your understanding of the business? It's just common sense. Murray has never run the club on a day to day basis and has a thin grasp of detail away from the football, in my experience. He stands in the way of what could be a productive discussion because it threatens his narrative and in my view for no other reason. Sooner or later, however, he will be overwhelmed by the truth, because whatever else RD and KM are I doubt they are stupid enough to be taken in by RM.

Personally, there have been times over the last 18 months when I've lost the plot on here because of the spiteful, lying, bullying people I had to deal with, the effect it had on my family and my life, and what I could see happening to many good friends and Charlton people, who in some cases were less able to return the blows than I was. Nevertheless it was traumatic and very stressful, for which money is no real compensation, although it helps pay the bills. So I accept some of the criticism made of me on here as valid, but if you only see one side of an argument taking place then you can't really know what's going on.

I have no reason to be bitter towards the current regime and I'm not. They'll get my views on what they are doing one way or another, as you'd expect after 25 years, and If they prove to be good for Charlton then they will have my support, but so far it's been a very mixed record. Your blind optimism is no more than propaganda and you aren't even consistent from one week to the next. Hope is a drug and we all take it, but we can't know the future.