Maglor and I were discussing this very topic over a beer yesterday. My reading of the faith put in Parky, despite an inauspicious start, is that he is seen by the Board as the bloke to deliver "The Charlton Way" after Dowie and the Pardew who clearly weren’t and manifestly didn’t.
So what did we have, under maybe Lennie, then Curbs and Gritty, then finally Curbs that added up to being this hallowed phrase "The Charlton Way"? Did that phrase, whoever coined it, apply only to the playing side, or did it run throughout the club?
Well I think it did apply to the club a whole. For me, it meant that working together, as a unit, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. That gave us an edge that delivered success.
Lets just focus on the playing side for a moment.
Under both Lennie and Curbs, the team didn't flourish by playing fantastic football, although there were some stellar performances. The team wasn't a "crazy gang" of thugs and reprobates. They were just extremely well organized, well coached and well motivated.
The coaching staff took players like John Robinson, who even his mum wouldn't claim he was the finished article when he joined, and turned him into a Premiership player. Players like Kins had talent but that needed channeling to make him the player he became. Going further back, Rob Lee had some talent but Lennie got the best out of him. The team that Lennie built had some really good honest professionals (and the odd star) but it was their battling quality that really made the difference.
I believe that this battling quality stemmed from the way the club that had fought against the odds for survival, the way it achieved the impossible by moving from ground to ground and then finally back home, and that every person involved: player, coach, employee, Director, and fan, had played their part. The team performed greater than the sum of its individual parts.
In life and in football, to be successful you need the slight edge. You don't need to be light-years ahead of the rest; you just need be one or two percentage points greater than everyone else.
If the club is to rise again, then "The Charlton Way" needs to be re-acquired. This will be achieved by everybody pulling together, on and off the pitch, by footballers that have the right focus, attitude, desire to improve themselves, and will to win. By managers and coaches working through every aspect, fitness, training, technique, tactics, team bonding. By Directors reaching out to fans and making them feel part of the solution, not part of the problem. All together that will produce "the slight edge".
Starting with the manager, frankly I don't know if Parky is the man to deliver that? There has been a slight improvement on the playing side from abysmal, to just plain bad (with an occasional glimmer). He needs to be extremely self-critical. He needs to work through his weakness and look to turn them into strengths. His weaknesses seem to me to revolve around tactics and team selection. How often has he set the team up wrong, only to change things at half time, or got it spot on at the start, only for things to go horribly wrong immediately after he has given his half-time peroration!
He needs to find his own “slight edge”. If he applies that approach to his own performance, then he can model that for everybody else on the playing side. That will lead to overall improvement in the Team, and it will deliver the 1% or 2% edge over every other team that will be required to fire us back towards the Promised Land.
If, instead of some rather self-serving press conference performances he has given, we can hear him speak in more humble terms of ways that he personally is looking to improve his performance, I for one will begin to believe what people like RM have been saying, that he is the right person to deliver.
Time will tell.
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going one up and expecting them to equalize.... going one down and not expecting to come back... that was the charlton way for years ... bar a brief spell of being genuinely good...
and conceding in the 15 minutes after half time..
Still love it though.. its charlton after all..
So much of that applies at this very moment. We need to use the current adversity to advantage. Forget the egos, forget the misery, forget the free-loading. Let's learn the lessons of recent years, gather our collective selves and get on with the job of fixing this mess.
Many fans are quick to adopt the 'Red Army' chant .......... well here's the call-up notice.
Start to work out what you can do. At the very least, renew those season tickets and show the Club, and the outside world, that Charlton fans don't run away from adversity.
To me, recovering what we had that has been lost has to be a huge part of the way forward.
Take Arsenal for example. Why (other than when they bought their way out of relegation in the early twentieth century) have they never been relegated? There has to be "an Arsenal way". That has to be to do with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts; and what drives that is the Herbert Chapman tradition and all that goes with it. Sure under Wenger, they have played differently to the old "boring boring, one nil to the Arsenal" days but there has to be something of the tradition of the club, it's ethos and it's collective determination, to maintain excellence in over 100 years!
I thought a few years ago that Charlton, because of our history and the struggle to rebuild and sustain the club we love, would never lose the "edge" needed to "punch collectively above our weight". I was wrong about that but it seems to me that with or without new investment, it is vital that the club strives to re-store what has been lost. I ask us the fans individually, the following (and this was touched on by Dave Rudd earlier): -
1. Is our road back to the Promised Land just about finance and individual players and managers or can we all play a positive part?
2. What can I do positively to help my club through this difficult time?
3. What can I do to make the difference, to give us that slight edge which can get us back from whence we came?
To the Board I say that most fans still, despite their anger and frustration, acknowledge the job you have done and thank you for your continued support. Through the FF in particular you have direct access to the fans. Fans are customers and the product that has been served up recently has been like a horrible school stew; tasteless, thin, full of gristle and indigestible. We can just about eat it but it tastes like crap. What we need is something much more palatable to give us all a lift. I think we'd accept some small crumbs of comfort as long as the taste improved gradually along the way. We are not ordinary customers, we love this club (despite the bad taste), we want it to succeed, but as quid pro quo for this, we mustn't ever be taken for granted. Therefore please ask yourselves:
1. How can we as a Board tap into this well of support and help fans engage positively in driving the change that’s needed to regain what we lost?
2. What additional initiatives for fund-raising other than season tickets, and Valley Gold, and the normal commercial products and services can be introduced?
3. How can we turn the fans energy (at the moment wasted or negative) into a positive force to the benefit of the club?
To the manager, coaches and players, I say to you that you have a massive duty to work to get this club back on track. It's for people like Roger Alwen, Richard Murray and the other directors who helped bankroll the club. This club however is not just about their money, important though that was and continues to be; it is the individual fans who refused to let it die, people like Airman Brown, Prague Addick, American Addick, BDL and many many more. People who stood for The Valley Party, people who voted for them, people marched to Woolwich Town Hall, people who raised funds, people who put their own hands in their pockets in the VIP scheme and bought tickets. It's the fans that've joined since who saw something special about this history and this club and wanted to be a part of it and pay week in week out to support. It's about those who continue to support the club from afar, some making the pilgrimage, others contributing commercially. It’s about the former players and managers whose tireless efforts often, on meagre resources, were made to drag this club forward. It's for people like Peter Varney whose role in shaping and managing the clubs affairs will never be forgotten. It's for people like Steve Gritt, Keith Peacock and others who continue to serve our club throughout this time. I suggest you go and watch the Centenary DVD in full over, and over and over again and then ask yourselves: -
1. How can I make my own contribution to restoring the clubs fortunes?
2. How can I improve my skills, my awareness, my attitude, that gives me the edge and helps make that difference?
3. How can I repay what they did, every time I pick a team, train a team, or play in a team?
Our history and the Charlton "family" collectively are our greatest strengths. We must all play our part. If we do that will re-store "The Charlton Way".
I thought it was an excellent post, and printed it off with the intention of doing an article based off it. I wished you had offered it as an article piece in the first place to be honest.
I just want to clear one thing because i know it has cropped up before. Sometimes when a post does not receive many replies, it does not automatically mean there is no interest. A lot of the time it can be because people simply have nothing to add to what has already been said, or no one has added anything that they wish to disagree with.
I would not always take it as a negative, or that nobody cares.
fair enough BUT get rid of Parky first. That will do more to boost renewals than price reductions.
when at work I tend to read the posts quickly and fire off a quick response and then get back to work. When it's a long one as above you need to read it properly to let it all sink in and at work that isn't possible.
May be your follow-up, in which you ask people to address specific questions, will generate the debate you were hoping for...haven't had time to digest all the second post yet, but will do so...
Will it LA? You know, despite the failings of the Parky regime, unless we learn the lessons of the last few seasons and get back to the club, organised and pulling in "The Charlton Way", I think it doesn't matter who is the manager (unless there is a huge amount of luck in finding say the new Brian Clough).
There is little cash around. The club may have to "run" with Parky because they can't afford not to. We know this, deep down, don't we? It may not be what anyone wants but necessity is the mother of invention. When money is scarce, replacing him with another gamble may be jus throwing more good money we don't have after bad
This is why I say, the club needs to work on re-storing "The Charlton Way", and ensuring everyone strives to find that edge needed and that goes very much for the manager who, to me, at present seems in denial of the truth, which is that he needs to sharpen his act up big time!
Thats what I was hoping, not out of some egocentric need for my back to be slapped but merely to start/re-start the debate.
Sometimes other things are going on which take precedence and there has been much over the last few days. I am not precious about this in any way, I just needde a hook to re-visit the thread.
Lol! Yes that and was the "Selling Crown Jewels" a hoax or a case truth being stranger than fiction!
Not only do you address the issue thoughtfully and articulately, it also deserves to be picked up by a wider readership than just our forum.
That said I think the Valley Investment Plan which I know you have referred to on other threads was (could be) very much part of the "Charlton Way." Whether 15 years on it would take the form of a Supporters Trust I'm not sure. Supporters Trusts do seem to work positively at some other clubs it seems.
When I think of anything else salient I will add to the thread.
there you go.
pub calling...
Lol!
The Charlton Way just seems to belong to a bygone era and we are struggling to keep alive something that big money has destroyed. I just believe that Football fans everywhere need to come together and demand the more equitable distribution of TV money. Whilst pondering the revolution, I will board my coach and urge everyone to renew their season tickets.
1) simply working together
2) singing from the same hymnsheet
3) supporting the Charlton cause.
LIke most , I was a little disapointed when the book was first published because of its lack of salacious revelations. I'm now a bit ashamed of that reaction and last year read the book again and concluded that it's actually a fascinating read and so much the better for the fact that Curbs refused to put in the kind of spicy 'exclusives' that would have earned the book lucrative tabloid serialisation.
Thoroughly recommend anyone who was disappointed with the book at the time to read it again today as a handbook to 'the Charlton way' . Many of the answers to Bing's questions are all in there, really.
"The Charlton Way just seems to belong to a bygone era and we are struggling to keep alive something that big money has destroyed.''
But surely that should not stop us still trying to keep it alive? Shouldn't Charlton be a (living) monument to those so-called 'old-fashioned' values we cherish, even if the rest of the football world has abandoned them?
Shouldn't we be signing players who understand those values ? I'd suggest someone like Murty does , while Marcus Bent was the complete antithesis.
We should be a kind of National Trust of the football world, not in a daft 'jumpers for goalposts' binge of Corinthian nostalgia but in a real and relevant way, upholding the game's best, decent , honourable traditions on and off the field.If that means we have to operate at a lower level than the modern, morally corrupt Premiership, then so be it.
What is so upsetting this year is that not only has the football been rubbish, we can't even say we're going down with our pride and honour intact.
What we need is a campaign for ethical football - with Charlton in its vanguard.
Hear, hear Nigel. No one expects us to win every game, but this year in particular has been rough because of the complete capitulation in most games. Getting back to Bings great post - Most definitely NOT the Charlton way of doing things and we need use the summer to reassess where we going as club, what sort of players we'll need to instill more of the Charlton "way" and who we need managing us to bring that spirit back to the club. Fans here are very forgiving, if we see we've recognised mistakes have been made and look like we're trying to do something about them, we can get the "Charlton way" back again.
Nigel I agree with this and I was using Arsenal as an example. There has to be an "Arsenal Way" that transcends the fact that its just about 11 blokes, a few subs and a decent manager. For them to have sustained themselves in the top flight for ever, has to down to the whole continuously being greater than the sum of the parts.
Does anybody think that managing, coaching and playing for Liverpool or Man Utd is just about clever tactics, good technique and decent players? It's more than that. It's drilled into them that they are special, the club is special, they are joining a tradition and they need to measure up to that. That spurs them on to deliver the edge, not occassionally but every time they get on the pitch.
Under Lennie, then under Curbs, that's what was achieved. OK not to the same level that Arsenal, Man Utd or Liverpool do it, but in our terms and from the distance the club needed to travel to get to the top flight and stay there. We had that, we've lost that in the last few years, and we need to find it again.
I remember Curbs taking the players for a team talk and sitting them up on the East and showing them what had been achieved and where we'd come from. He could talk about,
1. No money for the fish and chip meals
2. Not going back to the same hotel because we owed them money
3. Living out of Portacabins
4. Taking the cash round from the turnstyles of Upton Park and handing it all over to West Ham
5. The Directors personally putting their hands in their pockets to pay wages because the club had no money
There will be many other things. Thats all part of the history of this club, what makes it special.
When those players and that manager and coach get out onto the pitch on a match day, they need to have taken on board the greater picture of our club, what happened, the fight required, the sacrifices made. That needs to be in their hearts and their minds every day they train, they practice and they coach, they manage, and they play. Players selected to be signed need to fit in. Get that back use that to energise the team and we will again, punch above our weight.
That's "The Charlton Way"