4th April 1987. Charlton Athletic 4 (2) (Walsh 3, Gritt 40, Stuart 52, Melrose 68) Watford 3 (1) (Falco 11, Sims (pen) 57, Blissett 66) Selhurst Park, att: 4,958
Charlton: Bolder, Humphrey, Reid, Gritt, Thompson, Miller, Milne, Lee, Melrose, Walsh, Stuart. Unused sub: Leaburn.
Watford: Sherwood, Gibbs, Rostron, Richardson, Sims, McClelland, Bardsley (Allen 83), Blissett, Falco, Porter, Barnes.
Referee: Roger Milford (Bristol)
Ralph Milne had many critics in his time at Charlton but his contribution in this game was significant. His pinpoint crosses leading to to both Gritt and Melrose scoring.
The crowd was Charltons 2nd lowest of the season. When you consider this was for a top flight game it takes little working out what a state the club was in. It was also the Saturday after the Full Members cup final mentioned last week.
In their last five games, later this season, Charlton produced three wins and a draw to avoid automatic relegation. The five game play-off saga that followed will be covered later.
Jim Melrose finished top scorer with 17 goals in total.
Mark Reid was Charltons only ever-present player making 57 appearances.
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Comments
How we have got to where we are is nothing short of a miracle. These H&A posts act as a great reminder of that....
Watford were a decent team in those days - I think they finished second in the league the previous season and beat us 4-0 or 4-1 at Vicarage Road earlier in the season.
I stood in the Arthur Waite. I don't remember the crowd being that poor but we did have some dire gates at the time. We have come a long way since then.
Still a record I think.
I've no way of checking so I believe you, I just remember watching Milne play a blinder one game and then a couple of days later look totally disinterested, I could have sworn that was against the Saints. If not who was it we played a couple of days later???
Anyhow, the Watford match pretty much kick-started the revival that saw us escape relegation. I think we finished fourth from bottom that year and went into the play-offs, was that the only year that the fourth from bottom club went into the play-offs??
And yes, it was the first game after the full members cup final defeat. The Chelsea 0-0 was a midweeker few days after that and the defeat at Highbury the weekend after that...the game at the Dell was actually April 25. I remember my son asking Johnny H in the Sourthampton car park afterwards as we were getting on the Junior Reds coach why he had been sent off. ''I dunno,'' he answered. ''I just asked the linesman if he was f***ing blind''....Not the best choice of language to a nine year old, but one of the nice things in those days was that at away games the team coach and the Junior Reds coach usually parked alongside each other and the players were always very friendly to the kids.
The Watford game was our second lowest attendance of the season, and the only one lower was v Oxford 3/4 days before the cup final, so clearly the expense of a Wembley outing affected both gates. Despite playing at Selhurst , we got 19,000 that season v both Arsenal and Spurs...
i always thought those gates for the 'bigger' games at selhurst were announced a little lower than what was actually in the ground ... allegedly of course!!
Hmmm, and to be strictly accurate about 14,000 of those were away fans.
true..... we were massively outnumbered when the likes of liverpool came to town.....
Not just Liverpool!
Spurs and Arsenal used to take the whole of the away end, even the corner quadrant, and so did Liverpool and Man Utd. Chelsea and West Ham used to take 2/3 of the away end as well although Everton - despite being a top club in those days - used to have a pretty modest away turnout. Leeds also filled the away end for the POF in 1987.
The other lot that brought a lot of away fans were Kidderminster in the FAC in 1989, they took the whole away end.
I remember a few leeds jumping over the barriers at final whislte after emlrose had put us 1-0 in the first leg...
and I remember seeing kettering fans going absolutely mad when they scored in the FA Cup before robert lee finished it with a typical edge of the box turn and shot...
good memories.....
Yes, I was in the Arthur Waite for the Leeds game and as soon as Melrose scored loads of Leeds jumped over the barbed wire from the seats and into the Charlton fans on the terracing, bloody scary for a 15 year-old kid!!!
You're right, it was Kettering not Kidderminster!!!
Did you used to travel to away matches on the Junior Reds coach, Ormiston? I always prefered to drive to away matches, even up north. But when Jackie Monahan was short of the required adults to minors ratio, I quite often went on the JR coach to help out in the mid to late 80s. The age range went from about 8-15 and I was wondering if you were one of the teenage herberts I was nominally meant to be chaperoning ?
It's often occured to me that there may be quite a few former Junior Reds among Charlton Lifers, whom I woefully failed to keep in order !!!
I was in the Arthur Waite on the terrace for Leeds too. I think that incident disuaded me from going to Elland Rd - but it didn't stop me going to St Andrew's......
As he didn't have a clue about footie, no-one put any money on his prediction.