As it seems to happen every season what's going to come first with the fans.
1. Everyone gets behind the team and cheers them on to 3 points like what happened at Cardiff that one time 50 years ago.
2. Crowd gets poisonous when we go a couple of goals down early.
3. A new one. No one really giving a shit anymore and just keeping quiet cos they are getting bored of seeing the same old shit being recycled season after season.
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Looking forward to valley action, regardless of context
Coyr
Sadly I'm number 4 right now. Something that I wouldn't have believed if you'd told me two (or more) years ago.
I'll, probably, go on Saturday but I'm not traipsing up to the Valley, from Maidstone, midweek to watch us fail to beat another relegation struggler.
I'd rather watch the scores come through on the Sky Sports app (just like Teletext from the 80s).
Pretty much sums up my enthusiasm right now.
For that Cardiff game we had the likes of Chris Powell, Johnnie Jackson, Michael Morrison, Ben Hamer, Kermorgant etc - that 'golden' team that the fans loved and would always respect.
Whilst I don't think Charlton fans are the type to be 'poisonous' as such, I simply can't see them giving their absolute all to want to encourage the likes of El-Hadji Ba, Zak Bergdich or Naby Sarr when our backs are against the wall.
Even our young guns (Fox, Pope, KAG, to an extent Cousins) don't really have the universal backing of the fanbase.
There just isn't that same connection with this squad/manager as there was with that one that came back against Cardiff, simple as that.
Of course, it will be reported as 15k+.
Why should we be beating any teams when we are in the run of form we're on at the moment?
Defensively Preston seem solid so if we go one down I'm expecting another defeat.
I always feel that after 13-14 games, you have played a good mix of sides and that you should have a fair reflection of where you are at.
4-6 points from the next two games, should leave us around mid table, where we could hopefully stay for the rest of the season.
1-2 points would leave us in the bottom six, where I think we would struggle to escape from tbh.
Looking forward to valley action, regardless of context
Coyr
2 MASSIVE games in our season
Quote from above, best comment so far. Think the etc was Dale Stephens and Danny Haynes (when he was fit).
Sadly we won't see a team like that until these Belgian clowns sell up!
When I was about ten I got a Sinclair ZX81 for Christmas. I have to tell you it was amazing and all my friends just wanted to come over to play Football Manager on it with me. I spent hours and hours playing it. Anyone that knows what a ZX81 is will understand those that don't, google it. Now as much as I loved it I have since had 'replacements' including much more recently iPads and iPhones.
During the 80s we were, indeed, a little rubbish. We won promotion to the 1st Division in 1986 and had four wonderful years in the top flight of English football. Then we had a long campaign to get back to The Valley, then we developed the stadium, then won promotion.
In the early 2000s we had a team that could match anyone in the land (albeit we normally lost to the very big clubs), full of players that had been with us for years and had an affiliation with the club and us with them. We had stability through a Manager that was almost unsackable and a board that was made up of Charlton fans with the same dreams as us and invited us (as fans) to be involved with the running of the club and certainly shared with us their vision and gave us the impression that we are all in it together. The phrase that Lewis Hamilton uses a lot is very apt here: 'We win together, we lose together!'
Tomorrow night we face Preston in a desperate game that we need to win and are ill prepared for (small squad with injuries). Of course I want us to win but like last season, when we went on a run of defeats with just a couple of players in the squad that had played more than 50 games for us, I don't feel it in the same way.
I'm not a glory boy but just like you won't catch me attaching my old ZX81 to the 50" flatscreen, I can't get motivated to rush around to find a babysitter for my son, leave early enough that I have to have a take away (or take sandwiches), drive for best part of an hour each way and sit on my own (as my dad is away) in the cold to see us struggle to beat a pants Preston side that ten years ago we would have beaten with a reserve team in the League Cup. Actually scrub that last sentence - we, even then, used to lose to the lower league sides in the cups.