Portsmouth 0 Charlton Athletic 1

What a difference a week makes..

How an earth is that the same team that we saw last Saturday? Bowyer may well have learnt more from two defeats than three consecutive wins, and he deserves massive credit for turning it around.

That was an outstanding result today by a team that carried out his instructions exactly. I watched the 2nd half on iFollow and there wasn’t one moment when a Pompey player wasn’t surrounded by one or two Charlton ones. They chased and harried every single ball, and when in possession we were clever and precise with it.

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Chris Powell & Prostate Cancer UK

Thank you to Shadow Play for flagging in my comments that Sir Chris Powell is running the London Marathon on Sunday for the charity Prostate Cancer UK. Chris has been a long time ambassador for the charity and it is rare that he is ever seen without the charities pin on his lapel.

Shrewsbury Town 0 Charlton Athletic 2

We’ve all done it..

Be on a flight during a Charlton game, just before legally allowable you turn your phone on and watch the signal slowly appear and then with heart in mouth check for the score. I’ve done it a lot and rarely have I punched the air in delight. I did last night.

Well, well, well. How totally unexpected was that. Or wasn’t it. This is Charlton we are talking about after all. One minute they kick you in the nuts, the next lift your hopes higher than a mountain.

Taming of the Shrew

When I first planned this trip back home I also fully anticipated driving up to Shrewsbury tomorrow. At that time Lee Bowyer had breathed life back into all of us, I hadn’t been to the New Meadow (or Gay Meadow come to think of it) and, well, what else was I to do on a Tuesday? I looked at hotels to stay in, and I would have driven to Gatwick Wednesday.

Anyway, fortunately I guess, I now have to be in the office on Wednesday so need to fly back tomorrow and instead, and not for the first time recently, I will be on a plane for the whole duration of the game.

Charlton Athletic 0 Scunthorpe United 1

It’s good to know some things don’t change..

I’m too old in the tooth and been supporting to club too long to even be surprised by that performance. It was utter toilet from the first whistle to the last. It was almost as if those first three Bowyer games were figments of our imaginations.

It is the hope that kills you, but at least the players haven’t led us too far down the garden path and have extinguished that hope in the middle of April.

The time has come

For the first time this season I will be at The Valley tomorrow to cheer on Lee Bowyer’s boys. My first Charlton game of the season. I’m shocked by that sentence.

Anyway I felt it was time to get behind the Addicks as we go in search of a play-off place and what was an ever increase improbable promotion when Karl Robinson was in the managerial seat. We’d won one game of the previous 8 under Robinson and I shake my head at how we are still in with a shout.

AFC Wimbledon 1 Charlton Athletic 0

That was awful..

That was poor tonight from the Addicks, as the team went back in time showing a severe lack of imagination and belief on the pitch giving us all once again a reality check that we possibly are not good enough for a top six berth. Certainly Wigan, Blackburn and Shrewsbury are on a different planet to us, and we have to play two of them in our last five games.

We have to hope that Bowyer and Jackson, a big test now of their fledgling managerial qualities, can get the players up for the remaining games because they are each against better teams than Bristol Rovers and AFC Wimbledon.