Tuesday 17 November 2015

Muddling along

A tough trip to Birmingham beckons. We have moved to strengthen our striker options (and to give Ahearne-Grant a much needed rest) by bringing in Ricardo Vaz Te on a free transfer. That now looks like a pre-emptive strike before announcing that Igor Vetokele will not be fit to return until New a Year at the earliest.

Vaz Te looks like he may have had his moment in the sun a few years ago when his scoring peaked at Barnsley. West Ham paid £1m for Riccardo but he has failed to deliver and at 29 he could be in Last Chance Saloon which we will have to hope gets the best out of him once again. We are also being linked with a variety of other lower league hopefuls, although I am treating most of those with a large dose of sodium chloride.

Karel Fraye will be feeling slightly more secure having heard Richard Murray and Katrien Meire making supportive noises about him having turned a corner after the surprise 3-0 win over woeful Wednesday. Saturday should be a good test of the turnaround before we face Ipswich, Sky TV and another fans protest. 

Katrien won't be pleased that "the negative 2%" look like gaining support for the Ipswich demo and the fact that the similarly disgruntled Leeds fans are keen to join forces in the home match that follows, to unite in condemnation of useless owners. La Meire may have difficulty estimating the size of a crowd but the latest published record of the Fans Forum, released under Freedom of Information guidelines, tells us that 3,000 Charlton ticket-holders on average don't bother turning at games they have paid for. No surprise to any of us who have been going long enough to gauge it but something of an indictment on the attractiveness of what's currently on offer in terms of entertainment. 

Katrien should really reflect on that if she is serious about another Target 20,000  programme as we are closer to Target 5,000 the way things are headed. Roland Duchatelet will be looking at the P & L and you can't spin that for too long. Like Vaz Te, she looks in Last Chance Saloon to me and really needs to acknowledge some basic mistakes and reach out to all of our supporters including the Negative 7% before it gets much bigger.

2 comments:

  1. Dave, as Karel was interim, I'm shocked we haven't used the international break to complete all the interviews and finally appoint the new permanent manager...

    Pembury Addick

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  2. PA - I am confident she has been reviewing dozens of applications and interviewing back-to-back. What our fans fail to understand is that Flemish-speaking managers with Championship experience who will work for modest salaries, on modest budgets, on short-term contracts are almost impossible to source. In fact, there may only be four and we have tried them all.

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