These are strange times for Charlton supporters as they prepare for the play-offs in unusually bouyant mood. A fine set of results over the last three months, whilst our rivals stumbled meant we finished third in the table on the last day of the season and won home advantage in the second leg of the play-offs against the sixth placed side, Doncaster, who finished miles behind us.
Support at away games has been building during this period and with the team winning the majority of the matches played, there is a confidence about winning through the play-offs like nothing I can remember previously. Normally by now we would be fully expecting to fall over against Doncaster and not even make Wembley for the final (like we did against Shrewsbury and Swindon before them). Instead, confidence, expectation and excitement is so high that there has been a clamour for tickets for both legs against Rovers.
It looks like we will get close to selling out our initial allocation of 3000 tickets for the away leg on Sunday that kicks-off at the ridiculously early time of 12.30pm to suit Sky. I know we surpassed this figure for the similar kick-off in Sheffield against United a few years back but this was a game that would have put us into our first F A Cup semi-final since winning the competition in 1947. We were also a division above the Blades and many (me included) thought this was our time. The Doncaster game is just the first leg of play-off double-header and one which we can still win at The Valley irrespective of the result at the Keepmoat (hopefully we won't have to overcome a 3-0 deficit from the first leg).
If the away effort is commendable, the rush for tickets for the return on Friday 17th May is arguably even more impressive. With home gates having fallen steadily under Duchatelet's miserable ownership, we have seen a clamour for tickets and sales for the home areas which were approaching 21,000 this evening with Donny fans to be added and fully another week of potential sales. A good result on Sunday could even see us sellout in the home areas for the first time since we regularly did it in the Premiership.
The final will clearly be a harder game if we see off Doncaster. Sunderland and Portsmouth finished much closer to us and both have had very strong spells this season. Both are fantastically well supported home and away and will probably both take more to Wembley for a play-off final than us. And yet, the supporters of both clubs are desperate to avoid us. Pompey fans saw us do the double over them and Sunderland appear to be lacking confidence as the season ended with some very poor performances and results. This may be fuelling part of the current Charlton euphoria that promotion is a formality, although we should all be reminded that there are still large hurdles to clear.
I have been adamant that we cannot get promoted under our current ownership given the mess that the club is in but hadn't figured on the impact of a manager like Lee Bowyer. Without a full-time Chief Executive, no Finance Director and a host of other unfilled senior positions, decision-making at the top has obviously been truncated and slow. Lieven De Turck has been playing a small part in communicating the thoughts of Duchatelet outside of his limited, part-time, 'sale' role and he has made it clear that next season will see budgets cut again as the club tries to move closer towards break-even. Duchatelet is determined to cut his losses and it appears he is continuing to try to trade is way out out of the mess rather than simply selling the club for a realistic price to an interested party and swallowing his loss for incompetence over the last five years. My logic for this is simply that he is insisting on a completely over-inflated price equivalent to recovery of all his losses, now heading for £70m. There is no other plausible reason, despite the undoubted legal costs involved so far in dealing with the queue of interested parties there appear to have been over the last 18 months. An ongoing 'sale' story may well suit Duchatelet as it has quelled the active protests and been a good PR tool to get more fans onside. However, the sale story will soon run out of credibility. Fans at the recent Fans Forum meeting with Lieven De Turck questioned the credibility of De Turck's update on the five interested purchasers he has been telling us about for months but the lines have either gone cold or are still not passed 'go.' Some of his explanations were laughably weak and he is going to struggle to spin these out for much longer without a serious buyer emerging publicly.
Duchatelet may be sitting looking at possible monies to come from sell-on clauses and performance bonuses on players sold on, like Joe Gomez, Ademola Lookman, Johan Berg Gudmunssen, Esri Konsa and even Karlan Grant. He is probably also expecting to trouser another million or two from the sale of Joe Aribo in the Summer and I am sure he would listen more seriously to offers for other players like Lyle Taylor than he appears to have done to prospective buyers of the club. He has even told prospective buyers to be creative with their bids when refusing to give a sell price. This suggests back-loading of payments to Duchatelet in coming years when he is no longer owner, similar to the deals he struck when exiting St. Truiden where I believe he still gets a cut from the gate for example. De Turck has told us that different prices for the club have been agreed for the club as a League One or Championship club so there will be no unforeseen rise in the price expected although it's hard to understand this when it's also been said that Duchatelet won't give a price to prospective buyers until he's heard their 'creative' offers!
On the cost cutting front, it is clear that the bigger earners whose contracts come to an end in June, will not be renewed if we are still in League One. That would see us lose the nucleus of the current side and if you add in the risk that Bowyer doesn't agree a new deal, we are in a world of potential trouble in League One next season. This is the main reason why CARD have called for a delay in purchasing season tickets until we know what next season looks like. We could have another Karel Fraye scenario with a team bolstered by lower league players and youngsters.
If, of course, the promotion confidence proves right, we face a different dynamic. Presumably, Duchatelet will have to look at an increased revenue forecast from ticket sales (more away supporters for starters) and also TV revenues etc and agree a higher budget but I am only expecting that to secure Bower and the playing management team as well as some of those key bigger earners for next season. Reducing the operating loss will still be the key driver and I can't see Duchatelet investing the sort of money needed to be competitive in the Championship, let alone challengers. He was very clear in one of recent outbursts that the Championship was a money-pit - can anyone see him spending a million quid on the likes of Ricky Holmes in January as a squad player like Sheffield United did on their first season back? Realistically that would mean a season of struggle in the Championship and a likely season-long relegation fight.
However you look at it, the future still looks dismal but promotion offers some slight hope for next season. Failure to get promoted could well signal an end to the Bowyer regime and half this current side which would surely kill off the current feel-good factor which has been increasing attendances and improving revenues. If only Duchatelet could see and understand these dynamics? Sadly he only sees the bottom-line, which will again tell him he needs to spend less, even at the expense of the potential success of the football club. Forgive me for not jumping on the bandwagon.
Support at away games has been building during this period and with the team winning the majority of the matches played, there is a confidence about winning through the play-offs like nothing I can remember previously. Normally by now we would be fully expecting to fall over against Doncaster and not even make Wembley for the final (like we did against Shrewsbury and Swindon before them). Instead, confidence, expectation and excitement is so high that there has been a clamour for tickets for both legs against Rovers.
It looks like we will get close to selling out our initial allocation of 3000 tickets for the away leg on Sunday that kicks-off at the ridiculously early time of 12.30pm to suit Sky. I know we surpassed this figure for the similar kick-off in Sheffield against United a few years back but this was a game that would have put us into our first F A Cup semi-final since winning the competition in 1947. We were also a division above the Blades and many (me included) thought this was our time. The Doncaster game is just the first leg of play-off double-header and one which we can still win at The Valley irrespective of the result at the Keepmoat (hopefully we won't have to overcome a 3-0 deficit from the first leg).
If the away effort is commendable, the rush for tickets for the return on Friday 17th May is arguably even more impressive. With home gates having fallen steadily under Duchatelet's miserable ownership, we have seen a clamour for tickets and sales for the home areas which were approaching 21,000 this evening with Donny fans to be added and fully another week of potential sales. A good result on Sunday could even see us sellout in the home areas for the first time since we regularly did it in the Premiership.
The final will clearly be a harder game if we see off Doncaster. Sunderland and Portsmouth finished much closer to us and both have had very strong spells this season. Both are fantastically well supported home and away and will probably both take more to Wembley for a play-off final than us. And yet, the supporters of both clubs are desperate to avoid us. Pompey fans saw us do the double over them and Sunderland appear to be lacking confidence as the season ended with some very poor performances and results. This may be fuelling part of the current Charlton euphoria that promotion is a formality, although we should all be reminded that there are still large hurdles to clear.
I have been adamant that we cannot get promoted under our current ownership given the mess that the club is in but hadn't figured on the impact of a manager like Lee Bowyer. Without a full-time Chief Executive, no Finance Director and a host of other unfilled senior positions, decision-making at the top has obviously been truncated and slow. Lieven De Turck has been playing a small part in communicating the thoughts of Duchatelet outside of his limited, part-time, 'sale' role and he has made it clear that next season will see budgets cut again as the club tries to move closer towards break-even. Duchatelet is determined to cut his losses and it appears he is continuing to try to trade is way out out of the mess rather than simply selling the club for a realistic price to an interested party and swallowing his loss for incompetence over the last five years. My logic for this is simply that he is insisting on a completely over-inflated price equivalent to recovery of all his losses, now heading for £70m. There is no other plausible reason, despite the undoubted legal costs involved so far in dealing with the queue of interested parties there appear to have been over the last 18 months. An ongoing 'sale' story may well suit Duchatelet as it has quelled the active protests and been a good PR tool to get more fans onside. However, the sale story will soon run out of credibility. Fans at the recent Fans Forum meeting with Lieven De Turck questioned the credibility of De Turck's update on the five interested purchasers he has been telling us about for months but the lines have either gone cold or are still not passed 'go.' Some of his explanations were laughably weak and he is going to struggle to spin these out for much longer without a serious buyer emerging publicly.
Duchatelet may be sitting looking at possible monies to come from sell-on clauses and performance bonuses on players sold on, like Joe Gomez, Ademola Lookman, Johan Berg Gudmunssen, Esri Konsa and even Karlan Grant. He is probably also expecting to trouser another million or two from the sale of Joe Aribo in the Summer and I am sure he would listen more seriously to offers for other players like Lyle Taylor than he appears to have done to prospective buyers of the club. He has even told prospective buyers to be creative with their bids when refusing to give a sell price. This suggests back-loading of payments to Duchatelet in coming years when he is no longer owner, similar to the deals he struck when exiting St. Truiden where I believe he still gets a cut from the gate for example. De Turck has told us that different prices for the club have been agreed for the club as a League One or Championship club so there will be no unforeseen rise in the price expected although it's hard to understand this when it's also been said that Duchatelet won't give a price to prospective buyers until he's heard their 'creative' offers!
On the cost cutting front, it is clear that the bigger earners whose contracts come to an end in June, will not be renewed if we are still in League One. That would see us lose the nucleus of the current side and if you add in the risk that Bowyer doesn't agree a new deal, we are in a world of potential trouble in League One next season. This is the main reason why CARD have called for a delay in purchasing season tickets until we know what next season looks like. We could have another Karel Fraye scenario with a team bolstered by lower league players and youngsters.
If, of course, the promotion confidence proves right, we face a different dynamic. Presumably, Duchatelet will have to look at an increased revenue forecast from ticket sales (more away supporters for starters) and also TV revenues etc and agree a higher budget but I am only expecting that to secure Bower and the playing management team as well as some of those key bigger earners for next season. Reducing the operating loss will still be the key driver and I can't see Duchatelet investing the sort of money needed to be competitive in the Championship, let alone challengers. He was very clear in one of recent outbursts that the Championship was a money-pit - can anyone see him spending a million quid on the likes of Ricky Holmes in January as a squad player like Sheffield United did on their first season back? Realistically that would mean a season of struggle in the Championship and a likely season-long relegation fight.
However you look at it, the future still looks dismal but promotion offers some slight hope for next season. Failure to get promoted could well signal an end to the Bowyer regime and half this current side which would surely kill off the current feel-good factor which has been increasing attendances and improving revenues. If only Duchatelet could see and understand these dynamics? Sadly he only sees the bottom-line, which will again tell him he needs to spend less, even at the expense of the potential success of the football club. Forgive me for not jumping on the bandwagon.
The disastrous appointment of Fraye (from Belgian third division side VW Hamme) was the problem not the players who I would argue were not lower league players and youngsters.
ReplyDeleteLooking at one of Fraye’s 14 matches in charge the 2-2 home draw V Bolton on 15 December 2015 on the line-up included Henderson, Solly, Diarra (World Cup winner), Jackson, and internationals Berg Gudmundsson, Goochaanejhad, Makienok and youngsters Cousins, Lookman, Ahearne-Grant and Pope. Looked like a pretty good squad to me.