You need to know when to stop digging

I was going to title this post "Pissed Off Part 3" but I think we're in danger of drowning in self pity and recrimination and it's probably time that we lifted our heads and tried to focus on the task of overcoming Swindon Town. Before I do that, however, I wish the Club would simply acknowledge that they got this badly wrong and that they promise to learn from it.


The lead article on the OS today was "Club responds to ticket criticism" which immediately gave away the story-line that this would be a less than frank view of events. Stephen Kavanagh drew the short straw in terms of the quotations and there were some spectacularly short-sighted comments....


- "Unfortunately, the fact that we received just 2,000 tickets meant some supporters were always going to miss out, so we had to devise a sales policy which ensured as many of the club's regular away following, season-ticket holders and Valley Gold members could see the game as possible."


I'm wondering how little thought went into that sales policy? I'm pretty sure Rick Everitt has far too much experience of ticketing Charlton games to possibly support the view that this free-for-all would result in the most deserving fans getting the appropriate shot at the tickets. He then went on to say...


- "The logistics meant we were simply unable to put in place the measures we would have done had we had greater notice of the precise nature of the match, which could have seen us face four other opponents."


I think he's trying to say they could have put measures in place had they known who we were playing? If that's the case, plan for four scenarios. The fact is we would have sold out for Swindon and Millwall and possibly not for Leeds or Huddersfield, so two scenarios really. It's not hard, they've done a pretty good job at it for most of the season when they have managed to sell more than 2,000 tickets on occasions in not a great deal more than a week e.g. I'm sure the 3,000-odd Leyton Orient tickets were sold on a priority basis and were cleared within a week.


Anyway, time to move on and get ready for two crunch matches which would at very least give us our first trip to the not-so-new Wembley. I've heard a lot of people saying that they would have settled for the play-offs at the start of the season (me amongst them) and most would see a Wembley appearance as some icing on that cake. Let's get that first and then we can begin to think of a return to the Championship - something that seemed highly unlikely a couple of months ago.