A bumper crowd and fresh faces?

Chris Powell will have a bounce in his stride this morning as he takes his first Charlton Athletic training session as manager in the lashing rain at Sparrows Lane. He avoided a losing start to his career on Saturday, even if his first actual game in charge looks to be Saturday's home clash with Plymouth Argyle.


I am expecting some build-up to Saturday's match. The nations media should once again be making their way to down to SE7 to report on events. The opportunist imaginations of those now running our club will be looking to mark the occasion with fireworks and dancing girls or something else to make it crystal clear to everyone present at the Valley that things are different now and that needs to carry on into the match. 


I commented last week that Powell's arrival has sparked a huge increase in the club and fans are already speculating on the increased attendance expected for his first home game. Traffic to this site has doubled over the last week and that when everyone else has had more than usual to say about events at our club. The Official Site has struggled to contend with volumes in the past and Charlton Life and Forever Charlton have also been suffering of late as fans scour the internet for breaking news [rest assured, I have been in touch with the head man at Google and he's reassured me that surging volumes to this site won't bring Blogger down!].


If there is money to be spent, then I would be urging Powell to make at least an initial signing before Saturday if it were me holding the purse strings. My guess is that Chris Powell will add 2,000 paying Customers to the gate on Saturday and an ambitious looking signing might move that up towards 3,000. The gate for this clash would ordinarily have been around the 15,000 (paid tickets) mark, so my punt is a 17,000+ gate.  


The expectant atmosphere should only need a Charlton goal to set it alight and head us for our first victory of 2011. An goal-scoring striker under 30 or attacking midfielder in the mould of Jason Puncheon would do very nicely.