Charlton 2:2 QPR
For some reason I am a bit like QPR this season. I don’t seem to learn quick enough from my mistakes. I turned up at The Valley with just a t-shirt underneath my jacket and without gloves again. Why oh why do I do it?? It was bloody freezing and I spent most of the time hopping up and down and looking like I had some freakish twitch because I couldn’t stop moving in a bid to keep myself warm! I’ve done the same many times this season, including on my birthday which fell on the night of a freak snow-storm in that memorable win over Birmingham at home…
I said after the Preston game that the one thing that worries me is our inability to soak up pressure or realise danger and we got caught cold, in the cold, and conceded two soft goals against a pretty weak Charlton team, both of which came relatively out of nowhere and not during the period where they actually had a go and built up some pressure on our goal, which really only came once they got it back to 2-2.
From the outset, despite Charlton not really doing very much in the first-half, we seemed hemmed into our own defensive zone and our own players appeared to be on top of one another at times. Charlton didn’t particularly press us very hard, but sometimes it can happen like that and I wondered if it was because there were so many changes in personnel that it took a little bit of time before the players adjusted to one another.
Still, Matteo Alberti had a great first-half I thought. I wondered if his selection had anything to do with how he performed in the open training session for the Family Day that the club held. It was a bold move by Paolo Sousa to freshen the side up in such a manner in what will no doubt be an action packed Christmas schedule for all teams. Alberti made several good defensive interceptions and also broke forward well, eventually winning the free-kick that led to Lee Cook’s goal that gave us the lead after taking a high boot near his head from a Charlton player.
We lacked genuine quality though in terms of our final ball and decision making, particularly from the defensive players today and although it wasn’t shambolic by any means, we just needed that bit of class or guile to really take control of the match to finish Charlton off, but it never came. Instead, in both halves actually, we seemed to be reluctant to shoot. It was one of those matches that having a crack at goal may have yielded something in terms of rebounds or deflections. I think if we gambled a bit more we’d have caused them so many more problems.
But when you’ve not won from home for so long and haven’t scored that many, two goals on the road seems like good enough progress to me, especially as we could have lost the game towards the end as much as we could have won it. It’s actually a decent point and we’re still in contention with a strong and able squad ready for Sunday.
One of the main issues of the performance though was the amount of 50-50 tackles we seemed to lose. It always happened in the midfield areas, just when we were looking to build some momentum on the ball, and usually was Lee Cook, Mikele Leigertwood or one of the strikers. I didn’t think Dexter Blackstock did much all game apart from his goal, but I was still delighted because he’s starting to get that knack back of popping up when he’s needed to put the ball home. His goal was really well taken too. In contrast, I thought Samuel Di Carmine had his worst performance for us, not that he did much wrong, but he couldn’t keep himself on his feet and sometimes went to ground too easily for my liking. There’s a time to win free-kicks intelligently, which he does really well actually, but there’s also a time to not pussyfoot about and realise that if you use your quality you can also beat your man and open up new passages of play that can change a game. He just didn’t get that balance correct today but nevertheless, he’s still just a boy and I’m nit picking somewhat.
I don’t usually mention it in my notes, but the officiating was of a pretty dire standard today as well, and for both teams. The amount of times the linesman and the referee looked at one another cluelessly when it came to deciding whose throw it was, was pretty comical really… it’s frustrating when some of them cannot apply common sense, and what I mean by that is understanding the context and mentality of the players in any particular game. They just seem to get the context way off sometimes and to be honest, it’s because they probably have not played the game enough… okay, maybe I’m pulling that out of thin air, but it seems like that from watching them make such decisions.
Anyway… perhaps we should have won this match and maybe if we’d been a little bit more ambitious, we would have. But with a second-string line up and still managing to score two goals on the road, I’m content for now. I just hope that we can maintain our focus and concentration in matches, because there are much better teams out there who are capable of doing damage and it’s slightly irritating that any team, regardless of their quality or form, can simply muster a few crosses or long balls into the box and then suddenly we’re all at sea. I know we’ve done well in many games this season, so it may not be overly fair, but the important point is they’ve got to be ready for when it really matters as otherwise they will cost themselves points as we’ve done here.
