Charlton 1 Southampton 1

A hot day, and a hot reception for Alan Pardew on his first appearance at the Valley since that dreadful 5-2 defeat. It's still not clear exactly what the inside story of his reign was, and why it went so bad. The obvious explanation is that he simply used too many players, never allowing any coherence to develop, but you can't help wondering if there was some touch of madness about him, which prevented him developing good relationships with some of the players. Best chant of the day was "Alan Pardew, Alan Pardew, you're not super any more!".

And his team were so dirty! Lloyd Sam was announced this morning as the player of the month in league one. Which is justified, but it makes other teams pay more attention to him. Obviously Pardew knows Sam's style of play very well, and his tactic seemed to be to foul him whenever necessary. The match was badly controlled by the referee. He did nothing to stamp on this persistent foul play, and the game got quite nasty in the second half, with five bookings.

Charlton started nervily, perhaps picking up the crowd's sense of the importance of the game. In the first half they failed to impose their midfield control and it wasn't that surprising when Southampton took the lead shortly before halftime.

The second half was entirely different. Charlton drew level with a flukey goal soon after the restart, and the confidence to keep the ball down and pass it around came back. Should have won. Two goals were ruled offside. I think the first may well have been offside, but the second looked ok to me. Hope I'll be able to see it later. And there was a reasonable appeal for a penalty.

So the 100% record has gone. OK, it had to go sometime, but I wish it hadn't been against Pardew's shower of filth. We're still top of the league, and it was encouraging that the team recovered from the setback, and was able to find its shape.