The sacking of Katrien Meire

Well, someone had to do it.

If Roland Duchâtelet's objective really is to run a successful football club, he would surely have shown Katrien Meire the same ruthlessness and impatience he exhibits towards Head Coaches. By any normal measure, her management of the club has been an embarrassing failure. Most obviously on the pitch, of course, but income and profit must already be falling steadily - all those empty seats every week. And all those stewards to control a protest that may or may not materialise don't come cheap.

And in this, a relatively quiet week, we had the farce of her resignation/dismissal as a director of Charlton Athletic Holdings being mischievously hoaxed. Whoever did it (and I must point out that the stifled laugh you hear from this blog in no way condones the illegal act) must have been amazed at how easy it was to get away with it. All because the company didn't use the free verification service offered by Companies House, apparently. Something that any competent lawyer should have corrected. Where's a competent lawyer when you need one, Katrien?

So her failures as a CEO have led to financial turmoil, and have left the holding company unprotected against corporate identity theft, the consequences of which could have been much worse than the embarrassment we saw this week. If it wasn't already, the reputation of the club is in tatters.

In any normal business, the owner would have been replacing the fake document with a real one. Sorry, Katrien, but you've failed.

But this isn't a normal business, of course. It's certainly not a normal football club and Duchâtelet's long-term objectives remain as obscure as ever, although footballing success seems ever lower on his list of priorities.

So the protests must continue. We won't know until noon on Saturday what the twist will be this week, but we do know that there will be a protest after the game. Let's make it another big one.

Charlton 0 Bristol City 1

Like a fool, I had hope before the game. On a day when the blustery weather was urgently telling me to stay at home with a DVD and beer, and there wasn't even going to be a big protest to attend, I didn't want to miss one of Charlton's rare wins this season.

Surely they would win. Reports from Rotherham last week suggested the team had found a new organisation and drive that could easily overcome Bristol City, even if the visitors played better than anyone expected.

Surely Charlton would win. The consequences of defeat were too awful to consider.

Bristol City played about as well as anyone expected, ie not very, but it was enough. The first half was all that mattered, and a scrappy half it was. City took the points from a penalty, which Jose Riga later described as a blatant dive. Not sure I'd agree with him on that, and City probably should have been given another penalty a few minutes later, so you can't play the injustice card here.

As so many teams have found this season, if you take a lead against Charlton at the Valley, you just have to hold on to it. Even so, with about three minutes to go City got the ball in a perfect position to take it to the corner flag and run down the clock. To their credit, they went for goal, which kind of sums up their assessment of Charlton's chance of levelling the score. Fair enough: Charlton had spent the previous 70 minutes proving there was none.

It's desperately worrying that Riga's reinvigoration of the team has fizzled out so quickly. Although I'm more sceptical than some about his abilities, I had hoped ... Oh, that evil Hope again. Readers, if you ever have a daughter, do not name her Hope. She will kill you.

How we laughed at the start of the season when the bookies were offering ridiculously short odds about relegation. Three to one, I think it was. We should have lumped on.

Taking sides

José Riga's playing a good game, taking every opportunity to put some distance between himself and the Duchâtelet deathstar. Here's what he said to the BBC on his return to Charlton.

A lot of people think I am part of the network but I am not at all, because I went to other places. For me it is a professional relationship between an owner and a coach - not more.

But it's very similar to what he said when he was appointed as head coach at Standard for the second time:

[Duchâtelet] is just a chairman looking for a coach, full stop. [...] Just like when he first gave me a job with Standard, or the job with Charlton.

So, that's four times now that Duchâtelet has been just a chairman looking for a coach, and Riga has been that coach.

Either Riga is exploiting Duchâtelet's fear of strangers, or Duchâtelet is exploiting Riga's fear of the dole queue.

Today the talk has all been about Reece Oxford, by all accounts a brilliant 17 year old defensive midfielder with West Ham. Opinions were divided on whether his putative loan move to Charlton was a good thing or not. Consensus: excellent prospect, but not what Charlton most need, especially with Tony Watt apparently heading out the door again.

Late in the day it appeared the deal had broken down because Riga had vetoed it. And suddenly the story offered a bewildering flowerhead of possibilities.

1 In time-honoured fashion, the deathstar arranged the deal without speaking to Riga. On learning about it, he said no.

2 Oxford did a bit of research, realised what a snakepit Charlton is, said no, for god's sake no, and Charlton devised a story to cover this up.

3 The whole thing was never going to happen, but it made Riga look like an independent-minded man.

The problem with option 1 is that it assumes Riga has the power to say no. Option 2 doesn't seem likely: it's based on a tweet by Oxford that was misinterpreted. His anger and frustration was not at being shipped off to Charlton but at the fact that his chance to get some gametime was being denied. Option 3 could only be true if Charlton were run and managed by a lying, immoral group of chancers who are desperately trying to regain some credibility.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Which of these, dear readers, is the most likely explanation?

Alcorcón again

I honestly didn't intend to refer to Alcorcón again, but in a week when Charlton ejected a Charlton fan for the crime of displaying his devotion to Charlton, and the Charlton Chief Executive remains harder to find than Wally in a Where's Wally? fan convention, what's been going on in Spain?

Two actions valuing the supporters, that's what.

First, the two hundred longest-serving season ticket holders will be honoured with a special ceremony and a memorial on 31 January

Second, any fan with a birthday in January is offered a free ticket for a guest to the game against Real Valladolid on 30 January, and to enjoy a pizza and a drink in the VIP lounge afterwards.

As I've noted before, Alcorcón (a club that cherishes its supporters) appears to be on an upward trajectory, while Charlton (a club that throws out supportive supporters who show their support) is plummeting. Perhaps there's a lesson here ...

Of course there's a lesson here. A lesson so obvious that only a stupidly arrogant man and his hopelessly incompetent protegée could miss it.

Reality and sense are queuing up and knocking at Roland Duchâtelet's door but he's turned the lights off and is pretending no-one's home.

Troublemakers

As widely reported, this fan was evicted from the ground yesterday for displaying this banner. According to @CAFCfanDanii "He was manhandled and his mum was hit in the face all by stewards." I hope he takes further action against the club and urge any witnesses to support him.

But who needs a protest recruitment campaign when the club's management can stoke the flames of protest so effectively? The stewards' intervention was provocative: it could have started serious unrest in the North stand. Perhaps that was the intention. It's only the patience and decency of the fans that stopped that happening. The troublemakers here aren't the fans.

Yesterday's protest was impressive. No-one expected the boycott to be 100% solid but it seemed to me that fewer people than usual had bought programmes or food or drink. There were several bizarre sightings of people in black and white scarves buying things. I'm not sure how they can reconcile their actions, but that's an issue for their conscience.

After the match a massive crowd assembled outside the West Stand. Much bigger than the protest after the Forest game, but again it was on the whole peaceful though angry.

I've no doubt this is going to be a long campaign. Roland has deep pockets, and the indifference of a very rich man to what people think of him. If you haven't already, please consider making a donation to the campaign fund. Details of how to do it are in this thread on the Charlton Life forum. You don't need to be a member of the forum to contribute cash, but if you have any ideas on what action should be next, I'm sure they'd love to hear them.

It's payday next week for a lot of people, so please offer whatever you can. Any amount is helpful. Let's keep this movement going!

Charlton 1 Blackburn 1

For some time now I've been working on a post with the title "Omertá" - about the way football squads keep silent about any problems, and how that's normally a good thing but can be destructive. When a team - a hypothetical team, let's pretend - knows that its bad morale and performances are caused by something it can't even talk about, the frustration and indignation must easily become damaging.

But in a less hypothetical team, there's an increasing sense of a shared oppression: the team and the fans are both suffering from the bizarre decisions of the club's owners. The team can't say this, of course, but they have to understand that the fans know it.

The crowd today clearly knew it. Strong support for the team alternated with strong attacks on the ownership. After about 15 minutes this happened:

Disgusting scene at #CAFC no legal authority to remove a fan for a banner! @SkySportsNewsHQ #WeWantOurCharltonBack pic.twitter.com/o3GzmTNGRi

— Simon A.C. Martin (@CopleyHill) January 23, 2016

It was a stupid, unnecessarily provocative thing for the stewards to do, and it guaranteed a massive turn-out for the 5pm protest.

Meanwhile, a match was taking place and the team Charlton put out looked promising. Tony Watt provided some moments of excitement that have been missing, while newcomer Jorge Teixeira looked a worthwhile addition (a four and a half year contract, though?). There were some pleasing passages of play by Charlton, with even Bergdych looking like a footballer at last. Jose Riga is clearly the best coach Duchatelet has inflicted on Charlton and I'd like to believe he's repairing the damage that the others have done.

But it's still a long way to go. One-all was a fair reflection of the first half. In the second half, Charlton visibly weakened, and the game became scrappy. As in so many games this season a better opposition could have run riot - and I suppose that's what happened at Huddersfield and Hull. For all the undoubted effort shown by the team today, there was a lack of quality. Chris Powell could make a team perform above its limitations, and we saw Jose Riga do the same two years ago. We're depending on him to do that again to keep the club in the Championship.

And so a point was taken from the kind of game - at home, against out-of-form opposition - that Charlton need to be winning. More positively, it was a massive improvement on the last two league games.

After the game, the protest was bigger than ever, but I'll deal with that in a separate post tomorrow, possibly.

Protest this afternoon

Unnecessary reminder, I'm sure, but after supporting the team today, whatever the result, don't forget to gather outside the West Stand at 5, to reinforce the message that we'd be awfully grateful if M Duchâtelet and his friends would kindly go away. Polite but forceful should be our approach. We're in this for the long run, and even if there's no apparent response we need to keep being a nuisance, eventually wearing them down.

Going for a pre-match drink at The Valley today? Keep an eye out for 1,000 of these... #WeWantOurCharltonBack #cafc pic.twitter.com/tqRKBoQ9Ps

— CARD (@CharltonCARD) January 23, 2016