Charlton 1 Huddersfield 1

This report's a bit late, because I've been pondering my feelings about it. The heavy rain on Saturday night meant that my recorder didn't work, so I haven't been able to see the no-doubt detailed and extensive coverage of the game on the Football League Show, so I can't say whether the two crucial incidents - the sending-off and the penalty - were good decisions. The consensus seems to be that they were both dubious, so they, in a way, balanced out. And a draw was a fair result.

Once again, Charlton failed to take advantage of playing against ten men, yet I can't help thinking that four weeks ago, we'd have lost this game. It wasn't a great performance, and Huddersfield generally looked the more talented team. Perhaps the northern-style weather suited them better.

Through most of the second half Charlton looked like they were repeating last year's trick of doing just enough and no more to win a game but Huddersfield's late flurry caught them out, just like Cardiff's final struggles nearly did.

After the game, Chris Powell called on the team to show more killer instinct, and I'd say there's also a need to keep concentration going for the full 100 minutes. In November, Charlton have conceded four goals within 5 minutes of full time.

So it was a disappointing end to the afternoon, but spirits remain high. Just remember the last time we were playing in this division, four years ago. On 22 November 2008 Charlton seemed already doomed to relegation: a dreadful performance saw them lose 2-5 to Sheffield United, and the manager was sacked. He commented, with his usual incoherency, but with unaccustomed honesty "My record coming to this club has been good, but it's been difficult here. When I arrived they were on the slide and I haven't been able to stop that."

Today, in completely unrelated news, I've been enjoying reading about Newcastle United. The geordies are wondering what's going wrong with their team. Should we tell them?



Charlton website report by the brilliant and possibly-related-to-me Gary Haines

Charlton 5 Cardiff 4

I think I'll have to renounce my title as the world's worst football pundit. Yesterday evening someone on twitter (I can't remember who, and it'd be kinder not to) predicted "a dull game. 0-0."

That prediction only lasted 4 minutes, when I can't have been the only person fearing another horrible home defeat. But even after the second goal, on 24 minutes, the North Stand crowd (my man of the match) kept on chanting, in the most astonishing display of solidarity to Chris Powell, clearly a response to the few idiots who've been questioning his position.

Did it affect the players? I honestly think it did. There was no sign of the defeatism that was evident in the second half of the Middlesbrough game. It felt as if the team felt they could, improbably, come back. And improbably enough they did.

It was absolutely fitting that it should be Johnnie Jackson who started the comeback. He's not the most skillful player in the team, but he's got a knack of being in the right place at the right time that any striker must envy. And of course he has a huge influence on morale: when he's on song, the rest of the team seems to follow. His two goals at the end of the half completely turned the game around, and an exuberant crowd was disappointed when halftime came. Could Charlton continue this way?

Well, yes. Dale Stephens got the third before 10 minutes had passed. I don't know if he meant his free kick to be a shot or if it was a misplaced cross that fooled everybody. I kinda hope it was a fluke because it would be the first piece of outrageous good luck Charlton have had this season, an omen that can inspire and encourage the team as the season goes on.

For the rest of the game, Charlton were in total control, adding two goals and causing scenes of delirium in the crowd.

But then the referee, who had a poor game, booking eight players in a perfectly clean match, found six minutes of added time from god knows where. I felt that Charlton's players were emotionally, if not physically, drained at this point, while Cardiff were given a boost by this. So just to keep it interesting they scored two late goals.

Those goals slightly spoiled the mood. At the end of the game I thought Chris Powell was torn between an urge to lay into the team for conceding them and the simple joy of beating one of the top teams in the league. And the players looked as if they knew they were in for a bit of bollocking.

It didn't matter. It was three points gained in the most amazing, palindromic, game I've seen in years. And this from a team still ravaged by injuries, where the best rightback in the Championship has to play on the left, and one of the centre backs has to play at right back. When the team is back to full strength, who knows what they will be capable of?

Charlton 1 Middlesbrough 4

If you've got a recording of this match, and haven't yet seen it, do yourself a favour and watch it in reverse. The result will be the same but it will be much less depressing.

You'll find that, as expected, Middlesbrough are a very good team, and they will score with almost the first kick of the game. Perhaps less predictably, Charlton will play the first half like a bunch of strangers Chris Powell found in the local Wetherspooons. Generous strangers, though: they will hand the northerners two gift-wrapped goals before halftime, and stumble off 3-0 down.

For the second half, Powell will make a wonderful substitution, bringing on Lawrie Wilson to play at right midfield. You won't be able to decide if it's just him making the difference, but Charlton will begin to play better, making a few good chances, and you feel that with a bit of luck they could get back into the game.

But then 'Boro will score - Woodgate finding space to power in a header from a free kick, and really the game will be over. Charlton won't give up though, and will finally get the goal their fightback deserves. Even at the end, they'll still be trying, and the game will end with Bradley Pritchard heading just over. You'll feel upset, obviously, but you'll feel proud that Charlton didn't give up against a team that is deservedly on top of the table.

Sometimes you really need to be a time lord to enjoy Charlton matches.

Charlton 1 Blackburn 1

I haven't blogged many games this season. I didn't want to be dishonest but at the same time I didn't want to be negative. I was unsure whether the team was actually good enough to survive in the second tier, but hoped things would get better. In particular, the midfield looked outpaced a lot of the time, and that's something you can't easily put right.

But this evening I'm feeling much better. Charlton undoubtedly deserved at least the draw against a Blackburn team that's packed with well-known players, who were mainly in the premiership last season. Their performance must have dented their fans' joy at the departure of Steve Kean last night, and maybe they will realise it wasn't all his fault. Please, football gods, let Iain Dowie get the job, so they can see what a bad manager really looks like.

Of course, you can't expect things to turn around so quickly, but I think it was generally believed that Blackburn's players always supported Kean. Certainly there was no sign that they were happy he'd gone: they didn't play with any kind of flair or creative freedom. Fundamentally, I suspect, they're not a very good squad, with some players living off their reputations. Jordan Rhodes, who cost 8 million, was once again invisible; Michael Morrison really knows how to exclude him from a game.

Danny Murphy was booed by a section of the crowd. This is disgraceful. Everybody should have joined in.

And Charlton played the best I've seen them this season. This was a shock, given the line-up. Ricardo Fuller was a late loss, with a virus, and so BWP was playing alone up-front. Not his natural role, and too much of the play seemed to assume there was a tall man in a red shirt standing near him.

But it meant there were five in midfield, and they largely dominated the game, certainly after Blackburn's goal on 15 minutes. This was the result of a very skillful passage of play, and I feared the worst. Perhaps Blackburn really did have classy players. But the goal seemed to be the limit of their ambition, and all the creative play from then on was from Charlton. Everyone was playing well but special mentions to Salim Kerkar, who got better and better as the game went on, and to Danny Hollands, playing some very intelligent balls in the centre.

An action-packed afternoon for Johnnie Jackson, too. Looking better than he has so far this season, he missed a penalty, but scored the equaliser about a minute later, and only lasted 7 minutes of the second half before an injury saw him replaced by Bradley Pritchard, who fitted in perfectly, another player raising his game.

Charlton had chances; Blackburn didn't and were obviously happier with their one point than Charlton were. Charlton should have won, probably, but with only one striker it was always going to be difficult. The only dilemma now is whether Chris Powell should play five in midfield again: is the security that formation gives worth the price of losing goal-scoring opportunities? We'll probably find out on Tuesday, a game I'm really looking forward to.

Tokyo calling ...

I'm old enough to just about remember the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games. It was the first Olympics since communications satellites were invented, and so we could see live, or nearly live, coverage as Mary Rand, Ann Packer, Lynn "the leap" Davies, and Ken Matthews (who I have to say I'd completely forgotten) won a respectable-in-those-days 4 gold medals.

But the technology was pretty basic. As I remember, we saw an awful lot of people sitting and nattering in a studio far away from the action. Every so often they'd get hold of a bit of footage of a Brit winning something, and show that over and over again. Or we'd have a good laugh at the freaky ladymen sexually ambiguous shotputters from eastern Europe.

Channel 4's coverage of the London Parlympics has taken me back to those days, and it's not a good nostalgia. For most of the time, we have two presenters in a claustrophobic studio, usually with a guest, and they talk and talk about what we're not actually seeing. The games themselves might as well be on the other side of the world, there's so little engagement with them. We get occasional, context-free, clips of British athletes, but very little continuous or live coverage.This morning was an example. The rower Tom Aggar was competing in the final of the sculls, and apparently had a decent chance in it. In the event, he came fourth. C4 showed a short extract from the race about an hour after it had happened, packaged up with a short interview. Meanwhile someone on Twitter commented wryly that while a C4 commentator had described the long jump competition as thrilling, no-one watching would have known as they had only shown two jumps.

A few weeks ago, we saw that people could become enthusiastic about all kinds of sports if they were just given the time to get to know them and to follow the drama of the events. People became instant experts on synchronised diving and dancing horses because they could sit and watch and get drawn in, not because someone in a studio told them about it.

I know this is the biggest coverage the Paralympics has ever had, but in practice it's so depressing. I don't much like Channel 4 anyway - although it shows some excellent programmes, its personality is obnoxious - but these games were a chance to improve its image. Unfortunately, it's taken a fundamentally wrong direction, and I think the problem is this: it's presenting the games as a display of triumph over adversity, rather than as a top-grade sporting event. It's not trusting the sporting action to speak for itself, which is not just ruining viewers' enjoyment but is actually quite patronising to the athletes involved.

Don't ever take the BBC for granted!

Charlton 2 Leicester 1

I lived in Leicester for a while between school and university, working for a firm who provided lighting for outdoor events. I would travel the country in a really clapped-out van, installing naff lanterns in marquees, and occasionally feeling the surge of 240 volts through my fingertips.Yes, mes enfants, that's what a gap year used to be like. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed my time there. It was, after all, the first flat of my own, and consequently Leicester has always had a special place in my heart. Such a special place that I've never been back.

Even before then, I remember a League Cup (in the days when it was called the League Cup) match in the 70s, when Second Division Charlton (in the days before they were plucky) beat First Division Leicester City (in the days when First Division clubs took the League Cup seriously). I've such a bad memory for fooball that I'm amazed I remember this, but it seemed like a huge victory at the time.

I think I might remember tonight's game, too. It was a terrific game, the total opposite of so many games in League One, where the visiting team had a very simple agenda of not conceding a goal. Leicester were fantastic - quick, clever and adventurous - and the legendary neutral observer would have to say they deserved at least three points. But in the first half they were wayward in their finishing - Ben Hamer didn't have a save to make - and in the second half Charlton relied on a mixture of luck and guts to keep them out.

So the first half ended with Charlton 2-0 up. I may have omitted a few details. You can get a proper match report on the badly-fonted Charlton website. The important thing is that Yann Kermorgant scored. Actually that's less important than BWP's goal, the kind of chance he'd have missed last season by thinking too much. Yann's goal mattered much more to the Leicester fans, who seem to think he has deliberately scuppered their every chance of promotion for the last 500 years. They probably think Kermorgant is an old Nottingham name.

The second half started with two Leicester substitutions, a clear sign that they weren't giving up. And mon dieu they weren't. They racked up the speed of their play even more, and at times the Charlton midfield looked like an Englishman trapped at lunchtime on the central reservation of Madrid's orbital motorway (bewildered, scared and hungry). But luck and guts were enough, and Charlton ended the evening in 3rd position with 4 points from 2 games, easily as good as anyone could have hoped.

And it was good to see Paul Konchesky back at the Valley. He's another former player who has never seemed quite so good since he left (I still agree with Curbishley that he was better as a midfielder). A small section of the crowd booed him. Shame on them! I suspect they're too young to remember what an honest, hard-working player he was, and the big ol' skinhead had a great game.

So my unlikely love affair with Leicester is rekindled - I hope they do well, and think they will. And my love affair with football - I admit I flirted with other sports recently - is back on.

Sadly, I don't think many games will match tonight's for tension and enjoyment, but it looks like this season is going to be enthralling.

Something else Carol Vorderman's to blame for

There's a man (I've never caught his name) who does commentary on boxing for the BBC who has an amazing knack of talking in the worst kind of sporting jargon completely spontaneously. He says things that would look astonishingly pompous if you read them in an article ("Murgatroyd fulfills his destiny and writes a new chapter in the history of the noble art"), so they are stunningly overblown in simultaneous commentary. This is just my opinion.

Then there's Garry Herbert, who commentates on rowing. He knows his stuff, but even more than any other commentator, he gets caught up in patriotic emotion so strongly that he becomes incoherent, and you may not even notice that the British team have come a poor but plucky fifth, while someone else - who cares who else?- has produced a blistering, record-breaking performance. This is just my opinion.

And then there's Paul Dickenson, on the athletic field events. He's just got a really ugly, jarring voice, which I can't stand. This is just my opinion.

Hold on a minute, these are all men. Or are they? According to Des Lynam they must all be women. He makes it sound so definite: "I have come to the conclusion [like some kind of scientist] that the female voice is not so attractive for actual commentating [and I have the stats to prove it]."

Oh, Des, you were rubbish as a Countdown presenter but otherwise we all love you, so why do you spout such rubbish? Of course you're allowed to not like women's voices, but that's something about you, not about women's voices. So I think what you mean is "I have come to the conclusion that I find women's voices not so attractive, sometimes grating. But this is just my opinion. I worked with Carol Vorderman for a year. You try doing that without becoming a misogynist." If you'd said that, we'd find it in our hearts to pity and forgive you.

And while we're talking about commentators, I have to add - it can't be said often enough - that Mark Lawrenson shouldn't be allowed near a microphone again. This is not just my opinion, it is hard scientific fact.