Sixteen years ago today on the gloriously warm spring afternoon of April 29th 2000 Charlton Athletic collected the League Championship trophy in front of a capacity crowd at The Valley.
Sixteen years sounds like a long time ago but I’ve reached an age now where it doesn’t feel like it. The sensations of that day are still vivid; I can still feel the sunshine on my face and see the net making waves after Andy Hunt headed home John Robinson’s free-kick from six yards and ran towards us at the front of the Covered End. I can still feel myself wobbling about standing on my seat as the trophy was presented and the lap of honour began.
It turned into a long night; a bunch of us ended up taking over the Plume of Feathers in Greenwich, the landlord sending over bottles of champagne despite the Crystal Palace scarf and rosette that still hangs behind the bar there to this day.
It was a remarkable feeling. Charlton Athletic, our club, league champions by a mile and returning to the top flight thanks to a brilliant bunch of committed players marshalled by an inspiring manager approaching a decade in charge and backed by a boardroom hierarchy made up largely of lifelong supporters.
It was just eight years since we’d returned to a Valley with portacabins for dressing rooms, a capacity well under ten thousand and no money in the bank (three down in an FA Cup quarter-final a couple of years later to a Manchester United side who’d had Schmeichel sent off, their fans had crowed at us, “We’ve only got ten men”, to which we responded, “We’ve only got two bob”). We’d already been up to the Premier League and back in the meantime.
It was a time of incredible hope underpinned by the tangible sense of dreams being realised. The millennium gave us all a sense of a new beginning and a new future: we’d even straddled it on a record run of twelve consecutive wins. Dreams were taking wing.
The celebrations of Andy Hunt’s goal that afternoon were a little muted because by that time we were already three down. That didn’t really matter though (“Wrighty, Wrighty, what’s the score?” we’d sung at Richard Wright in the Ipswich goal after his side’s third; bemusedly he held up three fingers to massive cheers) because we were the champions.
The match programme that day, with a delighted Chris Powell draped in a ‘champions’ flag as the main cover image, was full of excitement and triumph; one feature trailing how the club had formed a partnership with Internazionale of Milan, one of the biggest teams in Europe – anything had seemed possible. The result didn’t matter. It was all about the bigger picture: the future.
I’ve felt the same sense of results being largely irrelevant while attending matches at The Valley this season. I wish it was because we’d won the same division at a canter and will again be sharing canapés with Serie A executives in expensive suits offering us a taste of the game at its very peak. But no. We’ve been relegated by miles, are stuck with a scruffy septuagenarian from the Low Countries so far out of his depth the coastguard is on permanent alert and the canapes will be served next season at Rochdale and Northampton Town.
Since Belgian micro-electronics magnate Roland Duchatelet bought the club in January 2014 almost everything the fans hold dear has been systematically dismantled, to such an extent one suspects it’s a wilful attempt to reduce Charlton Athletic to a soulless husk. It’s as if Duchatelet and his people want to cleanse Charlton Athletic of everything that’s gone before and create an entirely new club with a new set of spectators that happens to have the same name and plays at the same ground.
So, the reason our parlous run of results this season has felt broadly irrelevant is because, thanks to Duchatelet, right now relegation is the least of our worries.
Others have documented the details of how Duchatelet is destroying the club better than I could, but the most crucial aspect of his catalogue of idiocy is that he’s messing with the wrong set of supporters.
Because it’s not his club. It’s ours.
We want him out, and we will win.
We know we’ll win because we’ve got form. Much has been made of how Charlton was once the archetype of how to run a football club properly, but in the context of the club’s history that was just a blip. Before that there were decades of postwar neglect under the Gliksten family, the catastrophic early eighties reign of Mark Hulyer that nearly drove the club out of existence (signing former European Footballer of the Year Allan Simonsen from Barcelona when we were playing in a crumbling stadium in front of barely 4,000 in the lower reaches of the second division was always going to work) and the disastrous naiveté of his successor John Fryer that led to us losing The Valley for seven long years and further flirtations with oblivion.
The club’s more recent decline can’t even be laid solely at the feet of Duchatelet: his predecessors Slater and Jimenez were hardly shining examples of club ownership, but at least they’d facilitated Chris Powell’s assembly of a team greater than the sum of its parts – in true Charlton tradition – to storm out of League One as champions and then to within three points of a play-off place and, later, an FA Cup quarter-final.
The decade and a half in the sun we enjoyed around the turn of the millennium can’t hide the fact that we’re kinda used to the club being run by crackpots and hence we’re well equipped for it. The campaign to get the club back to The Valley included the Valley Party gaining 14,838 votes in the local elections, an extraordinary political result for a single issue party, an achievement often cited as one of the great fan campaigns of all time.
In the light of this, the fact that the current protests against the owners under the banner of the Coalition Against Roland Duchatelet have been imaginative, ingenious, effective, entirely legal and slickly organised (and will ultimately succeed) is no surprise, because we’ve won before and we’ll win this one too, no matter how long it takes.
In some ways this campaign is easier because the regime plays into the hands of the protestors at every turn. When it comes to the fans, Duchatelet and his Chief Executive Katrien Meire by their actions seem to think that we’re a slack-jawed, monosyllabic mass of knuckleheads who spend our waking hours shuffling around glassy-eyed chanting “Chow’un, *clap clap clap*”; numbskulled obsessives united by a blind loyalty that accepts with deference whatever we’re told is good for us.
As with most of their strategies they’ve got this startlingly wrong.
The people being systematically alienated and insulted by the Duchatelet regime are from all strata of society. A football club is a community and like any community it comprises a range of people: some as successful in business as Duchatelet himself; the rest generally articulate, intelligent and rational. Normal people, in other words. Normal people with opinions, knowledge and the choice of whether or not to accept the way the club is run.
Many protesting fans interpret this short clip of Katrien Meire speaking at November’s Dublin Web Summit as the chief executive calling Charlton fans ‘customers’ and ‘very weird’ and expressing disbelief that fans could feel a sense of ownership of their club, one that doesn’t equate with a favourite restaurant or local cinema. While her choice of words is certainly clumsy and ill-expressed I’m inclined to think she was trying to make a broader point about the unique nature of a football club’s relationship with its ‘customers’ when compared to other businesses.
She didn’t do it very well. But look at the way she says it. The eye-roll at the mention of receiving e-mails of complaint from fans. She doesn’t quite do dismissive finger air-quotes around the ‘our’ of ‘get out of our club’, but it’s close. It’s the contemptuous tone of what she says rather than the actual words that are most revealing for me: the underlying mix of mystification and frustration that the fans won’t just be told what’s good for them ‘because it’s the shareholder’s club’.
Even allowing for her accepting the undeniable truth that football fans are a unique customer base, she and Duchatelet have come down resolutely and entirely on the wrong side of that fact. Instead of embracing this unique relationship to mutual advantage the Duchatelet regime has tried to pull up the ladder and cut off the very people who can help them achieve success for Charlton Athletic. The people they need to help them.
It’s all down to the arrogance of certainty. Roland Duchatelet made a great deal of money in a particular part of the electronics industry, I’m sure with good reason and deservedly so. However, that spectacular niche success has led him to the lunatic conclusion that he can be equally successful in whatever field he chooses.
He believed, for example, that he alone knew best what the entire nation of Belgium needed and launched a political party with a manifesto largely comprising his own philosophies. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire and Vivant remains firmly at the margins of regional Flemish politics.
This has failed to dent an unshakable belief in his own genius and next he convinced himself he could single-handedly cure football of its financial ills and revolutionise the European game. He now has a controlling stake in five European football clubs of which Charlton is the largest (where we were once tied in to Inter, now we’re enmeshed with the likes of St Truiden and Carl Zeiss Jena). None of them is doing well. Charlton have, of course, just been relegated to League One after an abject season by probably the worst Charlton team I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something, a team put together by Meire, Duchatelet and the succession of numpty inadequates from his network that have passed through the manager’s office in the past two years.
There are many contributory factors to the team’s demise, all of which rest at the door of Roland Duchatelet. Despite having no experience whatsoever of football other than buying clubs with his micro-electronics money, he sends his coaches players, seemingly purely on a whim, and tells them who should play. Earlier this season he installed a coach in charge at Charlton, Karel Fraeye, who had never managed a team at a level higher than the Belgian third division. The Belgian third division. Surprisingly, Fraeye’s thirteen match reign at The Valley was cataclysmic and proved to be the undoing of Charlton’s hard-won Championship status.
“Roland doesn’t do failure,” said Katrien Meire last year. Well, clearly he does. Indeed, as far as I can see, in recent years he’s specialised in little else. Nothing he’s tried outside his core business has worked. Nothing.
‘Roland doesn’t do failure’ is one of those vacuous phrases used by people in business to avoid asking questions of themselves; a crass piece of sloganeering that betrays the complete absence of nuance and depth in the regime’s strategic thinking. It’s precisely what is causing the collapse of Charlton Athletic: this arrogance of certainty, the sense that they know what’s best because they say they do, no matter how obvious it may be that the complete opposite is the case.
Another phrase coined by Meire in Dublin was ‘unique real football fan experience’, again the kind of empty posturing devoid of meaning that’s popular with some business people. She says the regime is working at Charlton to create a new ‘unique real football fan experience’ whereby fans get to see homegrown youngsters before they are sold on to Premier League clubs.
What the chief executive appears to be saying here is that the club is abandoning all hope of reaching the Premier League ever again: its aim is to break even financially by selling on valuable playing assets to other clubs while treading water in the lower divisions.
Now, exciting young players leaving is undeniably a fact of footballing life and we at The Valley have seen it as much as any other club of comparable stature. One thinks of the great Robert Lee being sold to Newcastle United for a paltry £700,000 in 1992 because the return to The Valley had cleaned out our meagre coffers, even a young Jermain Defoe being poached from our youth set up by West Ham before going on to great things.
It happens. It’s always been part of football, part of the food chain, and we hate it when it occurs. Seeing a former local starlet who’s risen through the youth system, broken into the first team and shown glimpses of what he might achieve trotting out in the colours of another club (and in our case always scoring against us) is hard to swallow but it’s never been a stated policy. Until now, it seems.
We fans are supposed to accept this, keep turning up week in week out, greeting every departure to a Premier League side with a shrug and a chuckle and just keep blindly turning up to watch a team with absolutely no ambition. Just what do they think this game is about?
There are countless reasons to object to what’s being done to Charlton Athletic by the current regime, but for me this is the most idiotic (and it’s certainly the most contemptuous of the supporters). Not because balancing the books isn’t important, of course it is, but because with this policy Duchatelet and Meire are not just trying to take away our club, they’re taking away our dreams.
Football fans, especially those of clubs like Charlton, are nourished by our dreams and our memories: take even one of those away and you’ve ripped the heart out of your club’s supporters.
Our dreams and our memories are precisely what make Charlton Athletic our club. Roland Duchatelet may own the assets of the business, the stadium, the players’ contracts, the ticketing, the training ground, but the club is ours, a shared ownership gleaned through a collective experience that’s fuelled by our dreams. That is the true ‘unique real football fan experience’, it’s one with substance, depth and built from sheer humanity.
If any club’s fans are united in a ‘unique real football fan experience’ it’s the intensity of that experienced by the fans of Charlton Athletic over the years. We’ve seen our club come within minutes of extinction. We’ve seen our ground taken from us and fought hard for the best part of a decade to get it back. We’ve had the tragic, preventable death of Pierre Bolangi that traumatised the place from boardroom to training ground to the stands and pulled us even closer together.
I was brought up on 3,500 crowds watching 1-5 defeats at home to Rotherham in a crumbling, undulating concrete bowl ostensibly capable of accommodating 66,000. In 37 years of supporting Charlton I’ve seen extraordinary highs and wincing lows on the field. I’ve seen dreadful games, I’ve seen classic games, brilliant players to take the breath away and utter carthorses with the football intelligence of a dugong. Charlton Athletic is where I grew up, it’s the one constant in my life outside immediate family. Like all those around me at The Valley I have a bank of memories and experience, mine stretching back nearly four decades, and even Roland Duchatelet can’t take those away.
I also have dreams, the same as every other football fan. I’ve nourished myself in the bad times with the hope that it will get better, that anything might be possible. My expectations are realistic: just about every moment we spent in the Premier League we were punching above our weight, for example, and it was amazing. Take the dream of repeating that away and, well, there’s no point really, is there?
Nothing will ever top the feeling of standing on the threshold of unimaginable things after Sasa Ilic flopped onto Michael Gray’s penalty in the play-off final at Wembley in 1998.
Nothing will top the collective joy of December 5th 1992 when the team stepped out at The Valley for the first time after seven years away, The Red Red Robin played and the sky filled with red and white balloons.
Nothing will top the feeling at half-time in the away end at Old Trafford in that 1994 FA Cup Quarter-Final when the score was 0-0, Peter Schmeichel had just been sent off for the home side, Things Can Only Get Better pumped out of the PA system and we all joined in because at that moment it was true.
Each occasion listed above is special because it was about hope and about dreams. They’re special because they’re rare: they’re the pay-off for the bad times and the mediocre times. They’re what we live for. Those moments are part of the genuine ‘unique real football fan experience’. It’s not something you can read up in textbooks or cook up with a sharpie, a flip chart and a room full of earnest, pen-chewing ‘winners’ with minds full of buzzwords and an outlook forged from the arrogance of certainty. No, it comes from a history of shared experience and the collective clutch of dreams that supporting our club provides. Take that away, leave us only with the promise of bad times and mediocre times, and you’ve messed up. Massively.
Roland Duchatelet is taking away our dreams and destroying our club and that’s why we’re angry. That’s why we’re entitled to chant that “we want our Charlton back”, because he’s trying through sheer obstinate ignorance to steal from us the very heart and soul of our club. That is something no amount of money can buy. It can only be stolen.
Sixteen years ago today I stood up from the table in the Plume of Feathers, walked around the bar to the payphone, made a call and learned that my uncle Phil had died that afternoon after a long and horrible illness. He’d taken me to games as a kid and is mostly responsible for the 37 years I’ve supported Charlton Athletic. The first time I ever sat in the West Stand was on September 21st 1985 when Phil took me to what we all believed was the last ever game at The Valley and I broke my heart in the car on the way home. He promised me it would be OK. He kept that promise.
He was Charlton through and through. There were red and white flowers on his coffin and he’s buried with a copy of the programme from the day he died, the day we were officially crowned league champions, in his hand.
Today, on this joint anniversary, I shall raise a glass to my uncle Phil and to Charlton Athletic.
I can’t have my uncle Phil back, but I can, and will, have my Charlton back.
Roland Duchatelet, Charlton Athletic and the Arrogance of Certainty
by | Apr 29, 2016 | Blog | 65 comments
Brilliantly written Charlie, brought a tear to my eye.
Every moment mentioned (apart from the last Valley game) I remember vividly.
I’ll be there for the last home game showing my disgust of the Valley hierarchy.
WE WILL have our Charlton back.
Just brilliant…..
Great work Charlie and very very true. Maybe KM & RD should read it and try to understand what it means to be one of us (or any other football fan TBF)
On a footnote – WE WILL WIN ROLAND..!!
Great article Charlie
The best piece I’ve read on this sorry state of affairs. An absolute must read fot all Charlton fans.
Brilliant. Eloquently encapsulates all that is wrong with this regime full of no hopers with no idea of why a football club actually exists in the first place. Strip away the dreams and the sporting ambition and there is no point. You can balance the books by simply shutting down – without the hopes and dreams that you describe then you might just as well.
Excellent piece Charlie. Wonderfully written and poignantly sums up the feeling of so many supporters, young and old. I share so many of the same memories and despite having lived overseas for the past twelve years, my support of the club has remained undiminished and I’m sure I feel just as irked about what’s happening at Charlton as all the season ticket holders and regular attendees. Roland and Katrien beware. Unlike most football teams that Charlton have played this year, you will be defeated.
Superb article!
I saw my first match at the Valley in January 1962 and it changed my life forever.
So, so, true.
It’s your story, but my story too, and that of lots of other fans. We cannot let this club be dragged to its death by the Belgian software magnate. ROLAND OUT!
All so, so true!
Absolutely brilliant piece. I’ll raise a glass later to your Uncle Phil, he’ll be proud of you I’m sure.
This is a masterpiece and encapsulates everything that is going on at the present.
Please publish this in full in Voice of the Valley so that more can read it. Also post it to Duchebag and Liar Liar so that they can read it first hand. You never know it might just be the thing that rams the message home.
Thanks for all the comments, you lovelies. We WILL get our Charlton back.
Have made a couple of small edits since posting this: for a start I’d managed to spell ‘Duchatelet’ wrong all the way through (I didn’t get where I am today without a close eye for detail) so have corrected that. I also called him a ‘software’ magnate. While checking the spelling I happened upon his Wikipedia page and noticed that ‘micro-electronics’ is probably more accurate than ‘software’ but I don’t understand brainy computer things. I still shout, “It’s witchcraft, I tell you!” when the toaster pops up.
Bawling my eyes out!
My addiction began 39 years ago, at the age of 4, so you’ve described my history too.
Perfect piece that sums up Duchatelet’s mess.
Cheers Charlie – and uncle Phil. Fill your glasses and drink to Charlton Athletic (1905)
Just a great article,feel I’m going to Bunley game will be my last.
But no, it’s knowing there are fans who love our club as I do.
Thanks for writing, wish I could put my feelings as well as that.
Brilliant article. I have a tear in my eye after reading this and remembering walking back down Floyd Road to our first game back at our home and standing in Wembley not daring to believe that we had just beaten Sunderland and was playing in the Premiership next season. I have followed the lads since 1961 both home and away.
great stuff, Charlie
On the subject of my Uncle Phil, talk of the red and white flowers on his coffin reminded me of something else.
The red and white flowers were mine and somebody, probably my nan, had selected them to place on his coffin for the burial at Falconwood cemetery. I’d wrapped a Charlton scarf around them too, one issued the first time we were relegated from the Premier League that had a suitably upbeat slogan on one side. The scarf had been carefully arranged around the flowers on Phil’s coffin so this slogan was visible to everyone at the graveside.
Now, he was being buried in the same grave as his father, my grandfather, who’d died many years earlier. So, as uncle Phil’s coffin was lowered into the grave to join his father, there on the scarf on top of the coffin, in great big white letters, was the slogan, “WE’LL BE BACK!”.
He’d have bloody loved that.
Charlie
Great article – it deserves a wider audience How about a punt with the national papers, letter to the Times etc.
Frankly, what has happened at CAFC over the past two years goes beyond football and should have the widest audience
Best Wishes
GlynH
Thank you so much Charlie
A brilliant writer says the things you feel in your heart and your soul that you know to be true. At least for this boy from South London you are a brilliant writer.
Me? I just cant help believing!
Top Stuff. Very well put.
Very well put and says All that needs to be said. The only bit that I take exception to is the pathetic old cliche that we were punching above our weight in the premier league. We were there season after season because we DESERVED to be. The points tally proved it. Until Dowie came in – the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I can only echo the comments here that that is brilliantly written, and the ending sent an emotional shiver down my spine.
My first game was at the Valley on 1st May 1993 as an 11 year old with my Dad and I can remember the goals vividly, I remember the taste of the sweets I was eating and the noise of the Covered End. Though my Dad is still here my Grandad is not, and Charlton Athletic is a bond which runs strongly through my family even though we are now scattered far and wide from South East London.
Any fool with more money than I can imagine can buy a football club, but the emotional ownership of the fans is stronger than any deeds or contracts.
Thank you so much for sharing, I hope one day I can raise a pint with you to your uncle Phil.
Lee – of course we deserved to be in the Premier League. We were there entirely on merit and the points totals every season proved it. But for a club with our ground capacity, turnover and budget. we were unquestionably punching above our weight. And winning. And that makes the achievement an even greater source of pride. Not a cliche, just the truth.
Agree about Dowie. Dreadful appointment that probably came more from Murray’s desire to get one over Simon Jordan than the best interests of the club and Murray’s not exactly redeemed himself since.
As if I haven’t shed enough tears of frustration recently!
Beautiful, passionate and painfully true, Charlie.
Brilliantly put Charlie, but I’m beaten. I went through the Sellout park days without the proverbial pot to use, the days where we sold players to survive. But what we always had was, we were working together for the cause. These people haven’t a clue what its about, they’ve rocked this club to its very foundations and its so very sad. Until they’ve gone. 🙁
Don’t be beaten, Ray. They can’t win. Only the fans can win this.
Suggest someone should send a copy of this to Katrien Miere…..
This is why it is OUR CLUB. We shall win. We want Roland out!!!
Charlie
I’ve always enjoyed reading your stuff, but this is an absolute tour de force. I thought I knew all the reasons why this regime is bad, but you’ve provided perhaps the most important one. They are trying to destroy our dreams.
We cannot allow them to do this. As you say, we can and will win.
The arrogance of certainty indeed. A great line which we should all adopt.
Stand firm everyone, support all the organised groups. We can see him off.
Thanks Richard. If I remember rightly you were in the Plume that night sixteen years ago too.
So eloquently put. ‘Clients’ would not understand, just as KM & RD don’t understand but fans do. Don’t stop believing.
Charlie
I loved reading your soul as a Charlton fan. Remarkably similar to mine after following our team since 1957.
The disappointment of this season has been the worst in my memory as it was so avoidable. Coupled with an owner and CEO seemingly devoid of football experience who have shown unbelievable arrogance and complete contempt for the unique set of fans who follow Charlton Athletic.
Thank you for those eloquent words which sum up the Charlton experience under these misfits, and so much more. I too had a tear in my eye at the end. Uncle Phil did a good thing taking you to The Valley. Had he not we would not have enjoyed your fine words which we can all associate with.
Great article, sums up how so many fans feel. I’ve been going for nearly 50 years, seen it all but this owner has torn the heart from this club. Sad, so very sad. They should read this, perhaps then they may just understand although i doubt it.
ROLAND SELL UP CHARLTON FC NOW OR WE FORM A BREAKAWAY CLUB YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
Poetry
Nice one Charlie. “In the Shadow of the Dome, the History of the Pilot Football Club” never become a best seller. I think I should have used you as a ghost writer.
Best wishes
Pete
Great piece Charlie. Have been following Charlton since da took me to my first games at the age of 4 in 1970. I’ve been used to seeing us yo-yo in those years from 2nd to 3rd and back again. Paddy Powell was always my hero, but watching Simonsen rip apart Chelsea from the East Terrace (one of my few times watching from there) was special.
That Ipswich match remains in the memory so vividly. I was lucky enough to have met Peter Varney and a few other lads, who have become good friends over the years, after we returned to The Valley. Pete sat behind us in the North at the time. Years later, he had invited us in to the lounge after that game and we had a great night. We were invited to the boardroom, through another friend, that day, so it was a very special day.
From a club that knew how to behave and look after its’ fans to the sad, sorry state that we are today is nothing short of a disgrace. You’re scarf was so right though…We Will Be Back! And your Uncle Phil will be smiling down on you and OUR club on that day!
Cheers
Terry
Brilliant Charlie – (wipes away tear).
I have been going for 49 years – Douchebag and nightMeire have ripped the heart of our club.
The sooner we force them out the better.
#ctid #getoutofourclub #wewantourcharltonback
Sums everything up so eloquently.
Thank you Charlie.
The owner is temporary . We the fans are permanent with our love for the club passed from generation to generation. To coin the old phrase – we shall not be moved.
We are Charlton till we die God bless us everyone.
Sorrry, but this is histrionic crap. You complain about Meire’s “vacuous phrases” but you have just topped her in hollow grandstanding, Charlie. “The worst Charlton team (you)’ve ever seen,”? You must be some johnny-come-lately glory seeker if you honesly belief that (and you seem like an intelligent chap so I’m assuming the comment was for rheotical effect – but your problem is that such OTT nonsense devaues everything else you say). I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Charlton relegated., so same-old same-old. Time to grow some balls, man-up and support our club regardless of whoever owns it. That’s market capitalism, pal!
Stunning article
Roland the Dream Stealer
Wow, brought tears to my eyes. Been a supporter since the 50’s, but haven’t been to the ground for some years as I’m in Australia. This is so eloquent and passionate and it is this passion that will ensure we win. My personal motto is Never Ever Give Up and I believe that Charlie’s article will manifest itself through our community and inspire all of us. Thank you for putting this out there
GREAT,bought a tear to my eye too,been charlton fan for 38 years unfortunately I now live in Newcastle but do get to see the team at least 6 times a year,I speak to many George’s up here about it and there support all the hard work CARD are putting in,KEEP IT UP GUYS
Excellent piece, Charlie, very moving and emotive.
This is my fourth relegation, and by far the most avoidable and futile, but eventually the arrogant old fool must get bored and move on to a new hobby to not be very good at.
We live in hope.
Very well said, Charlie.
Roland does not know or care about Charlton’s history.
Charlton may not win very many leagues, but they know how to win campaigns!
Up the Addicks!
An amazing piece of writing Charlie that encapsulates everything we are feeling – the anger, desperation and hope. However, the beacon of light is our steadfast resilience that we absolutely will win this fight and, indeed, we will get our Charlton back.
We have a vacancy for a Director of Communications !!
HUMBLE PIE KM – Words, memories and sentiments something you’ll never ever have in your locker. We WILL get our Charlton back.
PS I’ll even pay for your Eurostar ticket.
Ah -William, banned from CL so over here trolling now. Very sad. Nice one Charlie, sums up well how 95% of the real support feels.
Charlie
great piece, unbelievably I have been coming to Charlton for 25 years, had 2 children, seen them both my kids grow up and lost both my parents in that time. Walked down Burtn Ash Hillafter the greatest final
sorry sent before it was finished and word-checked will try again
Beautifully written and echoes so much of everything that all we Charlton fans share. Family, family values, those moments of pure elation and the majority sitting quietly and patiently for those sort of moments.
Thank you for sharing this, it’s a tribute to your love for Charlton and – one Charlton fan to another – we will never give up the fight.
#wewantourcharltonback
Fantastic article Charlie. 15 years also since I left those shores; it seems like yesterday and it seems like a hundred years.
#wewantourcharltonback
Excellent and profound piece which sums up being a Charlton Fan superbly!!
I’ve been through all these in nearly 20 years, 15 as a season ticket holder, and never experienced such lows as the past couple of years have been!
For William ( your sole critic) I would say there is no place for “market capitalism” in football as we will undoubtedly find next season when players like Solly, Henderson, Cousins, Lookman, Gudmonsson and Harriet are playing for other Clubs in Divisions above us having realised the owners financial worth in his investment!
The current owner will only leave when he has sucked the financial heart from “Our” Club and only then will I and true Charlton Fans be able to reclaim and rebuild it!
As a Bradford City supporter who knows about the dreaded drop all the way down the leagues, to the point of almost going out of the league may I first say what an incisive piece, so well written.
We were lucky in having two local business men who were from this city and supporters too and they’ve kept us afloat. As you so eloquently stated it’s about the passion and the dreams and City were lucky we had the backing of two directors with both.
Absolute genius article
Thank you Charlie.
Extremely well written Charlie and sums up perfectly the debacle that has been the RD/KM/RM roadshow for the past 2 years.
Whoever ‘William’ is & wherever he resides (I hope he is not the William I know from Belgium- although the grammar and spelling hint at an overseas person) I would assume that he too frequents the Valley as often as RD does.
My reply requires ‘moderation’ – for what exactly please ?
Colin, nothing untoward and certainly not a reflection of specific content – every comment is automatically sent for moderation just to check it’s not spam.
Great article, well put. I am a Charlton fan myself and I feel that I am being forced to accept this philosophy of simply providing talent to the premier league. I detest this. It is obvious that the owners do not care about the club at all. It is disgusting. WE WANT OUR CHARLTON BACK
Thanks Charlie
Well written sums up my feelings 53 years of ups and downs but this is the worst I’ve seen at the valley.Ive finally given up I can’t see any change from this regime regardless of demos and protests,I hope I’m wrong but Saturday’s are going to be very different for me good luck to all for the future
Excellent. Truely excellent
Brilliant article and love the reference to Schmeichal’s sending off in 1994 – definitely one of my top footballing moments, along with Jim Melrose’s 9 second goal, the St. Andrews Play off final and of course Sacha’s save. Seems hard to imagine this happening right now……..things can only get better!
Your article very accurately addresses the WHAT has happened to the club but I can’t fathom the WHY? Why would anybody, even a super-rich egomaniac, invest their money and then, apparently intentionally, devalue their own asset? There is an almost accepted perception among the fans that the owner is purposely and wilfully ruining CAFC. What I haven’t heard is a theory as to why he would do this? Other than that he is so wealthy that he just isn’t focused on this mere bauble at the bottom of his treasure chest, I can’t see why he would want his name to be tarnished and trashed so thoroughly and his balance sheet reduced in value. Thoughts and theories?