Curtain raiser

Charlton’s first pre-season friendly tomorrow as we head to Welling for the traditional curtain-raiser. Mark Gower and Richard Wood will be the only new faces on show at Park View Road with Scott Wagstaff, Matt Taylor, John Sullivan, Yado Mambo, Danny Haynes, Ricardo Fuller and Salim Kerkar all departed.

Richard Wood has been on trial and is a centre-half with almost 300 appearances under his belt for Sheffield Wednesday and Coventry. He is 28 today and would fit the bill for a 5th central defender alongside Morrison, Cort, Dervite and Feely.

Ceddy Evina has been back training with the club, and was offered a new one-year deal, although he initially turned it down. There has been no sign of a move for Jonathan Obika and unless I missed it no announcement on which 2nd year scholars were retained or released.

One would assume that youngsters such as Adebayo Azeez, Joe Pigott, Morgan Fox and Jordan Cousins would feature tomorrow and as part of CP’s squad for next season, but I don’t believe the club have made any announcements on their plans for the young pros at the club.

Powell today confirmed that Bradley Wright-Phillips has moved on, with a potential career opportunity in America where he was recently on trial with New York Red Bulls.

Another player that was at the club but is doing a very good impersonation of Omar Pouso is the Burkino Faso international Florent Rouamba. The missing persons bureau would be interested in any information….

Pursestrings are tight and there has been little authoritative rumour let alone verified fact of any of Powell’s summer transfers.

Yesterday in an unusual recent move by the club they announced that we will pick up a sell on fee following Jonjo Shelvey’s move to Swansea City. The club said it was six figures and I reckon it to be in the region of £225,000. Hopefully Powell will be allowed to use it.

There are many clubs in our division with the same predicament as us, but all bar Leicester and Brighton. Birmingham have been the busiest signing 9 players. Wigan and Blackburn have both signed 6 and Huddersfield and Leeds been busy.

The signing of Steve Morison by Millwall on a season-loan impressed me as did Derby’s move for Norwich’s Chris Martin and Leeds winning the race to sign Crewe prospect Luke Murphy. Alan Judge was a name said to be on Chris Powell’s lips but he signed for Blackburn and Royston Drenthe takes an impressive CV to Reading. Lewis McGugan could also be a first-class free transfer for Watford.

Two other newsworthy items of note. Addicks everywhere would have groaned earlier in the week when Sky kindly offered to show live our home game against Millwall on September 21st.

Finally today the club revealed it’s new away kit, which other than not being yellow, didn’t offer any surprises as it is the same design as the red one. I like them though, plain and simple.