Championship level squad
Talking Point 🗣️
We know Nathan Jones is prone to hyperbole but the “I think we’ve got a Championship-level squad, I really do” comment looked spectacularly out of place in the cold of South Yorkshire on Saturday evening after a team below us in League One took us to the cleaners.
Jones and his team has an opportunity tomorrow night to put us back on the teetering path to a second half of the season play-off push. It’s what good teams do, bounce back after an unedifying defeat.
We’ll see, but a lot of us see this team and squad for what it is, and that is a middling, inconsistent mid-table third tier side. It’s what we’ve become and frankly where we deserve to be.
Not anywhere to the extent of Birmingham’s, but still for a couple of window’s we’ve been active in the transfer market, and have a top six budget, but underperformance has riddled this club from top to bottom for a decade.
There is a makings of a spine to this team, and possibly Nathan Jones could be its saviour, but sensible and visionary recruitment has to happen.
There really doesn’t look like a lot happening this January, but we are still glaringly short in a lot of areas. For me it would make sense before more restrictive changes to the Financial Fair Play framework kick in after this season to at least look to add to the squad for a promotion challenge next season.
The owners and SMT have made some positive changes to the infrastructure, but foresight and enterprise looks beyond them.
Championship level is an aspiration, and so it should be, but it has to be a journey that elicits trust and togetherness. The trouble with our Addicks journey is that just as they press the accelerator, we swerve and have to brake.
22 games left to at least give us something to get behind. COYR.
Three quarters of the way through this transfer window, and not a whisper of any incomings to assist an assault on a top six finish. Agreed, Jones is dreaming if he thinks this squad could get to the Championship,let alone hold it’s own there. The odd decent performance does not get you promotion. Bolton tomorrow night will be another stiff test, in which I fear we will come off second best again.
First we need to be a promotion level squad – I will worry about the Championship when we get there.
Consistency has been an issue, we were superb in a few matches – Birmingham, Wycombe etc but we are prone to slipping up and we do so too frequently, the best sides have defeats and poor performances once in a while. Right now I’d say we are a two steps forward and one back team.
But we are in a much better place than we were this time last season, that’s undeniable. This time last year we were potentially looking at relegation. So there has been progress, just not enough progress.
We also need to bear in mind that you rarely build a genuine promotion squad in one window. For the last four/five seasons we have given managers one window, they recruit and then after performances drop off they get the sack and another manager comes in with a different style of play etc so continuity has been a major issue. We seem to have understood that at top brass level.
This window we need to add to what we have and weed out the average players and under-performers and replace them with the right players and not cheap loans and frees transfers. If we only add one or two players this window – say a creative number midfielder and maybe a goalscorer then I’ll be happy, as long as they are the right players. Too often we’ve recruited in numbers in the January window and taken semi-fit loanees and gone nowhere.
A squad capable of challenging for promotion costs money. Getting promotion costs even more money. The model for our SMT is to challenge for promotion using a squad largely made up of academy prospects. The problem is that a squad needs a number of experienced ‘old heads’. The most expensive part of building a squad tends to be identifying a goal-scorer capable of 20+ goals a season. We had one of those but the club sold him to a rival. I fear that Charlton have genuine promotion aspirations but not for a few seasons yet Meanwhile attendances will continue to decline, as they have done for a few years, and all the while the club lose supporters who were diehards and are not replaced by new, younger supporters who lose their connection to the club, preferring to watch PL teams rather than shite L1 football.
The team is poor, the manager is a half-wit. No wonder we’re struggling.
I understood from what Charlie Methven said that the emphasis would be on pruning the squad in this window rather than strengthening it. You are write to draw attention to the new rules from next year and one view is that will make us more reliant on Academy players who are not ready. But I need to find the time to read them carefully.
I meant ‘right’ not ‘write’ apologies.
The overview is here Wyn:
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/c36e4068113o#:~:text=Clubs%20in%20Leagues%20One%20and,any%20investment%20over%20ÂŁ500%2C000.
Wyn forget about academy players being ready we have half of the first team who are not ready or really up to the pace! 🙂
Adhadme, Potts, REG, Hylton, A.Campbell, Docherty,Gillesphey, Mannion, Berry, which incls Chucks who can only play max of about 20minutes, if not injured, plus Dixon who obviously is not ready yet, even though Jones has put in him the first team squad!
which of those in the list are not ready and which ones not up to the pace?
I think Berry and Docherty have improved of late
Let’s assume that the owners of this club actually want us to be financially sustainable, and that is the basis for success going forward, then I can get behind that. Obviously, that will come at the cost of spending some real money on signings, such as Birmingham have done, but we know that that doesn’t always end well(financially speaking), if you don’t have instant success. As a fan of Charlton, I would love nothing more than some quality reinforcements coming through the door! I think that we have to be realistic about what we have been through the last few years, and some of the shoddy owners we’ve had, and just maybe put some faith in the current owners and NJ, to get us heading in the right direction.