In the cold light of day, relegation still seems the most likely outcome to this season. After playing around with the BBC Championship predictor, the very earliest we could get out of the bottom three would be mid February, and that would need us to win our next five games on the trot, and for other results to go our way. I really can't see that, or anything near it, happening.
We have probably seen the last of Andy Gray in a Charlton shirt, which probably won't upset too many people, and as I wrote in a previous post, I believe that picking him was a habit that Charlton had to break. So, with Dickson getting close to a start, and Fleetwood recalled from Brighton, did we really need another striker? I am puzzled by the signing of Tresor Kandol, but pleased to see him nevertheless.
28-year-old striker, Kandol signed a new deal at Leeds in 2007, which will keep him with the Elland Road club until summer 2011, and last season he was part of the deadly duo, along with Jermaine Beckford, which terrorised third division defences all season. So why then, has he been on loan with Millwall for a large part of this season? He is still scoring goals at that level, having netted 8 in 16 games for the Spanners, and yet he has been loaned straight back out to us. Has he fallen out with the manager or something? No doubt somebody can tell me.
Andy Gray was almost certainly Pardew's worst signing and that is some accolade. McCleod and Varney, for example, may not have worked out, but at least you could see the logic; young players with potential. But Gray? For the cost of a Sky Sports Football Yearbook (the old Rothmans) Pardew could have seen that this 31 one year old (i.e. he has no potential) had, before this season, scored 78 goals in 342 league games, during what can only be described as a journeyman career. The most number of games he has played for one club is 77 at Bradford City where he scored 20 goals. His goalscoring record is flattered by the fact that he is a decent penalty taker. It wasn't necessary to see him play to realise that he was a stupid signing, especially when the club had Iwelumo, Varney. McLeod and Dickson available and given the silly price Charlton had to pay.
ReplyDeleteIn his entertaining book, Neil Warnock, a real journeyman footballer if ever there was one, explains that when he was a player he tended to have a couple of good games a season and that the clubs these were against then signed him at the end of the season when, inevitably, he was released by his current employer!! Warnock was obviously taking the p**s, but many a true word said in jest. Pardew really fell for the sucker punch when Gray scored twice at the Valley in December '07. Very unfair that the "rough justice" in the form of Gray's injury which has now followed has fallen on the much more likeable, but terminally unfortunate Phil Parkinson.