Who'd have thought it? Not me that's for sure! Two games in and maximum points.
I have previously alluded to the 52 mark being the points haul required to keep us in the division, and rather fastidiously worked through the fixture list predicting where we could genuinely and historically hope to pick points up, bringing me to conclude we'd finish on 51, hopefully just enough to avoid the drop.
I'd had us gaining just the one point at home to Stoke out of our opening two weekends. How wrong was I? Thankfully completely wrong. So we are currently tracking five points ahead of my projections already.
What struck me whilst at The Valley for our opening home game, was how improved and more self assured as a side we looked. The new signings, even those that have been with the rest of the squad for just a few days, settling in well. It took a while last season for Bowyers hastily assembled last minute squad to really gel and get that momentum going that saw us eventual play off winners. I'm sure that the new incoming squad members still need time to fully assimilate themselves into the Bowyer way of doing things. Once they have, the mind boggles at what we could possibly achieve based on what we've seen so far.
Feels a bit weird being so positive in a post what with experience over recent years. Not just about how we've started the season, but also about the transfer window itself.
Following on from Aribo's departure north of the border we saw Dijksteel go to Middlesborough. A pretty negative occurrence, and does leave right back as potentially the weakest link in the first team with a relentless schedule of games and no natural cover. However the continued rejections of bids from Brentford, Boro (again) and apparently Bristol City for big sums of money for the services of Lyle Taylor were, to put it simply, most out of character for our current owner.
We have then gone on to make some quality loan signings, by no means are any of these guys here to make up the numbers and warm the bench. There is real competition throughout the squad for starting places. We even had a late big money (well big for Duchalet) bid turned down for Peterborough's Ivan Toney. The word from Bowyer was that the aim was that Toney would play alongside Taylor and wasn't planned to be a direct replacement for the Charlton idol. This would have been funded by the money received for Dijksteele.
Strange days indeed down in SE7.
As for the game itself (apologies if this is your first time reading this blog, I don't do blow for blow match reports, there are others much better at delivering that type of information), Once we'd got through the first twenty minutes or so of Stoke probing and testing us out we grew into the game. Taylor, whose attitude following on from what must have been quite a difficult and frustrating week for him, showed why he is lorded so much by the Addicks faithful. 100 per cent commitment to the cause and another tireless performance capped off with scoring our opening goal and setting up our third.
After the disappointment of conceding an equaliser, once the second half went underway we slowly worked ourselves into a position where we began to dominate the game. When possession was lost the team to a man worked hard to regain it. And once Aneke scored his debut goal there only looked like being one winner.
A marvellous performance was capped off for Gallagher when he finished from Taylor's lay off to see us out 3-1 winners. No weak links to report at this point.
Final word to the twelfth man. All 15 odd thousand of them. If you compare the atmosphere to that of the Pre Bowyer days under Duchalet, it is completely different. Momentum carried through from last seasons run in combined with the players attitude and style of football we are getting to watch make The Valley an exciting place to be right now.
Lets see where we can all take this season now.
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