Saturday, July 31 2010

Inside View with Charlton Athletic midfielder Scott Wagstaff

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In football, some of the most important things are often the most obvious, and the lesson we must learn from recent matches is not to concede the first goal.

We didn’t need Sky Sports to remind us on Monday night that by going 1-0 down to Bristol Rovers, we had conceded the first goal for the fifth match in a row.

It’s not good enough and we’re making things hard for ourselves. Not only does it give us a mountain to climb, going one behind seems to be making us rush things a bit and stopping us from playing our natural game.

We had our best spell at The Memorial Stadium when we were 2-0 down and playing with just 10 men after David Mooney was injured after we had used all three substitutes. That was with just 10 minutes to go and that’s obviously not good enough.

We’ve not been at our best recently and we missed the chance to reduce the gap to Leeds and Norwich but we’ve now got two home games in four days and we need to be focusing on taking all three points against Yeovil and Brighton.

One player who clearly won’t be involved is Grant Basey after he suffered a nasty injury on Monday night but at least the scans gave us some good news.

Thankfully, Basey’s ankle isn’t broken. He won’t be out for as long as he could have been and it was good to see him getting around on crutches this week.

Perhaps there is more good news in the fact that we won’t be on Sky again this season.

I’m told that the maximum number of times the matches of League 1 clubs can be televised in a season is three and the defeat to Bristol Rovers was our third game.

Given that we’ve lost two of our three live-on-Sky league games and also the two cup games when we were shown on Sky and ITV, I can’t be the only one not unhappy that that’s the last we will see of the cameras.

There is a lot of talk about Norwich and Leeds having promotion in their grasp now but the race is not over.

We still have to play both clubs, plus Colchester, at The Valley near the end of the season and the important thing is to make sure we can make those matches count.

We’ve got to try and catch up with those teams ahead of us but we’ll do that by concentrating on ourselves and picking up as many points as we can in every game.

Thursday, February 18 2010