There was a surreal atmosphere around The Valley on Saturday. Though there were eight games still to play, everyone seemed to know what was going to happen.
For sure nothing is mathematically certain, and if team A does this, and team B does that, it could all change.
But realistically, we are going to play Portsmouth in the play-offs, with the first leg being staged at The Valley.
The entire top six look certain, with the only real question seeming to be whether Barnsley or Sunderland will go up automatically.
Bradford seemed to have accepted that they are going down. Despite the Addicks only holding a slender advantage, there was no frantic end to the game on Saturday. There was no urgency to the visitors’ play.
But there were some nuggets to enjoy. The increasingly impressive Joe Aribo produced a bit of magic to set up Lyle Taylor’s winning goal.
Here are Lee Bowyer’s thoughts:
“The two of them (Aribo and Taylor) combined well. Lyle had another chance just after his goal, Joe put it through to Jonny (Williams), Jonny cut it back to Lyle.
“It wasn’t much different really but he hit it over. I thought in the final third we weren’t too bad and our play to get there was decent.
“We had to be patient because of the way they set up. Lyle’s got another goal and the most important thing is the three points.
“We got a clean sheet which is good, so it’s two clean sheets on the spin.”
Taylor should certainly have buried the chance Bowyer was referring to. But even with just a one goal advantage, Charlton never seemed in any danger of dropping points from the game.
Despite his team’s good form, Bowyer has more-or-less ruled out the possibility of a top two finish:
“The likelihood of the pair of them (Barnsley and Sunderland) messing up is slim.
“But if Barnsley keep dropping the odd point here and there, and Sunderland have got to play a lot of games and they’ve got to win them all, then you never know.
“We’ve got to be there just in case it happens but we concentrate now on Plymouth.”
Even if that scenario did happen, the Addicks would still have to overhaul Portsmouth. Another bright spot for the boss was the steady improvement shown by striker, Igor Vetokele:
“That’s the best Igor has played since I’ve been in charge. He looked sharper, he looked fitter. It didn’t quite fall for him today but he looked very good today.”
A fully fit and firing Vetokele would be a real fillip for the team going into the play-offs.
TAGS: Charlton Athletic