Charlton head to Cheltenham on Saturday (5.30pm kick off) with Nathan Jones admitting that it has been "a disjointed pre-season" and that the game will be "our final pre-season even though it is a cup game."
His team's pre-season performances have not exactly been inspiring so far and failure to beat League 2 opposition will hardly create much confidence for the arrival of Derby County on Saturday week. However, we travel in hope.
Cheltenham had a miserable time last season. They lost eight of their first ten games and were in 24th place when Steve Cotterill returned as manager after a twenty three year absence. He did enough to get them out of the bottom four by December and, although they lost their final three games with an aggregate of 2-11, they finished the season safely in 18th place.
Our record against them is far from inspiring. We have only played them seven times and it took us six games to beat them despite the huge difference in size of club. The first encounter was a League Cup game at Whaddon Road in 2016 which the home team won 1-0. We then found ourselves playing them in League One and they came to The Valley in August 2021 and beat us 2-1. We managed to scrape a draw at the Jonny-Rocks Stadium in the return fixture the following January with a 94th minute Chuks Aneke equaliser.
The following season was no better. We celebrated thirty years back at The Valley in December 2022 by succumbing 0-1 to a late Alfie May goal and in the final game of the season we allowed him to score in the 84th minute to secure a 2-2 draw at what was now the Completely-Suzuki Stadium.
It was only in the 23/24 season that we seemed to get the measure of them and the main difference would seem to be that May was now playing for us. He scored two penalties in our 2-1 home win in November and he was back on the scoresheet along with Daniel Kanu and Tyreeq Bakinson when we triumphed 3-1 in March at what was still the Completely-Suzuki Stadium.
It will be the EV Charger Points Stadium that we visit on Saturday and supporters who watched the sluggish 0-3 defeat by Reading last weekend will be hoping that Nathan Jones has managed to instil a bit of spark into the squad. He has stressed that the squad are not undervaluing the match:
“It’s our first competitive game, we’re treating it that way, it’s a really important competition,” he said. “It’s a nice way to do it actually, we did it after COVID. The cup game came the week before the season – it’s a really good way of doing it. We’ll treat it as our first competitive game and prepare accordingly. We want to win the game, we always learn from outcomes and performances. We don’t want to be a headline, we want to win the game.”