The real story about Jimmy Seed

Jimmy Seed was an outstanding manager, so what was the story behind his departure from the club?  https://retrocharlton.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-departure-of-jimmy-seed.html

Wallowing in past glories

Not everything was glorious in the past as this example of poor design from a 1978 programme shows

Katrien Meire has said that we mustn't wallow in the past glories of the club, but to me they are very real and a welcome distraction from present woes. It was therefore a great pleasure to make my first visit to the Charlton Athletic museum last night. There is already an excellent display and more donations are coming in all the time (I took the framed set of historic items we received when we sponsored the match against Bradford City in 2000). The museum does need more money for display cases and I am taking out membership.

A chance to tour the museum was followed by two talks. The first provided video and audio of what was then believed to be the last match at The Valley. There was a lot of hoof and hope in the game but we did beat Stoke 2-0. The second, by Steve Sutherland, looked at the Crystal Palace years and had many fascinating anecdotes about the personalities of that era. Clubcall was then the main way of communicating with fans and in order to provide material in the summer months it ran an interview with the laundry lady who discussed her favourite detergent!

Steve's basic theme was that the Selhurst Park years tended to be air brushed out of our history. However, if people hadn't kept things going through that dark period, there wouldn't have been a club to come back to The Valley.

He struck a chord when he said that his most important relationship with is father was football. My life diverged sharply from what my father experienced, and I am sure that I was a puzzle to him, but we continued to share a love of football and Charlton in particular.

Ben Hayes of the museum is featured in an article in the latest Four Four Two. He stumbled across a neglected cinema newsreel clip entitled Charlton Match Filmed to Aid Training. Numerous cameras were set up around The Valley for a game against Burnley in 1947. The players then went to a local cinema to watch the game. It was probably the first time they had seen themselves play. There's a great posed clip of Jimmy Seed looking over the stills, none of which the supporters ever got to see. 'It must have been used as a coaching tool - and a PR gimmick,' said Hayes.

You can se the film here (don't be put off by the fact that it starts with a clip of Princess Elizabeth and Phil the Greek: Movietone film Charlton

Apparently, Jimmy Seed's grandson is about to retire and may address a future meeting at the museum. How time flies.

BTW, don't try to visit the museum today as the lift is broken.

Those were the days

I was sorting through some old programmes recently and I came across the Addicks Premiership Diary report of our match against Blackburn Rovers in February 2004. This was some game, attended by basketball fans from Pittsburgh.

'A professional magician was part of the pre-match hospitality package on February 21st, but early leavers from Charlton's game against Blackburn missed the magic. Some had already left before Blackburn keeper Brad Friedel audaciously equalised for the visiting northerners, but in the last gasp of the game Claus Jensen made it 3-2 for the Addicks.'

'Charlton looked as if they had been coasting towards victory after two goals in the first half from Carlton Cole and Jason Euell put them 2-0 ahead, but an error by Kishishev let them back in the game. The substitution of Carlton Cole by match winner Kishishev was highly controversial and had the Bloke Behind Me screaming, "Why did you sign the contract Curbishley?"'

In those days we still had dog reporters and 'It was an exciting Valley debut for novice match analyst Monty Martin. The excitable spaniel was over the moon when he discovered the role would form part of his weekend as a house guest. He selected Paolo di Canio as the first recipient of the coveted Silver Bone from him. Monty commented, "I have heard dogs in Didcot discussing di Canio. But I was not prepared for his magic skills, his commitment and his enthusiasm. His feints and his flicks, especially one back flick, had me entranced."'

The Hiss of the Match went to Blackburn manager Graham Souness. Having thrown his chewing gum wrapper on the ground, he was challenged by an Addick to pick it up, but replied, 'This place is a carsey.'

After Jensen's clever lob secured the three points, the Addickted went berserk. Di Canio jumped on to a police officer and embraced him. Little did he know that moments afterwards an excitable spaniel would be jumping over him with a silver bone in his mouth.

Not long afterwards, I had to go into hospital for an unexpected operation. Curbs sent me a signed get well card with a picture of both us on the front. Some friends had organised it, but it was still a nice gesture and reflective of the spirit of the club in those days.

Going back even further in time, Jimmy Seed gives a tactics talk with his magic magnetic board: Jimmy Seed

The team of the late 1940s and early 1950s

Here is a second extract from the autobiography of novelist and one time Charlton fan David Lodge, A Good Time To Be Born.

In 1946, Charlton got to the FA Cup Final at Wembley, only to lose ... I listened to the BBC radio commentary and was inconsolable at the end. Jimmy Seed, Charlton's brilliant manager, who had steered them from the Third to First Division in two seasons before the war, vowed they would be back at Wembley next year - and by golly they were, just like a story in one of the boys' magazines, Hotspur,Wizard and Champion.

This time they won! The FA Cup, now overshadowed by European competitions, was then the Holy Grail of English professional football, and I felt privileged to be a supporter of so successful a club.

After that peak a slow decline in Charlton's fortunes began, but I remained loyal. I no longer needed to be escorted to matches by Dad, but travelled to The Valley with a couple of friends in Millmark Grove [Brockley]. My heroes in the team were the goalkeeper Sam Bartram and the centre forward Charlie Vaughan. Bartram was a genial and virile figure, with a grin like Burt Lancaster's and dense auburn hair set off by the green woollen jerseys goalkeepers invariably wore in those days.

Jimmy Seed defined a good goalkeeper concisely as 'a gymnast with ball skills', and Sam Bartram was certainly that, but he also showed, in the instinct of his flying saves, an instinct for what transforms a game into a spectacle.

Charlie Vaughan had been a star of the amateur club Sutton United before he joined Charlton, and something of the gentlemanly amateur lingered in his deportment at The Valley. I don't remember him ever committing a violent foul or protesting against a referee's decision, and when caught offside in possession of the ball, he would place it for the opposition's free kick before retreating. His posture was straight-backed, his arms usually held close to his sides as if to emphasise that football was played with the feet, and he would have been appalled by the holding and shirt grabbing that is now tolerated in professional football. He was a good role model for a football mad boy.

After he moved to Birmingham, Lodge let his Addicktion slide. 'At some point in the 1970s, I went with a friend to watch a professional football match for the first time in at least twenty years, at the Birmingham City ground, and revived the experience of entering the unappealing back parts of a football stadium, squeezing through its stiff turnstiles, mounting a dark, dank concrete staircase, and the thrill of emerging at last into an arena packed with humming, expectant humanity, looking down on a vividly green rectangle of grass on which a contest would shortly be enacted by twenty-two brightly club athletes.'

Fortunately, he did not become a Blew and he sets out a very cogent case against egg chasing.

Curbs out after all

Alan Curbishley's return to football after a six year absence has been a brief one. Earlier reports that he had retained his role as technical director at Fulham were premature and it appears that he is to be sacked after all: Curbs

There has been some discussion on the boards of whether we would want Curbs back at Charlton. I think that he stands alongside Jimmy Seed and Lennie Lawrence as managers who have made a real positive difference to the club. However, that doesn't mean I want him back, even as director of football or in the rather nebulous technical director role he had at Fulham. Supposedly he was responsible for the defence, which doesn't bode well.

According to The Times this morning Curbs was miffed because he thought that his role was independent of the coaching staff which again raises the question of what he was actually doing. Was he responsible for the floodlights?

The difficulty is that Chris Powell's faults are very much those of Curbs such as leaving substitutions too late. Not surprising, really.

Red wine duel agreed with Blackheath Addick

The stand at Charlton was too small to maximise revenue, even though it isn't full in this photo. Pitch doesn't look too bad though as it seems to be winter.

The Blackheath Addick and I have agreed to settle our differences over the takeover with a bet in good red wine. If Charlton are in a higher position in the Championship this time next year, he will treat me to a good bottle of French red wine. If we go down this year but come straight back again we will call it a draw. If by the end of next season we are still in League 1, I will buy him a good bottle of red wine from Chile and we will both drink another bottle together to drown our sorrows.

I think that really we have different visions of the club. When I started watching Charlton in 1953, there was still the potential for the Addicks to be a really top club, although even by then the best years were behind us. Arguably our very best years were just before World War Two when we came very close to winning the top division title. However, our momentum was then disrupted by Mr A Hitler. After the war, we won the FA Cup which was a bigger deal then than it is now. Unfortunately, the owners at the time, the Glikstens, failed to invest in the ground when we were attracting big crowds (the one stand always sold out and the price ratio there to the cheapest standing was 7.5:1). We were also something of a selling club, although the South African imports helped a lot, as did the genius of Jimmy Seed.

Those days can never come back and I think that the Championship is our natural level, much as I enjoyed the Premiership years. However, I would still like to see us challenging for promotion for the top flight rather than fighting relegation. If it came to a choice, Blackheath would prefer an 'authentic' Charlton among the cloggers and hoofers of League 2 rather than one at a higher level which the fans could not identify with.

I am going to go to the CASC Trust meeting in London tomorrow to see what I can learn about the takeover, although there may be limits on what I can report back. How forthcoming Richard Murray will be remains to be seen. I did attend one meeting he held some years ago with bloggers, although the main purpose of that appeared to be to defend the board's handling of Dowie's infamous 'move north'.

While the Slater/Jiminez regime was still in place, I met up over the summer with an old Charlton hand who knows and understands more about the club than I do. I asked, 'Where does Murray fit into all this?' His answer was 'Good question' and it probably still is. Murray was originally a Wolves fan, but he has been associated with the club for 20 years and provided a lot of funding. He has, however, made some quite serious mistakes, particularly over personnel, although we all do.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the old regime ran out of Cash last summer, hence the lack of a needed strengthening of the squad. The rumour mill suggested that by the beginning of this year we were encountering serious cash flow challenges. The club had to be sold otherwise we might have been in a very serious situation. But, as Michael Slater has said, there weren't that many serious buyers in a queue to buy Charlton, rather a lot of time wasters. In fact, many of the stories going around were a load of old Koc. We weren't really in a position to say 'Thanks, but no thanks' to Roland, even though the Chicago Addick has raised new concerns in his latest posting.

One time Voice of the Valley contributor Olafur Johansson is ready to welcome blogger Blackheath Addick and his partner to Iceland

In the meantime the Blackheath Addick is setting off for a holiday in Iceland with his charming French partner Suzanne. I have told self-proclaimed No.1 Iceland Addick Olafur Johansson to look out for them and he promises as warm a welcome as is possible in Iceland in February.

Greatest Charlton XI

The latest issue of Four Four Two includes a special supplement on the Perfect XI for each Football League club. The line up for Charlton is:

Goalkeeper: Sam Bartram
Defenders: John Humphrey, Richard Rufus, Chris Powell
Midfielders: Robert Lee, Mark Kinsella, Scott Parker, Allan Simonsen, Eddie Firmani
Forwards: Clive Mendonca, Derek Hales
Manager: Jimmy Seed

There are one or two names from the 1950s that might have been added and there is no one from the team that won the FA Cup. Simonsen was brilliant, but his stay was a relatively short one. And is Chris Powell's inclusion a nod to his present status as manager?

Who would you include?

Having a pop at Charlton

It's all warming up (well, not literally) ahead of the paint drying cup at Brentford. Their relatively new chief executive has decided to give a world exclusive to a Hounslow paper, arguing that Brentford spend wisely (i.e., parsimoniously) while clubs like Charlton have been splashing the cash to no good effect: Bees

I haven't been aware that we had been splashing the cash, but perhaps I have missed something. The amount we spent on Benson is hardly mega bucks. And the return is not that bad given that we are currently 2nd in the table.

Curiously The Football League Paper also had a pop at us on Sunday. It's quite a good paper like its NLP sister, although I suspect it's written by freelances who get paid 5p a word.

However, they claimed that prior to the takeover offer, it was doubtful if we would survive the season. This strikes me as OTT. We could have gone into administration, but then an administrator would run the club as a going concern and there would have been bidders for a fire sale.

Obviously it's not the route one would want to follow and it won't be unless there are some nasty surprises in the books. We do owe £7m but that money does not have to be paid off until we return to the Premiership which at a minimum is two seasons away if we repeat Jimmy Seed's effort which so thrilled my father. My guess would be that if we do manage to get back it won't be for five years or so. I would be happy to be in the Championship for a few years while we re-build.