A good hiding never hurt anyone......

When I was younger, so much younger than today, my Grand-dad, a pround and upstanding old man that had fought in both world wars and took no crap from anyone, often used what I thought was a rather strange and contradictory idiom...

'A good hiding never hurt anyone.'

Seeing as most of my scholarly exploits was spent trolling the concrete jungle cunningly disguised as Bloomfield Secondary Modern School, where it appeared my main daily task was to avoid being murdered by most of the neanderthal war spoilt teachers, it seemed a rather strange thing to say......

I could quite rightly swear upon oath that it did indeed hurt and I had more than one bloodied nostril and wheal lined arse along the years to prove it....

It wasn't until some years later I think I knew what he meant......... if you are going to get a beating, as long as it's for a good reason and you can learn from it, then it can indeed be beneficial.

Take the game against Tottenham on Saturday, we appeared to play quite well for the first thirty minutes then they went and scored, we collapsed, big style too, not even a close run thing, a five goal bloody good hiding......OUCH!!!

What was that all about then? According to Reed's new psychiatric mind set we were supposed to playing at home, we should never have lost by such a score..... but we did......

At the time it hurt, hurt like hell, but over the next few days we have all spent some time licking our wounds and examining where and what caused the annihilation by the spuds.

Whatever Reed and his boys come up with for excuses they have got to learn from it and learn fast. No more trick cyclist 'home game' clap trap, no more charging into the valley of death in the desparate hope we can snatch the elusive first away win in over a year, no more inspired substitions that open us up like a can of soggy worms, no more of anything Tottenham in fact....

Mr Reed, you need to design a game plan, a defensive game plan, stick to it, get everybody playing to the same gameplan and, this is the hard bit, work bloody hard to achieve it!

Need any inspiration? Look at some of the videos of some of the old 0-0 draws Charlton fought out over the years, not pretty viewing I grant you but in times like these who needs pretty?

Bottom line, if getting a good hiding from the spuds means we learn more than we actually got out of the encounter then so be it, but to let it happen again is just not on, old boy.