Championship / Ralph Ellis / 11 December 2008 /

Be careful what you wish for, says Ralph Ellis. Betting.betfair.com looks back at the days when Charlton's mid-table position in the Premiership wasn't deemed good enough and the current mess they're in at the moment.

There's an old saying about being careful what you wish for. It's a pity nobody at Charlton took any notice of it when they were booing Alan Curbishley little more than two years ago.

The phone-in grumblers who were moaning that Curbs had "taken the club as far as he could" got their wish when he finally walked away in the summer of 2006. And haven't they done well in finding somebody to "take them to the next level" and "get away from mid table mediocrity" ever since? By this time next year they could be very glad to be in mid table in League One.

Charlton's is the classic story of a club built on the management skill of one man but the directors failing to understand his value. Ultimately chairman Richard Murray allowed Curbishley to walk away under pressure from the fans, and then made a complete cods of handling what happened next. A club who had one manager for 15 years are now hunting for their fifth in as many months.

So it's a bit rich to learn this morning that Murray flipped after Tuesday night's 2-1 home defeat by Coventry and stormed into the dressing room to give the players a rocket. The Sun's Paul Jiggins, whose contacts on this story can be relied upon because his journalistic roots are in South East London local papers, reveals the extent of Murray's anger this morning.

He quotes an insider revealing: "The chairman came in and told us we were a disgrace and we should all be ashamed after that performance. It was quite a shock for the players and coaching staff because none of us had ever seen him that angry before."

If anybody needs to be labelled a disgrace it's a chairman who took Iain Dowie from Crystal Palace in highly controversial circumstances and then sacked him after 12 games, handed replacement Les Reed a long contract then blew him out too at Christmas time, and has now got rid of Alan Pardew without a clue about what to do next. Meanwhile the parachute payments from the Premier League are flapping away into the breeze with no strings on, and a plan to sell the club to wealthy men from the Middle East has turned out to be no more than a mirage too.

Charlton are a club in freefall, yet incredibly they are still odds against to be relegated today. You can get [2.14] for them to go down, which is amazing when they are five points from safety, don't have a manager, and any movement of players in January is likely to see the few decent ones sold rather than anybody coming in.

There were five loan players in the team against Coventry - will any of them really care if the club goes down? Their reaction to a rant from the chairman will be a good giggle rather than to roll their sleeves up and have a go. Remarkably Charlton are [2.5] favourites to beat Derby at home in their next game. People are still betting on their name rather than the sad reality that the home so wonderfully rebuilt by the Alan Curbishley era is turning back into the Valley of Doom.

Five things you might not know about The Valley

1.The ground was originally built in 1919 by volunteer supporters in an abandoned sand and chalk pit, flattening a pitch in the middle and building the earth removed up the sides

2.The first game was played with no seats or terraces but the crowd stood on the earth mounds behind a rope

3.The record crowd was 75,031 for an FA Cup tie against Aston Villa in 1938. For years The Valley was the biggest league football ground in London

4.When Charlton went bust in 1985 the club moved out. When the local council turned down a planning application to rebuild the stadium the supporters trust former their own political party and won all but two seats on the revised planning committee

5.The capacity now is 27,111 - plans to increase it to 40,000 have been mothballed since relegation

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