Leeds lead the way over Charlton

13 April 2012

Let us give thanks for tales of ordinary madness, for the familiar sight of footballers acting hard done by after fouls, both real and imagined, for debates about penalties and the merits of one goal against another.

I cannot quite say why it was patently the only course to postpone the Ryder Cup, and yet it was right in some other way to proceed with a weekend?s domestic sport. Something to do with international flags, perhaps.

It is not sensible at present to expect anyone to compete normally in any match featuring the United States against anybody. That is not allowing terrorists to ?win?, it is simply implementing what is reasonable.

Yet at the end of a week?s insanity, perhaps it was not so great a crime to feel the need to reach out towards some reassuring framework of the mundane. Thank your god, whoever that may be, for providing the crutch of routine to lean on. For some that meant shopping, or gardening, or the cinema. For others it meant football. It was not, as some portentous fools suggested, that football could ?help heal?. It was just that football was there, that was all, in all its usual stupid self-indulgence.

It was even in some way comforting that football chose not to devise some temporarily nice version of itself for the weekend. Yesterday at The Valley that may have been due in part to the fact that the visitors were Leeds, who can safely be relied upon to be fully committed under any circumstances. At least Messrs Mills and Bowyer were a tad less committed than when they dropped in at Highbury last month.

Yesterday that role fell to Charlton captain Graham Stuart, hitherto unrenowned for his hatchet man qualities. Ian Harte crumpled to the ground in apparent agony after Stuart?s two-footed tackle, yet once the red card was brandished Harte was up and about in no time. No doubt, as David O?Leary insisted, this was thanks to the skill of the Leeds physio.

Nonetheless, Stuart?s dismissal before half-time made defeat a done deal, for by then the home side were already trailing. Mark Fish should have been untroubled by Harte?s through ball. Instead, he failed to deal with it, permitting Robbie Keane to capitalise. With Stuart off, Leeds created truckloads of chances and wasted them all. No wonder manager O?Leary complained his men should have scored more.

Their second goal had nothing to do with the opposition being down to 10 men, such was the quality of ex-Addick Danny Mills?s 25-yard left-footed blast. Charlton toiled earnestly but in vain. Last season?s ninth place owed much to home form. The new one has so far yielded a single home point from a potential nine and the minimum target of 40 points sought by manager Alan Curbishley for safety already seems distant.

Stuart faces a three-match ban and add to the problems Curbishley is suffering with five key players already ruled out with injury. But Charlton defender Chris Powell said: ?It is too early in the season for anyone to be despondent. Stuart feels he has let us down but we do not blame him for what happened. There is no way he would go into any tackle intending to hurt someone.

?It seems like there has been one thing after another at the start of this season and this is just another blow we have to try to recover from.

?We have not won at home yet but there are lots more games at The Valley to come and who is to say we will lose any more.? At leat Curbishley will be encouraged that Mark Kinsella played his first 25 minutes of the season following a hernia operation and came through unscathed.

By contrast, Leeds sprang to the top of the table with naked intent. That said, Keane managed to get himself booked for one of those penalty appeals which might have gone either way but was denied in this case thanks to his artistic plunge to the turf.

O?Leary managed to have a whole cakeshop and eat it by first describing Keane?s booking as ?scandalous? and then delivering a terribly sincere condemnation of football?s endemic amateur dramatics. In other words, it was two-faced business as usual and for once it quite warmed the heart.

Later, at home, I watched one of those detective dramas in which improbable numbers of village folk are routinely murdered every week. It didn?t feel wrong to enjoy it. Last week the BBC turned to the harmless Only Fools And Horses to see the nation through an impossible evening.

Was it wrong to show something funny, a sin for us to laugh? Should it, and we, have limited ourselves to the unremitting horror, in grateful penance for the fact that most of us were not forced to utter the worst prayer of all: dear God, let it be someone else?s loved one who has suffered, rather than mine.

Sport, and football especially, did all right this weekend. Football often has cause to be ashamed of itself but this was not one of those times.

I remember especially the three small boys I saw walking down Charlton Lane towards The Valley. Their dads were ahead of them, requiring nobody to tell them of their great good fortune in so ordinary a joy as taking their sons to the match. The boys were playing paper, scissors, stone, giggling furiously at the outcome of every joust. If only all conflicts could be resolved with such finite simplicity.

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Charlton Athletic

David Jones (Footballer)

English Football League 1

Leeds

Leeds lead the way over Charlton

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