Matt Holland, as articulate off the field as he is on it, seems a likely candidates to buck the trend. He smiles and shakes his head. “Look, I’m really sorry about this, but you’ll have to add me to your list. I’d love to know why and I’ve asked myself so many times. I’m afraid I just don’t know why it happened, but the real problem this year was that it came so scarily early. If we’d carried on like that, I think you know what would have happened at the end of the season.”
As ever, Charlton refused to panic. In fact the bald statistics did not paint the whole picture. “It looked worse than it was,” says Holland. “It was highlighted because we were so good at the start and then we fell away. Teams beneath us had collected points more evenly and there was no sense of slump or crisis for them.”
It was time to take stock. Few people at Charlton regard Alan Curbishley as laissez faire. He called a meeting of staff and players, where it was decided to switch from 4-5-1 to 4-4-2. “We went back to basics.” explains Holland. “We’ve become more dogged, we’ve sacrificed nice football to dig out results because results were needed by any means necessary. We’ve had a real work ethic over the past few weeks, we’ve closed people down more. Once you’re in a run where things aren’t going well, you go into the next game with confidence already draining. We had to overcome that.”
There was more, though. With West Ham’s visit looming, the players decided to do something themselves. Under the benign leadership of senior players Chris Powell and Luke Young, the squad held their own summit without the coaching staff. “Basically, we discussed what we were doing wrong,” says Holland. “We questioned each other about what we could do differently in training. We asked if we could work harder and if we could do better. It’s certainly been beneficial.”
West Ham were summarily dispatched, as Birmingham would be in the next game at The Valley last Saturday, both by 2-0. In between (a defeat at Goodison Park notwithstanding), Sheffield Wednesday were eased from the FA Cup. “I think,” says Holland, smiling, “we’re coming through the slump.”
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This lunchtime, though, Charlton will enter Stamford Bridge, the Theatre of Nightmares for visiting teams. Eleven have tried, but none has picked up a Premiership point there this season. One team, though, did lower Chelsea’s colours. It may have been in the Carling Cup, it may have been after penalties, but as Holland notes: “We knocked them out and that adds spice for the league game and encourages us to think we can get something. Although they’ d rested a couple of names that night, they still had a team full of internationals. It wasn’t as if we were playing a patched-up side. I’m relishing this game: you should always want to play against the best, and over the past year or so Chelsea have proved they’re that.”
This year’s Chelsea, however, are an especially tricky proposition. “It’s their speed of thought and positional sense,” says Holland. “The best players always find space, and if you’re given a marking job, sometimes it’s difficult because they position themselves in between players, in little holes.”
Even the most addicted Addick would struggle to argue that Charlton are Chelsea’s equal in any way, save spirit. Yet, were Athletic to travel in expectation of defeat, they might as well not travel at all. They will, naturally, be well prepared.
“Oh yes,” says Holland. “We know their players from individual video clips, so we’re well aware of their individual strengths and weaknesses. But we’re also aware of their team strengths and weaknesses and their set-pieces.
“After we work on what we know in training, the manager will say, ‘Well, we feel we can do this against them’, or ‘This is one of their strong points, how do we deal with it?’ But I must stress, that’s not just for Chelsea, we’ll prepare in exactly the same way for Leyton Orient in the FA Cup next weekend.”
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Once the game begins, though, Charlton should not be fazed. “Right now, if you ask me if we’d like a draw at Stamford Bridge, I’d say I’d probably be very happy with that,” admits Holland. “First and foremost we have to be difficult to beat. The ideal scenario is not to concede early. If you do, you’re chasing the game. That opens you up and makes it difficult, so people such as myself have to push further forwards than we might wish. But you also have to believe you can win and have an attacking outlook. You’re not going to go there and win without it, are you?” If Charlton do return to SE7 with pelf, it will be the highlight of Holland’s grim year, which began to unravel towards the end of last season when his wife, Paula, was involved in a horrific riding accident at the family home near Colchester.
“She has got a plate and three metal pins in her leg now,” he explains with a shudder. “She smashed her knee joint into six pieces. It was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. She’s fine now, except when she kneels on it. Mind you, she was back riding again before she could even walk properly.”
This season has been a feast of injury-ravaged misery after a remarkably consistent career in which Holland had previously missed only 11 league games in 10 seasons for Bournemouth, Ipswich and Charlton, something he attributes to sheer hunger. “I’ve been hungry since I left West Ham for Bournemouth in 1994 as a 20-year-old. I’d been pampered at West Ham. I loved being at Bournemouth, but you’d have to wash your own kit. There was no food on the coach after away games, so they’d give us £2 to spend at the garage. That made me want to go back up the leagues, and I appreciate the step up.”
He injured his shoulder in a pre-season friendly at Watford, before suffering concussion while playing for Ireland and then bruising ribs in a comeback reserve game. Finally having recovered, for the first time since joining Bournemouth, he found himself out of the first-team picture.
“That was so difficult to take. Everyone should want to be in the first XI every week. If not, they’re perhaps in the wrong trade. I’m the sort of person who gives my all week-in, week-out, whether it’s training or matches, but I was playing catch-up fitness-wise and it was difficult to get back in the side when everything was going so well at the club.”
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Inevitably, Holland is too self-effacing to ascribe Charlton’s revival to his return to peak fitness and the first team. He is, though, delighted to conclude by contemplating Stamford Bridge one last time.
“The pressure’s off,” he says. “People don’t expect us to get anything, but we’ve hopefully turned the corner after our bad run. If we do get something, it could make our season.”