Newcastle 4 Charlton 2 - Well, crap forecast or what. If I wasn´t so pessimistic about us at the moment I´d simply blame it on my fingers.

I really should have foreseen that all my boring ranting about the milestone of our 1000 top flight game pushing us into the elite of English football would ultimately end in only one result for our boys. 0-0.

Pessimistic or not I have noticed a rather pleasing change to our play. As we all know there are morning people and night people. Some get up at the crack of dawn and surge into action catching some early worms or whatever. Others, like myself, find the mornings a slow drag of nothingness and can only embrace life when the day is really getting started in the late afternoon. Much like the slow recovery the following day after a evening session with your mates.

Charlton, have become late starters, at least in Premiership games. An slow, alright, appalling, first half followed by a greatly improved second half. We finished well for example against Man. City and getting those two goals has, it seems, lifted everyone. And now we´ve held the Magpies at half-time and according to all the reports that I´ve read, got stronger towards the end.

And after reading about the Barcelona comments, I have to say that having seen Barcelona more times that most back home, they also always have, well not an appalling first-half, but they do start slowly in both Champions and League. They like to take their time, and their pace and the chances they create do progressively get more as the game progresses. There, I´ve put the thing neatly into a nutshell, we´re almost in the same league as Barcelona.

Several people on the Charlton sites have already said how impressed they were by Barcelona and I have to add that they are like that most weeks. A great team to watch and I´m afraid rolling antics are part of play over here especially from the south Americans.