Monday Medicine - Part 17 of a Continuing Series

"General lethargy and waywardness" , "shockingly naive " and "the manner in which they crumbled was disturbing".

As we seem to spent most of our time trying different ways of cheering ourselves up especially on a Monday morning, my eye wandered to the state of our fellow strugglers in the Premiership. So you'll be gladdened, if that's the word, to read that the descriptions above not only referred to the Addicks but were also to be found in reports on West Ham and Fulham performances last weekend. In the Guardian, West Ham were termed lethargic and naive whilst losing 4-0 at Wigan while Fulham visibly crumbled losing by the same score at Anfield. And its more of the same in other papers, with the Independent telling us that Fulham's "strength, structure and spirit disintegrated".

Not surprisingly, these are the only teams below us on current form, West Ham with only 3 points from the last 18 while Fulham, like ourselves and Blackburn only have 4 to show from their last 6 games. West Ham's problems seem the greater though and stem from takeover talk affecting the players and injuries changing the lineup and don't look like improving with the visit of Manure to Upton Park on Saturday. They have now lost 5 out of the last 6 games, scoring but one goal in the process, and are also the only team to have suffered more Premiership defeats this season, 11, than the Addicks.

Blackburn are also struggling at the moment with another player sent-off on Saturday and they comfortably lead the Bad-Boys table with 4 reds and 36 yellows and more importantly have only won 1 of their last 9 games. And they too face a tough Christmas with Reading, Arsenal, Liverpool and Wigan next on their shopping-for-points list.

Elsewhere around the country there's a little bit of feative cheer as well. The Independent continues to do its best with little jokes and tell us that "The only threat posed by Middlesbrough's forwards on Saturday was to future Riverside gate receipts." But then reminds us that their forthcoming match on December 23rd against the Addicks is crucial to their season. That makes two of us..

And although the reports on Everton 2-0 defeat at Portsmouth remind us that we really should have beaten them two weeks ago it does at least tell us that other strikers apart from ours are also finding trouble scoring, "Andy Johnson's prolific spell is but a distant memory. He has not scored for 11 games."