The Psychology of Disappointment

Unlike mid-week games, at least we've had one day to get over the frustrations and concentrate instead on our creativeness and the number of chances we had on Saturday.

But it was all rather like that past nightmare of determined efforts to get into that exciting-looking party, you spent nearly an hour-and-a-half knocking on the door before at last your bangs are heard and its opened only to discover that the parties being held by your ex-wife and her new man. And you're lucky to escape further embarrassment when she fails to recognize you due to your exhausted appearance and you can make your escape clutching a meagre can of beer that you managed to snatch.

The reality in the telegraph however chooses to focus not on our good play but instead on the polyglot combination of Barnsley although, despite the wealth of exciting foreigners, highlights the games star performer, Andy Reid. Labelled 'conductor' as he "orchestrated" our efforts, the overall term applied by the papers to the teams efforts appears to be "wastefulness".

There's no player scores from Alyson Rudd at the posh murdoch but he obviously enjoyed some post-match entertaining and tells us that our Reidie has had "a stint at an Italian health farm" to improve fitness and to ensure a regular supply of the black stuff, has just opened a bar in Nottingham called "the runner". Strange name Andy.

And at our friends over at the guardian there's a straight comparison between the Ambrose miss and the late chance spawned by Barnsley.

There's obviously the best report of them all laying waiting for us in the independent, but all I get at the moment is an annoying "The page cannot be displayed". So much for modern technology.

And as an aside, and thinking about servers being down, anyone wanting a quick relief from fizzy football should talk a look at this amusing resubtitled parody of something called isketch. As the video's set in a bunker in 1945 and is in German, it carries subtitles so if you're at work you can turn down the volume.

Anyway, back to the football with the match stats talking of 14 Addicks corners and 16 attempts at goal - our highest total of the season - , although only 6 were on target apparently and although its disappointing to create so much and still not win it has to be remembered that this was the third game running when we have conceded a late goal with all three coming in the last 6 minutes of the games.

And if Pardew wants to try to understand the psychology of his team, perhaps he should ponder on why we are the best team in the League when at a losing position at half-time have come back and won 4 points from that situation, obviously due to his half-time admonishments, whereas at the other extreme we are 21st in a table of 'Points Lost' when ahead.

Yes, once ahead in a game by scoring the first goal, as we often do, we have then failed to kill off the opposition 4 times and conceded goals leading to 9 points lost as experienced against the likes of Scunthorpe, Stoke, Coventry and now Barnsley. And as a consequence of points dropped against these four sides our record in games played against top half teams in the fizzy Table is 15th while against bottom half teams we are 1st in a table with 5 wins and a draw in 6 games.

However, as our big apple correspondent has recently pointed out, due to our summer spending on strikers we have scored at least once in every game played this season and have scored first in 11 of them, so Pards, how can we complain. We're in the top two with 19 points and all we can hope is that we continue in the same way, because none of us wants to read, or even write, articles in May next year entitled "The Psychology of the Playoffs".