When Charlton visits Bristol Rovers on Friday night, Michael Appleton hopes for much more from his team.
The home team enters the match fresh off a thrilling 2-1 victory over Portsmouth. With only ninety seconds remaining, Luke Thomas’ goal condemned the league leaders to their first away league loss of the year.
Since Matt Taylor took over, Appleton said, “they’ve changed shape a little bit and they’ve been playing with three at the back, which I know he’s used at previous clubs he’s managed.” They’ve clearly improved since then.
“I must admit that as a group, I really like them, and I believe they have some really good players. I’ve worked with one or two of their players in the past, so I have some knowledge of them. It’s going to be a difficult match, as it usually is. It’s a challenging place to win games and always has a great vibe. As the manager of Oxford and Lincoln, I was there frequently and faced challenging matches.
“We’ve been annoyed lately by a number of draws, and the Boxing Day loss was no exception. Tomorrow night, I hope, will see much better performance and energy levels from us, and I strongly believe that will be the case.
“We’ve got or one two with knocks that hopefully we’ll be able to steer through to make sure that they’re ready for the game tomorrow,” Addicks manager Appleton responded when asked about the team’s injury status.
“It’s possible that we’ll see players like Terry Taylor and Conor McGrath before the end of January,” the head coach said. “At this point, there’s no set timeline for Chuks [Aneke’s] return because we need to exercise extreme caution and make sure that his re-scans are proceeding appropriately, among other things. In terms of being able to be available by the end of January, things are undoubtedly looking up with Conor and Terry. It’s clear that the others are past January.
“Lucas [Ness] is fully functional, but he and Deji [Elerewe] haven’t been playing lately because I don’t think it’s necessary to have two center halves on the bench,” he continued. From a tactical perspective, you would prefer to have as many offensive players on your team as defensive ones. With people like Terell Thomas and Nathan Asiimwe, we have lots of cover.
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