FanView – FA Cup hammering by Fulham didn’t dampen spirit of Charlton travelling faithful

“We’re gonna bounce in a minute, bounce in a minute, we’re gonna bounce in a minute.”

Reading this you probably think it was the Fulham fans who were doing all the bouncing on a pleasant Saturday afternoon in South West London, but if you tried to talk to me after the game you would realise it was a different story.

Never in my life have I been amongst 7,000 football fans bouncing up and down, even at 4-0 down. At one point, the old and tattered away stand at Craven Cottage was shaking so much that I thought the stand plus the majority of Charlton Fans were going to come crashing down. Luckily enough for us, it didn’t.

Well, I guess we have to talk about the game at some point, so here it goes. Fulham scored four goals, Clint Dempsey got a hat-trick, one of his goals was a lucky deflection and the other in my unbiased opinion was not a penalty. Although I’m not one of these fans to go on about how unlucky we were not to get something out of the game, but in my opinion: “We was robbed!!!”

Four or five years ago, Charlton Athletic were by far the bigger club out of these two sides and would have been going to Craven Cottage thinking about taking all three points, not looking at producing one of the FA Cup Third Round’s biggest shocks. Well, it looked like we would have to produce something special that afternoon.

Since our fall from the Premier League, I have been lucky enough to go on a few away days in the South of England with the Charlton faithful, but Saturday was definitely a different experience.

As soon as I got off the train at Putney Bridge tube station, the chants of “We are Charlton, Super Charlton, We are Charlton Covered End” had started and it felt like Saturday was going to be a good day, and yes, despite the result it was fantastic.

After arriving in Putney, we went to a nice real ale pub called the Bricklayers Arm’s, which was full of Charlton fans sinking a few pints of Britain’s best beer to calm their nerves, which in recent years has become something most of us have become accustomed to.

At 2:40pm, the Charlton fans had already got going and the noise inside of Craven Cottage was very one-sided. The only time I heard Fulham sing was after their fourth goal, and that was only for a few minutes, until the Charlton fans drowned out their poor efforts.

One of my favourite chants of the day had to be: “FA Cup, Who Gives a F***, Charlton Athletic we’re going up!!!” and in all honesty that chant is true, none of us really cared if we won.Yes it would have been nice, but the league is our priority at the moment and with other teams around us winning or drawing in the cup yesterday, it looks like we will have the better run in towards the end of the season.

Even though the result could have been more pleasing, I’m proud to say I was part of the 7,000 fans that invaded South West London, and no matter what the outcome was, we are still top of League One, and I am definitely looking forward to being part of a smaller but decent crowd of 2,000 travelling fans to see the Addicks at Hillsborough next week.

Thomas Eastwood