Roy Keane and Gary Charles

[supertom]

A nice, but sad story.

I've said before that I never understood at the time the stick Wright and Charles got, they were such key members of 95/96. The amount of goals that season that one of them would be involved in. And a thankless task as at one end they were expected to be top class defenders, and a minute or so later be up the other end taking on fullbacks and whipping in crosses like Tony Morley at his peak. 2 of the more undeserving scapegoats in my time.

What always disappointed me was the stick Charles got when coming back from that injury. I was there when he got injured (West Ham night match IIRC) and you could tell straight away it was bad by the reaction of the other players on both sides. Over a year out and then expected to hit the ground running in a Villa side that was struggling. Almost straight away Charles was getting stick again.

It was a shame really and inexplicable. In 95/96 we scored plenty of goals. I think Savo and Yorke scored 39 between them, with no small amount of supply from Wright and Charles. On top of that we had one of the meanest defences in the league too. The fullbacks were the key to that formation working as well as it did that year.
That should have earned Charles plenty of patience from fans upon his return from injury.

[Villa in Denmark]

Over and above the obvious tragedy of the accident with the cyclist, it should be another salutary lesson in whatever is going on, on the pitch, we only see 90 minutes out of 168 hrs a week out of these players lives.

How many times have players got to be slagged off and abused, only ro find out later that there was something else going on behind the scenes.

Collymore, Charles, Helenius, Curcic.

I think it was Brian Green on one of the threads talking about a player's mental health is just as important, if not more so, than their physical health.

In my opinion he's absolutely correct.