NATHAN Jones said Charlton Athletic must improve “on every single level” as he vowed to make “ruthless decisions” after the Addicks ended their campaign with a 3-1 defeat at Swansea City at the weekend.
All the goals came in the last sixteen minutes. Adam Idah opened the scoring before Miles Leaburn headed home Sonny Carey’s corner five minutes later.
Idah got his second in the 82nd minute and Leo Walta curled a 25-yard free-kick past Thomas Kaminski with two minutes left.
The Addicks finished nineteenth, their highest finish since twelfth in the Championship in 2015.
“We have to have a moment of pride because we could have gone down and that would have been a disaster,” Jones said on Charlton’s website.
“We had a wonderful start. At certain times we’ve been unfortunate with injuries but we have to get better individuals, that make really good decisions over a period of time. We are behind people in terms of pure talent and pure ability because we haven’t got those resources and from where we’ve come from, people are more athletic than us as well. We have to improve on every single level.
“It’s hard work ahead of us this summer. On Monday and Tuesday we have meetings with all the players and staff and then it all starts again and that’s the reality of it. The thing for us is that at the first game of next season myself, the club and the fans look and go, ‘wow, we have improved’.”
Jones wasn’t happy with the performance in Wales.
“I was disappointed, really. It was an end-of-season game for long periods,” Jones said. “They didn’t look like scoring, neither did we, so then we tried to really go more aggressive which meant we left ourselves open and we didn’t defend certain areas well.
“Then we just made poor decisions, which we have in games, that’s the level, that’s what we’ve got to get better at.”
Leaburn’s goal was his fourth of the season.
Jones said: “It was good delivery and a good header and it was just a shame we couldn’t go on from there. We wanted to go on from there but we didn’t. We turned the ball over after a good bit of play and then we were open and we didn’t handle that well and that’s the learning curve. We need to get better, whether that’s through personnel or learning. We’ve stayed up this year and that’s important but I’m not in football to do that. I’m not just a survivor, I want to push boundaries, to do that you have to just survive at times. You have to make sure you do the first phase of everything and we’ve done that and now it’s time that we move forward.”
Charlton achieved their goal of staying up in their first season back in the Championship in five years. They had huge backing from their fans, with Valley attendances at seventeen-year high and another big following on the road at the weekend.
“The supporters have been wonderful,” Jones said. “I hope they understand that today we went for the game and got hurt, that’s the learning curve for us, we can’t do that. We could have sat in and got a point and got a 0-0 but it’s the final game of the season. If we’d needed a point we would have done that.
“I remember us losing to Wycombe in the last game of the season in my first season here and I was devastated because we were on a fourteen-game unbeaten run. That galvanises me now, I know what I need. I made ruthless decisions in terms of who we got rid of and what changes we made at the end of that League One season and we got promoted the year after. And this now is time to evaluate quickly and then really look to the future, that’s what we have to do.”
