All change at the Valley 1-1

A hard earned 1-1 draw for the first game of the season should not be sniffed at and there will be plenty of coverage in other blogs, already there is divergence of opinion over the prospects as a result of the performance. But what were the noticeable changes from last season, as a result of the economies.

Walking up to the Valley, you see more food stands, presumably more concessions have been sold to the smaller crowds. The Review has returned to a normal pocket size with no lamination, so you can mark the teams on the pages, without etching into the pages. Reading through there were no superstars on the opposition side, no internaionals and actually no names that we recognised. We had to wait till the game had started before we would realise just how bad the referee would be. Sadly, it is unlikely that this will be T. Kettles last visit to the Valley.

The pre match entertainment was not an opera singer, flown in specially but whatever you wanted to do, read your review, speak to your mates - maybe thats why the crowd was so quiet for much of the match.

The most obvious cut back was the big screen, The Premier League have already requested the return of their clock and replay machine, along with reasonable type faces, so we enjoyed a red screen throughout the match, with delayed score updates.

Of course, another on pitch change was that we did not recognise most of our team including Marcus Bent who gave the impression of a player who cared - for some of the game - and he scored, so another change was Marcus Bent celebrating scoring.

The Charlton bench has changed and we no longer have old Mike Kelly coming out from the changing rooms on creaky knees with 10 minutes of the game gone, holing his cup of tea.

According to the East Standers the concourse now lacks bins, but retains stale bread, so maybe future attendees should pick something uip to eat from the new concessions.

So we've started, there are 45 games to go, I am sure that there are changes from last season that I have missed, so let me know what they are.

One thing that has not changed from past seasons is Cubishley apologising for his team on TV, fortunately this year its for West Ham.