Nathan Jones said he was delighted to have League One’s leading goalscorer Alfie May as part of his squad, on the day the striker made it 20 league goals for the season and helped the Addicks to a 3-2 win over Carlisle United.
“He’s a wonderful player,” Jones told local media. “He’s a clever player, he’s a great lad and he’s brilliant around the place. He thinks about his game, he thinks about his movement, and he doesn’t just go and play off the cuff.”
“He’s scored goals wherever he’s been, he’s come here and he’s been scoring goals. His dip coincided with a dip in the team’s form, which can happen, but all you have to do is keep giving these players confidence and keep talking to them. And Alfie’s responded fantastically well.”
Charlton are now 10 points clear of the relegation zone and are one of the form teams in the division. But the boss maintained that, for him, the rest of the season is all about how the team plays.
“It wasn’t [about] survival, it was about getting performances,” he said. “Yes, we want to make sure that we don’t get sucked into any kind of relegation thing but we want to finish as high as we possibly can because we want to build.
“We’re not just planning for now, we want to build for the future as well.”
While he was mostly pleased, Jones was not happy with the defensive work in the first period.
“We can’t give goals away like that,” he said. “It was lazy defending. We were slow first half. We were caught in possession. We conceded the corner, we didn’t clear it, and it was scrappy.
“That’s not how you keep clean sheets and we’ve got to get out of that mentality.
“But we won the game,” he continued. “We’re climbing that league. We’ve got 44 points whereas we had 30 or something like that when I came in. So it shows we’re in decent form and I’m very happy with that.
“Keeping clean sheets is a great habit, not losing is another great habit. But winning games is even better.”
