Luke Berry spoke of his excitement at scoring a stoppage-time winner at the Covered End on his full league debut, as the Addicks beat Leyton Orient 1-0 at The Valley.
“I’m buzzing! The main thing was to get the win. We feel like we’re in a good place at the moment. A nice 1-0 win away from home and a win 1-0 at home as well, so if we can keep that up for another 44 games, we’re flying!” he laughed.
“It’s more instinct. There were a few chances first half where it bounced to me, I’ve had a go and it’s got blocked. But I knew if I keep on making the same kind of runs, they’ll switch off and eventually they did.”
The match-winner told CharltonTV that the side had their fitness to thank for finishing the game strong.
“They were a good team,” he said. “They tried to make it ugly for us. You could see they were tiring – about three or four of them were cramping up. I don’t know if they were pretending to cramp up, but it just shows the intensity of how we play. It’s only two games in, so if we can keep that up for another five, 10, 15, 20 games, teams will tire earlier than that and we can just run over them.”
The result means that the Addicks have claimed two clean sheets from two league games to start the season, and Berry believes that the defence has played a crucial role in the early success.
“One of the first messages from the manager in pre-season [was] we need to get clean sheets,” he said. “That’s what get teams promoted. If we can start from a solid base, we will score goals. If we can keep it 0-0, a hundred percent we’ll get a goal. That’s what our belief is. We don’t want to be sitting around waiting for that. We want to be still attacking and have a strong structure at the back as well. That’s what we feel like we’re doing.
“It’s nice little three [in defence] we have there. Real solid and strong. They’re chatting all the time at the back, keeping attacks going.”
The midfielder is taking it one step at a time: “It’s only early doors, we’re only two games in. It’s a great start, we just need to keep going and keep learning. I feel like if we’re on it, we can make more chances.”
Having said that, the side are already full of belief. “We want to attack everything,” said Berry.
“Even if we played Man City we’d go there a hundred percent thinking we could win the game. We’ll do that again against Bolton.”
