Darren Pratley insists that Charlton’s togetherness will ensure they will bounce back from successive defeats.
After a hugely-impressive start to the season, disappointing results against Birmingham City and Wigan Athletic have seen the Addicks suffer back-to-back defeats for the first time in 2019, but the experienced midfielder is confident he and his teammates will dust themselves off and look to make amends against Leeds United at The Valley on Saturday.
“The best thing about this group is that we’ve stuck together,” said Pratley.
“We haven’t lost many games since I’ve been here. Football’s easy when it’s all going well. Your passes are coming off, you’re scoring goals and getting pats on the back. But now this is another side of football which we haven’t really experienced.
“This team is good. We stick together. No one is happy in there. We don’t go out and celebrate and big ourselves up when we win and we don’t go home and cry when we lose. We win together, we lose together.”
Charlton’s next challenge is to face Leeds in SE7 and Pratley knows that the Addicks will need to raise their game against the team that are hotly-tipped for promotion to the Premier League.
“We’re playing the team that are expected to win the league and we’re going to have to raise it, because if we play like that, we’re going to get punished,” he explained.
“This league can be unforgiving sometimes and you can go on a little bad run, but hopefully we can go again next week.
“Whoever we play, we want to go into the game and win. We want to win every game and we’ll be going into the game coming off the back of a defeat and we want to put that right, especially in front of our home fans. It’s going to be a big crowd and we want to put it right for them.”
“We haven’t reached our peak yet,” he added.
“We’re still getting better. We’re learning and some of our players haven’t played in this division before. When you look at the teams in this league, they lose a few and win a few. You just have to keep up the morale and go again.”
