Ben Garner admits top six finish would be an overachievement for Charlton with squad available
Charlton manager Ben Garner admits that reaching the play-offs this season would be an overachievement with the squad he has available.
The Addicks suffered a second reverse of the campaign as Bolton Wanderers brushed them aside 3-1 on Saturday afternoon.
The South Londoners were unable to add any further bodies to their squad on deadline day, despite a return for QPR striker Macauley Bonne appearing to be on the cards. They did make seven signings during the summer window but Garner admitted he has to be realistic with what his aims are in League One this year.
“Yes, I think it will,” he replied when asked if a top six finish would require overachieving with what he has at hand.
“We’ve had one window. We haven’t spent any money, we’ve made a profit in transfer fees. We’re not going to jump from 13th to winning the league. I have to be realistic. We want to put foundations in place. We probably need another two windows to get the squad where we’d be happy with it in terms of the strength and depth.
“But we always want to be optimistic and overachieve. We need to do that with work, preparation, constant improvement and drive to get better.
“[Today’s loss at Bolton is] a little reality check of where we are in terms of squad depth and in terms of the amount of work we need to do on the training ground.
“We haven’t got a big squad. The key is going to be keeping people fit. We need to get some of our injured players back as quickly as possible because we are light in numbers at the moment. We’d have liked to have one or two more, that would have given us a lot more depth within the squad. A lot more competition.
“We weren’t able to do that. These players have done great so far. We’ve been stretched on numbers. There’s players that have been thrown in at the deep end a little bit and they’ve equipped themselves really well. But we know that we’ve still got a long way to go and a lot of work to do.”
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