Charlton boss Karl Robinson explains why Milton Keynes return will be different this time

By Richard Cawley

richard@slpmedia.co.uk

Karl Robinson has admitted his third return to Milton Keynes will be a very different feel to his first two – with the Charlton boss hoping his old team do not lose their League One status.

The Liverpudlian parted company with the Buckinghamshire club just before the end of 2016 and went back twice in December of that year as the Addicks faced them in the FA Cup and the league.

Milton Keynes are 22nd in the current standings and in real danger of the drop.

“The other games there were in the space of a month of leaving,” said Robinson. “This is a little bit different – it is 13-14 months since the last one. The others were surreal.

“I’m going there to do my job. Milton Keynes fans appreciate that I’m there to work for my team and win for my team. That’s all that really matters for me on Saturday. Once the game is past then the last thing I want to see is them in that position, after the seven years I had there and the success we had.

“I’m absolutely loving the challenge I’m in the middle of at the moment.

“In the five years I was in League One [at MK] we finished 10th, eighth, fifth, fifth and second. We had a year in the Championship. When we left people forget that we were only six or seven points from the play-offs, even though we were somewhere like 18th. If we’d won the game before I left we’d have been something like three or four points away.

“What annoys me is people say they dragged them from where we left them to 12th in the league. But that was 10 points from the play-offs. In many ways that is worse than when we left.”