SAM Sodje is catching up brother Akpo in Charlton’s scoring charts after his only goal sunk Carlisle at The Valley.

Sam, 30, now only trails his younger sibling by four goals to five this season, with Akpo’s advantage of playing up front balanced out by Sam’s superior number of appearances.

However, this was something he refused to acknowledge, instead calling foul play in his personal battle to be the top scoring Sodje this campaign.

He revealed: “We’re going to see who can score the most this season, but I won’t bet money on it as I think he’s cheating as he’s a striker and he has more chances to score.

“I should really get two goals before we start if we were to bet. He comes round my house and gives it a go when he scores but today was my day.

“It’s been hard because I’ve had injuries before today and it’s been 2 games in a couple of days but I’m back on my game again and training properly, the medical staff are looking after me and I’m enjoying my football.

“I’m doing really well. All my career I’ve had a good scoring thing and always scored goals – I played for Brentford a few seasons ago and scored nine or ten goals so my six so far doesn’t surprise me, I’ve always got goals.

“I always knew I’d get a chance today and the defender wasn’t really keeping hold of me before my goal and when the keeper missed it I just knew I had to put my head on it.

“The crosses were brilliant from the wide players – if we didn’t score from a cross we would have been disappointed as there were some quality crosses into the box today.”

Despite it keeping his sibling from moving further ahead, Sam admitted feeling gutted when Akpo’s goal in the second half was struck off when Frazer Richardson wandered back from an offside position to lay on the assist, rendering the ‘not active in play’ rule obsolete.

He added: “I was looking forward to us both scoring in the same game, but it was a shame that his goal was disallowed because it was a good goal as well.

“We’re really wishing that it happens at some point this season.”

And with Charlton now facing some big matches against promotion rivals in their final six league games, Sodje feels the tough run-in could actually work in their favour, starting as soon as Saturday’s trip to Southampton.

He said: “We’re both big teams and without being big-headed or anything I don’t think we should be in this league.

“But we’ll go down there as we’ve done for the past two away games and be strong and try not to be beat.

“I got on really well with Alan Pardew, he’s a good manager, but right now we’re hopefully going to go down there and turn them over.

“I think it’s better that we’re playing big teams now as when you play against teams like today they will defend a lot but a Norwich or Leeds will want to win themselves so the game is very open.

“We’re not hoping for any favours as we know we have to do this ourselves and to get promotion we will have to beat the big teams.”