Zheng Zhi's poor run of recent form has coincided with Charlton's slide down the table
ALAN Pardew admits this has been a difficult week for everyone at Charlton as the realisation the club face another season in the Championship begins to hit home.
Last weekend's tame performance and defeat at Loftus Road mathematically ended the Addicks' hopes of reaching the play-offs and the manager has revealed the disappointment has been hard to take.
He said: "It has been a time for reflection because the end of the season in my career has been the worst I have experienced in terms of results.
"I need to reflect on the reasons why and make sure it doesn't happen again.
"We are looking at a few things already and will probably come in midway through the summer to make sure the players hit the ground running."
Charlton's poor form since the turn of the year ultimately cost them a place in the promotion shake-up and the manager has already begun the post mortem to discover what went wrong.
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He explained: "I'm not going to sit here and make excuses for why our season tailed off as it did, but there is no doubt the selling of Andy Reid had an impact on this team and perhaps a greater impact than we all thought.
"The replacements for him, the loan players, didn't work out and that was a big part in some ways I feel as to why we've struggled.
"Having said that, all year we've been struggling to get goals and it haunted us right into this last period.
"Again we didn't score on Saturday and the lack of scoring two or three goals has been very, very costly.
"We must have lost 10 or 11 games this year by the odd goal and probably dominating possession in all of those games, so there are some facets to this team which I need to change."
The nature of Saturday's display at QPR, as well as the result, underlined to Pardew he faces a busy summer in the transfer market getting it right next time around.
But the manager was also quick to point out the failure couldn't all be put down to one poor performance in west London.
He said: "It tells you everything when you come to crunch games and people or the team doesn't perform.
"Without attaching blame I've had a good look at the games where it really mattered for us and we've had players come up short and I can't accept that.
"It is my duty as manager of this club to look at the signals and decide maybe some people are not going to be there for the crunch and I've got to find players who will.
"Now I'm sure within the squad there are eight or nine players who can do that and deliver when the crunch comes.
"We haven't delivered this year. It might be inexperience or a number of reasons like fatigue."
He added: "One of the players who springs to mind in the last eight or nine games who really went below the level of his play is Zheng Zhi.
"The season unfortunately caught up with him and he has looked tired. Now he is injured.
"If you looked at the ZZ who played against Crystal Palace and the ZZ who played against QPR, then we are talking about a different animal here.
"It isn't because the boy isn't up for the battle or when the big game came along he couldn't deliver.
"I genuinely think because he played throughout the summer last year he was fatigued.
"Maybe I should have given him more rest than I did, but it is all well and good in hindsight."
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