Last weekend was a strange one if you were a Charlton player.

It was an international weekend, so there was no Championship schedule, and perhaps that gave people more opportunity than they might have wanted, or felt comfortable with, to think about the club’s current situation.

I’ve been at Charlton for six years and can remember when we had players approaching double figures leaving the club at international weekends, when it was hard to form teams during training.

That wasn’t the case earlier this week, so it’s just another illustration of the club’s fall from grace, I suppose.

This season we have got to hold our hands up and admit we deserve our current position in the table – as hard as it is for us to accept.

We’ve been in matches where we feel we have been very unlucky, and aside from the Sheffield United home match and the Sheffield Wednesday away game, no one has really hammered us, but we’re obviously a long way from safety.

No one is under any misapprehensions about what lies in the future for the club, because it’s going to take a monumental effort to stay up.

You try to stay as positive as possible when you go into the training ground building at Sparrows Lane. You try to start the day with a smile on your face and try as much as you can to keep everyone upbeat, but it’s very difficult.

People often ask me, perhaps because I have been at the club so long, where everything went wrong, and regularly point to the departure of Alan Curbishley as being a turning point.

He had been at the club for such a long time and left such a legacy; he built the club into a solid, stable Premier League side, but I think he felt he needed a change.

He felt the time was right for him to move on, and you have to give him enormous credit for what he achieved on limited resources.

Increasingly, you don’t get any time as a manger to stamp your authority on a football club in the modern game. It makes such a difference when a manager has been in place a long time and knows the club inside out.

You look at the success Sir Alex Ferguson has had at Manchester United - he knows that club inside out, and Alan was the same at Charlton.

Whether you’re a player or a supporter, it’s been a difficult few years; that much is certain.

But there can be no giving up. You have to play until the final whistle, and you have to put in 100 per cent effort until the final match of the season – that’s the minimum requirement, starting at Southampton on Saturday.