Happy Birthday Keith Jones

Happy 57th Birthday (14/10). When you think back to that promotion winning season of 1997/1998, then the centre midfield pair would always be him and Mark Kinsella. Jones would play in all Charlton’s games that season bar a couple of league games and a League cup fixture (Kinsella ever present) and the pair dovetailed superbly and was part of that spine from the start of that season (Rufus, Jones, Kinsella, Mendonca) and that would see us in the Premier League.

Jones came in from Southend United (Where he played with Chris Powell) for £150,000 in September 1994 and ended up playing over 80 appearances in the following three seasons but it was that 97/98 season where he will be fondly remembered, with Kinsella and ended up with 3 league goals (Winner v Man City, Crewe and Swindon, all at home).

The Play off final v Sunderland with his ball from inside our own half to find Super Clive to make it 2 each. and hiss penalty in the shoot out to Perez’s right. Fully deserved.

Then into the Premier League where he ended up playing 23 times (10 as sub) and that famous winning goal at home v Liverpool.

Keith finished his Charlton career with another promotion (1999/2000, 17 league games) back to the top flight before leaving on a free transfer at the age of 35 to Reading after 176 appearances for the club.

Underrated? Possibly by some but every team needs a Keith Jones in their starting eleven. Never shirked a challenge. A proper professional who gave his all for the shirt. Happy Birthday Keith.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s