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Charlton Athletic's Ben Hamer writes for the KM Group

Ben Hamer. Picture: Keith Gillard
Ben Hamer. Picture: Keith Gillard

It was well documented before Saturday’s game against Blackpool that we hadn’t kept a clean sheet at The Valley for a long time.

I even opened the papers on Saturday morning to see a story reminding me of that, so it’s obviously something, as a goalkeeper, that has been on my mind.

It was nice to finally get that clean sheet at the weekend and it came after a good defensive performance against Nottingham Forest – where we let in a bit of a freak goal early on.

I’ll hold my hands up to that one. I lost the Andy Reid’s free-kick in the lights. It was probably a routine save if I had seen it all the way, but I lost it for a split second and it cost us the goal.

I was lying on the floor thinking ‘here we go again’. But we started off well and we got ourselves back in the game. I think we were awesome.

We brought that to the first 20 minutes against Blackpool as well and started off like a house on fire, although 0-0 was probably a fair result in the end.

That's the life of a goalkeeper in a sense - you make a mistake and it gets highlighted. I've had a couple of those this season.

You can be in midfield, give the ball away and it not cost you. Or you can miss a chance, but you don't see strikers getting battered.

Goalkeeper’s have got to be mentally strong and deal with it. We’ve seen it recently in the national press with Joe Hart getting criticised, but he's a top quality goalkeeper so I know he'll come through it.

As a club, you can see that we've had a bit of a bad start to this season and we'll hold our hands up and say that it hasn't been good enough.

However, over the last two games we have seen things starting to take an upturn and hopefully we can take that form into the international break.

We've got players who have come up through the ranks and who have been in League One and we've just got to pull together.

These times are tough when your squad is thin, especially at the moment when we have three key players out in Chris Solly, Johnnie Jackson and Yann Kermorgant.

What we've got to do is keep plugging away and hopefully the results will come – with Blackburn away next, followed by Football for a Fiver against Wigan at the end of the month.

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