It was great to be back at The Valley on Tuesday night – and even better to making a scoring return to Charlton.

I feared the worst just before Christmas when I suffered a knee injury against Millwall, and had to be taken off.

When it first happened, it’s probably the most pain I’ve ever been in. Then it started to ease off a tiny bit, and I thought I might be able to run it off, but inside, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to continue.

I tried to put a brave face on it, but I think everyone could see how disappointed I was.

The next few days were really difficult, because the bad weather caused all sorts of problems. Ideally, as a player, you want to know the extent of the damage straight away – you want to know where you stand (or sit, if you’re like me and had a knee injury!).

Sometimes you have to wait for the swelling to go down before the specialists can properly make an assessment, but my delay was solely due to the weather, which was making travelling difficult and obviously causing problems for the medical staff as well.

Thankfully, when the news came, it was good news, and the injury wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

I went back to Reading to get treatment there, not least because I live in the area and it wasn’t worth travelling to Charlton every day to get treatment. Their medical staff were brilliant, and after some hard work on my part, particularly in the gym to build up strength in my knee, I was soon running again and ready to play.

Throughout this time I knew Charlton were speaking to Reading about extending or renewing my loan, although the situation was complicated due to my injury.

Obviously, there was no point Charlton taking me on loan if I couldn’t play, but everything seems to have worked out.

I played at Wycombe Wanderers last weekend, and it was great to get back on the scoresheet against Hartlepool United, when we gained an important victory.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t a brilliant performance. The pitch was quite hard and bobbly, and having been beaten 5-0 a few days earlier, Hartlepool were very defensive and determined not to be embarrassed like that again.

I’m sure the knowledge that United had been thumped on Saturday contributed to a bit of frustration in the crowd, which is perfectly understandable, but I don’t think there was any shortage of effort on display.

Sometimes things don’t come off, but we have to keep going and keep believing, which is exactly what we did, and we gained our reward with a victory.

With our next match not until Monday night, we’ve now got a few extra days to work hard on the training pitch, which is snow-free for the first time in a while, and ensure we continue to put pressure on Leeds United and Norwich City at the top of the table.