It’s probably not escaped your attention in recent weeks, particularly with some of the big score lines coming out of our games; Reading have not been playing well at all recently. Following a victory over Everton in mid-November, the Royals went on to record 7 consecutive defeats, including significant losses away at Wigan, Sunderland, Villa and Southampton. Since my last post (away at Wigan), I’ve been to four consecutive home games and rather than spreading the doom and gloom over four more posts, I’ve decided to review them all together at once.
First of all these was the home game against Manchester United – live on Sky. The first half was frantic at times, with seven goals scored in about 30 minutes (in fact, 7 in the first half is now a Premier League record). It’s heartening to see that we went ahead twice and managed to score thrice against one of the best teams in the world, but once again we failed to control a game in which we were leading – it’s beyond a joke now that when we’re ahead it’s difficult to imagine us seeing a game out.
However, it has to be said that their attacking line-up was always going to be much better than ours. When you’re playing against a team containing Robin van Persie, Wayne Rooney, Ashley Young and Michael Carrick you’re always going to be overrun and it was positive to see us keep the second half at 0-0 (even though Federici did try his best to lose possession in the six yard box to van Persie). As a result, the journey home wasn’t in such a sombre mood as the next would be.
Two weeks later, we had another home game on television – at home to Arsenal. A few weeks previously the two sides had played somewhat weakened squads against each other resulting in a 7-5 score and we were eager to ensure that this would not be repeated. Both sides thus played stronger teams with Santi Cazorla, Theo Walcott, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Lukas Podolski providing the main threats for the Gunners.
However, we showed we really weren’t good enough and the game turned out to be men against boys – it was less than a quarter of an hour gone when Podolski put in the first, and Cazorla got two within quick succession not long after the half-hour mark to ruthlessly put Arsenal 3-0 up at the break. He then scored on about the hour after half time. Once again, McDermott was very late making his substitutions but this time they almost paid off – within 10 minutes of Le Fondre and Robson-Kanu coming on, we’d pulled two back with some great finishes. First, Adam Le Fondre rounded Szczesny and put it in from close range, followed by Kebe getting clean through and finishing tidily.
Despite this, we never built much more upon the promise and within ten more minutes Theo Walcott capped a great move (which Reading made far too easy for Arsenal) to score their fifth. Not long after, the full time whistle blew and we all trudged out of the ground despondently. We expected a defeat against Arsenal, obviously, but we also expected the players to show some spirit and desire. Later it transpired that McDermott allegedly dropped Alex Pearce to prevent other clubs from becoming interested in him, which really does sum up the manager’s attitude at the moment.
However, the following week we went back down with an open mind. The Boxing Day fixtures saw us drawn against Swansea City, who had beaten us in the play-off final two years ago and against whom we bottled a 2-0 lead earlier this season. The big player they had in this game was the Premier League top scorer Michu (who had just achieved the record of most goals scored by a foreign player before Christmas in his debut Premiership season, tying with Aguero), but he didn’t last the whole match in the end.
Whilst Roberto Martinez and Paulo Souza had set previous Swansea sides up to play attractive passing football (and Brendan Rodgers merely continued it, despite the press lazily reporting that he started the club playing in this manner), Laudrup had turned the team into one of the more boring teams to watch in the Premier League this season. Whilst few could doubt its effectiveness (given that they’re a top-half side), it meant the side played sterile possession football and took a while to drag teams out of shape before hitting them with a counter-attack-like style, hoping for some of their faster attacking players to punish teams.
However, Reading began to press more and keep their shape in a new, more disciplined, 4-5-1 formation and thus the game was pretty unremarkable, ending 0-0. As mentioned before, Michu got a rather nasty injury in the second half, but he’s back playing now just over a week after it happened, so luckily it doesn’t seem quite so bad.
With this new-found confidence, the club welcomed its old rivals West Ham 3 days later. The Hammers seem to have some kind of superiority complex over Reading, as they always seem to view themselves as a huge club compared to us and take the view that we barely deserve to be in the same division as them. It’s quite funny really, as we always beat them (and usually humiliate them, such as in the 6-0 victory a few years back and the 3-0 last year when Jimmy Kebe’s trickery led to the Hammers finishing with 9 men).
From the off, it was obvious that this would be a dirty game, when Joey O’Brien put a bad foul in on Kebe in the first minute. Sam Allardyce likes to set up his teams to play real anti-football, which made it even more enjoyable when James Collins gifted the ball to Pavel Pogrebnyak just five minutes in to coolly finish past Jaaskelainen and celebrate in front of the shocked West Ham fans.
Even better was the fact that we held out for the 85 remaining minutes, despite an astonishing display of thuggery from the West Ham players. Carlton Cole in particular was disgraceful, elbowing Mariappa as well as stamping on Gunter twice (on the back of having a red card overturned). If he should be banned for a while, so should Kevin Nolan for another range of filthy tackles and poor sportsmanship. However, this made it all the better that we held on and won. It was even more entertaining to spend the journey home checking the West Ham fans’ forums to see them all show rage at losing to us yet again.
So, in summary; we ended our seven game run of defeats with some promising displays, perhaps indicating that we’re finally turning a corner. Let’s hope we can now push on and go for survival.
Matt's Football View 