Royals must rise to the occasion at Oakwell
I WAS not able to enjoy the game as much as usual last Saturday at the Madejski Stadium.
We are now at the stage when the importance of the result outweighs the need to be entertained.
Reading are teetering precariously on the play-off precipice, with Bournemouth, Middlesbrough, Cardiff and Barnsley all trying to shove them plummeting downwards.
All season Reading have sat in the top six of the Championship. Unfortunately, they looked most certain and assured in the first month and since then have looked less convincing, month by month.
During the last year, line graphs sloping down on the TV news have been one of life’s most heartening sights – unfortunately Reading’s form graph follows a similar wiggle.
The pressure is mounting and when we arrive at Oakwell on Good Friday it will reach a crescendo.
Whoever wins the game between Barnsley and Reading will have taken a giant leap towards the play-offs.
With so much at stake it made it all the more surprising I was so easily distracted last weekend in the 1-1 draw against Queen’s Park Rangers.
The scoreline fairly reflected an incident-packed game full of chances at both ends, though Reading fans will point to an exhilarating 20-minute onslaught immediately after half-time, during which they ought to have put the game to bed.
I was too busy thinking what the life of QPR’s laundry lady/man must be like? The players turned up pre-match looking more like Stan Wawrinka than Stan Bowles, all dressed in natty bright white tracksuit tops.
During the warm-up they wore dark and light blue tracksuit tops. Then to walk the 30 yards from their changing room to the touchline at the start of the game they wore red tracksuit tops, which were immediately removed and thrown into the kit man’s bag.
That’s a lot of laundry gathered during 90 minutes of doing not very much. If that distracted me during the first half, a failing pitch sprinkler had the same effect in the second half.
The QPR keeper, Seny Dieng, was doused by cold water in his penalty box from the sprinkler behind his goal, which was jammed on.
The groundsman had opted to water the whole pitch during the break. All the other sprinklers turned off, but the water kept on spraying in Dieng’s penalty box.
There was no sign of any groundsmen available to help, so the former South Africa, Atletico Madrid and Manchester United star Quinton Fortune, who is now part of the coaching set up at Reading, took it upon himself to jog all the way round the edge of the pitch, to sort the sprinkler out.
Did Sir Alex Ferguson send Fortune on a plumbing course while he was at Old Trafford? Maybe gardens in Madrid need sprinklers, so Fortune backed himself to be the best qualified to sort the issue out?
Just as he reached the offending sprinkler, it turned off – it would have been a highlight of the season had 24,000 been in the stadium.
What was Fortune thinking as he made that long jog round? From one of the world’s most sought-after midfielders to part-time plumber in South Reading.