The fun and games start again for Royals supporters
JUST 91 days after Reading stumbled over last season’s finish line, they start all over again.
The trip to Stoke on Saturday marks the start of nine months of Championship games. What should you expect?
Only the most blindly loyal and super-positive fans will think we are on the eve of something special. All the evidence points towards a long tough slog.
Last season, bar an odd and illadvised three-game experiment when a very small number of fans were permitted into three games, the show was behind closed doors. Now the turnstiles will be clicking and the doors are flung open.
Just how many fans will initially return remains to be seen.
Some will still be wary of crowds, others will be out of the football
routine, some will now not be able to afford such an expensive hobby, while others will have discovered alternative ways of spending their Saturday afternoons during the last 18 months.
The elephant in the room is Reading’s hideous financial situation.
Breaching sustainability and profitability rules led to a transfer embargo. This has prevented the club bringing in any new players. They have lost Omar Richards to Bayern Munich and Michael Olise for £8m to Crystal Palace. Several of the squad players have not had contracts renewed.
Sone Aluko, Sam Baldock, Sam Walker, Tomas Esteves, Alfa Semedo, and Lewis Gibson were all regularly in the first-team squad. Yakou Meite is the club’s most reliable scorer over the last three seasons, but he will miss most of this one through injury.
Everyone thought the squad was thin last season. Being unable to replace these nine players this time round is making the squad look ridiculously light.
The first XI is capable of a top-six finish, but the lack of experienced, high-quality back up makes a bottom-six finish more likely.
Reading finished last season poorly. They only managed nine points from their last 10 games, and were winless in any of their six games during the last month of the season. Carry on in that vein and relegation will be a certainty. On the flipside, and perhaps more constructively, remember Reading started last season winning seven of their first eight games and were seven points clear of the chasing pack. Nobody predicted that.
Never has Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous quote been more apt: “There are known knowns (the small squad, poor form at the end of last season), there are things we know we know (transfer embargo), we also know there are known unknowns (inevitable injuries, crowd size), but there are also unknown unknowns (player form and fitness, opposition strength) – it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”