Reading blink first in play-off final shackled by fear
The contrast in emotions at the end, when Christopher Schnindler’s penalty went in, was the starkest one in football. The Huddersfield players sprinted over to reach him, the Reading players collapsed in despair. It showed what this tense but turgid match was all about: two teams desperate to win, but shackled more by their fear of messing up.
The problem with games like this is that the longer it goes on for, the more scared each team is of losing it. The best way to win is the early blitz. That is what Norwich City found here two years ago when they
scored twice in the first 15 minutes against Middlesbrough and never looked back.
If no team succeeds in winning early then inevitably both teams sit back nervously and try to drag it out. No-one is about to make a grand attacking burst late on in the second half. Not in the 49th Championship game of the season, at the end of May, after an exhausting slog, with everything on the line.
That explains the pattern of two of the more typically anxious play-off finals of recent years. In both 2013 and 2014, the superior footballing team choked on the day. Gianfranco Zola’s Watford could not perform against Ian Holloway’s Crystal Palace, eventually giving away an extra-time penalty to Wilfried Zaha which Kevin Phillips converted.
Then, in one of the most one-sided finals in recent years, Steve McClaren’s Derby County dominated against Queens Park Rangers. But Bobby Zamora scored for QPR with almost the last kick of the game to take them into the Premier League.
What all this means is that these games are not always won by the better team. And that the longer they go on without a goal, the worse the football gets. That is exactly what happened here. It was Huddersfield who tried to win the game in the opening spell, trying to do what Norwich successfully did two years ago.
Huddersfield came out of the blocks hard with the running of Rajiv van la Parra, Nahki Wells and Elias Kachunga causing problems for a Reading defence that usually looks more solid than this. They had their two chances, a Michael Hefele header and an Izzy Brown tap-in but missed them both.
From that point on the game was only going to get worse. Huddersfield retreated, keen to conserve energy after missing their moment. Reading, already exposed more than they would want to be, locked the door. In terms of quality, fluency and fun, the game went steadily downhill until the 90 minutes were up. Then it got worse for another 30.
Of course it could only be settled by penalty kicks. Despite Michael Hefele’s miss, the best part of two hours after his first one that could have won the game much easier, Huddersfield turned it round, capitalising on two Reading misses to win 4-3.
So what does this tell us about the two teams? Almost nothing. It would be easy enough to read too much into Huddersfield’s eventual triumph, their cool execution under pressure, but it would be to paper over the poverty of everything that came before. The fact that Huddersfield won the shoot-out, after two hours of non-football is a minor detail.
Maybe this game would have been better with different teams. Fulham, Leeds United and Sheffield Wednesday players and fans must have watched this in some exasperation, feeling that they were good enough to be here instead. They might even have produced a better game. It would be hard to imagine a worse one.
But then play-off finals are not about really quality of performance, momentum or skill. They are about not making a catastrophic mistake, for as long as possible, and hoping the other side blinks first. Like a game of chicken, but with the two sides moving towards each other at a glacial pace.
It was Reading who blinked first, in the end, when Liam Moore put his penalty over the bar and Jordan Obita had his saved by Danny Ward. Failure to execute under pressure? Perhaps. But both teams had been failing to execute under pressure since about 3.20pm. The fact that one of them won a shoot-out does not cancel that out.
Maybe the pressure in these games is just too much now. There was a time, 20 years ago, the era of Charlton v Sunderland, when this was reliably one of the games of the season. But now the money involved seems to make both teams buckle, more often than not. Do not expect it to be much different when two teams meet here this time next year.