WE HAVE TO DIG IN AND FIGHT – THIS IS HEADING RIGHT TO WIRE
PAUL Ince has never ducked a challenge – and returning to football management with struggling Reading is another great example.
While others may have turned their backs, the former Manchester United and England star was ready to step into the hotseat once the Royals called time on Veljko Paunovic.
So why did he come back to management and take this tough job?
“Because I’m f ****** mad, ain’t I?” he laughs. “I love football. I love being involved in football. You get your ups and downs, you get your disappointments.
“But you’ve got to enjoy it. You see what’s going on in Ukraine, we’ve just come out of a pandemic, people have lost their lives.
“There is awful stuff going on. But this is the football world I know and I enjoy the challenge.
“If I didn’t feel like that I might as well not be here.
“But I’m here until the end of the season. Fingers crossed, we can keep this club in the Championship.”
Gutsy
Ince has won two of his six games so far, drawing another and losing three.
There have been 4-1 and 4-0 defeats at Blackpool and Nottingham Forest respectively that have worried him. He questioned whether his players had the fight for the challenge.
But a gutsy 1-1 draw at promotion-chasing Bournemouth before a crucial 1-0 win over Blackburn in the last two games before the international break are the type of performances Ince needs - and has been demanding.
The Royals sit five points clear of third-bottom Barnsley, seven ahead of Peterborough – who breathed fresh life into their survival bid with a superb 3-1 win at QPR last Sunday - and eight clear of Derby.
If Ince can consolidate that, he will succeed in his interim job at Reading and put his managerial career back on track.
“We can have a soft belly and you can see why this team in the past has conceded goals,” said Ince.
“They need to dig in and they weren’t digging in. At Forest it was 4-0 and it could have been more. That was us going back to our old selves again, our old habits.
“We are in a dogfight. Barnsley, Peterborough, Derby, they are scrapping. We have got to scrap.
“I told them after the Forest game that I’m not putting up with it. It was embarrassing in the second half. At Bournemouth, if we had played like that, we’d have got beaten badly again.”
It looks as if the message is getting through.
“That performance at Bournemouth was more of what I wanted, followed by the Blackburn win.”
Ince’s lad, Tom, hit a screamer of a goal for the point at Bournemouth and that was followed up by Josh Laurent’s equally terrific winner against Blackburn last weekend.
“Our fans are great,” adds Ince. “I went to watch West Brom recently and their fans were walking out with their team losing.
Dogfight
“Our fans stay. They understand we are in a dogfight. They understand where we are as a team.
“We have suffered with players missing through Covid. We’ve been down to the bare bones. But that isn’t to say we can’t roll our sleeves up and battle to stay in this league.
“It’s about changing the mentality but it’s a tough one to change in such a short time.
“We talk about leaders, we talk about characters, but this is a team that’s been playing nice football for the last two and a half years and now they find themselves in a situation where they have to dig and fight.”
The 54-year-old has got that five-point cushion between Reading and the bottom three, but takes little comfort from it.
“I don’t like looking at points buffers because they can easily go,” he explained. “This is going to the wire and that’s what I told the players as soon as I walked through the door.
“We’ve got good players and I believe we can stay up. I think we’ve got enough in this team.
“But this team has been conceding goals for a long, long time.
It’s going to be a scrap, it’s going to be a dogfight and I enjoy a dogfight. So let’s have it. “I’m always one for a challenge. I went to Macclesfield for my first job. It was the challenge of it. “We will all fight together - myself, the staff, the players – and the players have got to understand that. “We’ve got 15, 16 players out of contract in the summer
It’s going to be a scrap, it’s going to be a dogfight – and enjoy I a dogfight. So let’s have it Paul Ince
so I’ve said to them ‘Whether you are going to be here or not, you’ve got a duty to this club. You’ve got a duty to the fans, you’ve got a duty to the staff, because you might go but some of that staff might not be here anymore if we get relegated.
“‘As long as you are here as a Reading player, you fight for this club. You owe something to try to keep this team in the league. Show some heart’.”
Someone who has definitely shown some heart this season is another former Manchester United and England star – Wayne Rooney, 36.
While Reading were docked six points for breaking finanin cial rules, Rooney’s Derby fared even worse, 21 points taken away, basically for the way owner Mel Morris flouted rules and mismanaged the club before it went into administration.
“Listen, Wazza has done an unbelievable job at Derby,” said Ince, who took on the task of keeping Reading up eight years after his last job at Blackpool.
“With all that has happened at Derby this season, he has done amazingly.
Amazing
“If we had those six points now, we’d be fine. Wazza has lost 21 points. Just look at that his first managerial job, he’s been amazing. Unfortunately, I have to hope that he doesn’t stay up.
“What he’s done is great, he’s got them fighting for their lives. But we are fighting for our lives as well.”
Now the final rounds begin. The bell rings on Saturday for Reading’s crucial game at Poya Asbaghi’s Barnsley. Derby need to build on their good home form against Preston, while Grant McCann’s Peterborough host play-off chasing Middlesbrough.
“It’s a four-horse race,” says Ince. “We have to make sure we are top of that table.”