I've written on many occasions before that if there is one club in the country that should understand the dangers of sitting on a lead then it should be Reading (and for the benefit of younger readers, I'm talking about 1995).
It is therefore extremely annoying that the same problem came back to haunt us again in 2001, leaving us with another season of visits to poxy little clubs like Bournemouth, Cambridge and Wycombe. We even had the opportunity to learn from the end of the regular League season that it was a stupid way to play, and yet still managed to do the same thing in the play-off final.
In the early part of the 2000/01 season, Reading showed their true ability with a series of thumping home wins, mostly against poor opposition. In those matches, when we went 1-0 up (often very early on), we continued to play our own game, and ended up with one of the best sequences of home results in the club's history. Had any of those games instead occurred in April, we would have gone 1-0 up and hoped to hang on. (And in some cases, we would have managed it because a lot of the teams in our division last season were truly bad.)
Towards the end of the season, an element of caution had not only crept in, but managed to become the main factor in dictating our style of play. The absolute worst example of this was when, after being gifted a lead away to Cambridge United, we decided that 1-0 was enough. We let them attack us for the whole of the second half, and the only surprise was that their equaliser took so long to come. I know we were reduced to ten men, but remember that Robinson's first booking was for time-wasting, so we brought that on ourselves.
In contrast, ten days later Millwall visited Cambridge and won 5-1. I bet they didn't go 1-0 up and decide to defend for the rest of the game.
And let's just think about the Reading squad. OK, so they weren't all available all the time, but our squad included Jamie Cureton, Martin Butler, Nicky Forster, Anthony Rougier, Jim McIntyre, Darren Caskey and James Harper, as well as Graeme Murty and Matthew Robinson. Would any other side containing those players try to play defensively???!!!
We had real problems with Bristol City's wing-backs at Ashton Gate in October, but for 30 minutes or so at Madejski Stadium in March we had them under complete control. The reason was that our own full-backs were pushing forward, forcing the wing-backs to defend. Unfortunately in that home game, we took a 1-0 lead and sat back. End result? A 3-1 defeat. The only consolation was that at least in that game we were up against reasonable opposition.
Probably the only reason we beat Wigan in the play-off semi-final was that we took the lead sufficiently late on to give them no chance to come back at us. Wigan had certainly learnt from our clueless display at the Jar Jar Binks stadium that either our management or players were in a timid mood.
As for Cardiff, we were 1-0 and 2-1 up but never looked like extending the lead. Conversely, as soon as we went behind, we showed not the slightest sign that we had any idea at all about how to get back on level terms.
Over, the summer Alan Pardew should have been forced to watch the UEFA Cup Final on a daily basis, to see if he could learn from the following:
(And just in case you think you've read something like that paragraph before somewhere and that I nicked the idea, I'd just like to point out that what you saw elsewhere was written by me as well!)
Opposition fans sometimes sing to us "Where were you when you were shit?" The answer is that we were at Luton, Cambridge and Colchester. And we had bloody well better have learnt the lesson for this season.
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