| Competition | Date | Opponent | Venue | Result |
| Division 2 | Saturday, 26th August (3pm) | Northampton Town | Away | Lost 0-2 |
Reading goals: None
Gamebreaker: Northampton's second goal
Attendance: 5,728
Reading line-up: Whitehead, Gurney
(Murty), Robinson, Parkinson (Cureton), Viveash (Mackie), Hunter,
Newman, Caskey, Butler, Rougier, Hodges
Subs not used: Ashdown, Igoe
Tenacity, spirit, flair.
Well in this game, Newman and Butler showed some tenacity, and Rougier managed flair, but no-one else provided any of the three qualities that we supposedly look for in our players. This match fell firmly into the "should win" camp, but we allowed Northampton to run the game and there's no doubt that they deserved the points.
Pardew named the same starting line-up as for the Swindon game, which was his first mistake. And I'm not just being wise after the event - I said in the news page on Friday that I believed there would be changes. Anyway, we lined up in a 4-4-2 formation with Butler and Rougier as the front players. Hodges and Caskey were the wide midfielders.
The start was particularly scrappy from both sides. Northampton were frequently caught offside whilst when we did get the ball we usually gave it away pretty quickly. It looked like our only real tactic was to get the ball to Tony Rougier.
You may have noticed that I don't normally mention the names of opposition players in reports - well, it's because I don't really care who they are and I'm not going to make an exception for the nonentities playing for Northampton. Their strikers showed why they are playing at Sixfields rather than for a decent club, by managing to badly miss the shots that they did get. However, they were getting the ball in more dangerous positions than were Rougier and Butler. After one shot that went well wide and one that cleared the stand as well as the goal, the home side could have taken the lead as a forward broke the offside trap and took the ball into the area. Our defence had forced him to go wide, though, and he could only managed to pull the shot across the face of the goal.
Reading's first chance came after a move down the left involving Robinson, then Rougier and Hodges. The shot fell to Hodges who put it a long way over the bar. I think it was the first time he'd been involved in the game. Our best chance of the half came when Rougier ignored everyone else and got a shot in himself. He received the ball on the left wing, beat the usual two or three defenders, cut inside and fired a shot across the goal. It went just wide, but the referee did award a corner so one of the defenders must have deflected it.
The other pattern that did emerge in the first half was that every time we put in a challenge on a Northampton player, he fell over and the referee awarded them a free-kick. It doesn't excuse any of our sloppy play, but the ref's actions didn't help any. At one point he even booked Hodges for an innocuous challenge (and it must have been for the foul because he didn't move the free-kick forward 10 yards and so it wasn't for dissent).
After about half an hour, Northampton took the lead. They took the ball down the right wing, put a cross over which was headed on to an unmarked forward standing in the six-yard box almost level with the far post. He only had to touch the ball to get it in the net, and then celebrated provocatively in front of the away fans.
Caskey had our best chance to equalise. After a set-piece, the ball fell to him ten yards out from goal and at a bit of an angle. There was a massive crowd of bodies in front of him so he tried to lift the ball over them and into the far corner. Instead he hit it too hard and blazed the ball over the bar.
Half-time saw a competition where fans had to kick a ball into the boot of a car from various distances. The car was by the corner flag - if you managed the feat from the centre-spot you won the car, or from the edge of the centre circle you got £1000 and from half that distance you got £500. I confidently predict that Northampton will never have to pay out on this one. They'd added some extra rules since the last time we visited where you could get a few yards closer to the target based on the roll of a die, but I still bet Zinedine Zidane would struggle in this competition (and not just because he rarely attends Northampton home games). Much as we all slagged off Northampton for this, the fact is that there was rather more entertainment offered than the usual half-time fare.
Reading made no changes at half-time but soon after did bring on Graeme Murty in place of Andy Gurney. As he was putting his shirt on, he hit his head on the top of the shelter provided for the manager and subs! All jokes aside, he managed to get on the pitch in one piece and completed the game. He also didn't shirk from tackles, and certainly added an extra level of quality to our play.
In order to make the substitution, the referee had stopped play before Phil Whitehead took a goal-kick. After Murty ran on, Whitehead took the kick and hit it straight out for a throw. The ref didn't see this as he was still over in the bench area for some reason. He therefore restarted the game with a Reading throw at the position where Whitehead had kicked it out! We worked the ball down to Rougier near the corner flag who knocked it against the defender's legs for a clear corner. The linesman signalled a goal-kick! Now there's no way the linesman could have made such a big mistake - I think he was just trying to equalise things up after the throw-in we'd gained. Of course, what he should really have done is made sure that the referee had realised his original mistake, but I suppose that was too obvious.
Murty seemed to help us get back into the game, and shortly afterwards we also brought on Jamie Cureton. Now the correct thing to do was to take off the completely ineffectual Hodges and play Rougier on the wing. Instead Pardew took off Phil Parkinson, who'd also done very little. This meant that we now had Butler and Cureton up front (with Butler seemingly hanging back a bit), with Rougier and Hodges both trying to play on the left wing. Is it any wonder that the players failed to operate as a unit?
However, Cureton helped us raise our game. He so nearly scored, when he hooked a hanging shot onto the top of the bar with the Northampton keeper absolutely nowhere. We had another chance when Rougier took the ball down the right and crossed perfectly onto Caskey's head, but the keeper made a fine save.
Northampton discovered that an effective tactic was to foul Rougier every time he got the ball. Although the referee sometimes gave us free-kicks he never booked their players for this. What it meant was that our attacks always ended either with a set-piece or with Northampton heading in the other direction with the ball.
After one such incident when we didn't get the free-kick and lost the ball, Darren Caskey decided to adopt the same approach. He fouled a home player near the half-way line and of course got booked. All very predictable, really. From the free-kick, Northampton took the ball straight town the left wing, crossed it to a forward who after collecting the ball turned sharply, shot and scored. 2-0 and the game was over.
Now this is where I give the management team their only praise of the day. Instead of giving up, they tried to shake things up and go for goals. It didn't work and we could easily have conceded a few more, but 2-0 and 5-0 are basically the same result. The first step was to bring on John Mackie for Adi Viveash - obviously I don't know if Viveash had taken a knock, but I think it was a tactical move because of Mackie's superior pace. We then moved Barry Hunter up front alongside Cureton, with Butler dropping back to play behind the front two. Mackie played as the sole central defender with only two full-backs to back him up - quite an introduction to League football!
The plan was to hoof long balls up to Hunter who would win them and let our other forward players feed off his knock-downs. Well, Hunter did win his fair share of the ball but apart from one that ended up with Butler shooting wide, the plan never really worked.
Meanwhile Northampton had a series of chances on the break that they completey failed to take.
Robinson went down injured as the 90 minutes were up, but recovered to play out the injury time and was hopefully OK. Then the referee blew up and I ran the mile and a half to the railway station, thus ensuring that I had put in more effort in the afternoon than a number of our players.
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