| Competition | Date | Opponent | Venue | Result |
| LDV Vans Trophy 3rd round | Tuesday, 30th January (7.45pm) | Swansea City | Away | Lost 0-1 |
Reading goals: None
Gamebreaker: Swansea's goal
Attendance: 2,516
Reading line-up: Howie, Murty,
Newman, Parkinson, Viveash, Hunter (Mackie), Igoe, Caskey,
Cureton, Rougier (Butler), McIntyre (Hodges)
Subs not used: Ashdown, Gamble
A small hardy band of Royals fans made their way to Swansea on a coldish Tuesday night to watch our next step on what we expected would be a glory cup trail. There were no decent teams left in the southern section of the draw so there was a real opportunity to win this competition. It was also a chance to experience playing at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, which might have been useful should we have to go there for a play-off final in the future.
However, the players decided differently. In this game we saw Reading players bottling out of tackles and not bothering to chase for challenges. We also saw some absolutely dreadful attempts at passing. In short, it was the worst Reading performance since the home disaster against Cardiff last season.
And yet despite all of that, Swansea only managed to beat us by one fortuitous goal, so it does offer some real hope for our rather more important return visit in the League at the end of this month.
The Reading team showed a couple of changes from the side that saw off Bristol Rovers - Scott Howie replaced Phil Whitehead as expected. Also Sammy Igoe came into the side meaning that Graeme Murty dropped back to right-back, Ricky Newman switched to left-back, and Stuart Gray was left out.
Neither side created anything worth talking about in the first half, with Swansea's best chances coming from corners which they wasted. For Reading, Jamie Cureton looked interested when he had the ball, but was usually in an offside position most of the rest of the time because he was only walking back into position. Consequently many of our potential attacks broke down.
At half-time, Martin Butler replaced Anthony Rougier and this did seem to change the game slightly. Butler was by no means at his all-action best, but showed a bit more urgency than the rest of our side. Swansea continued to fail to threaten although it was quite clear that their players and particularly their fans were keen to get to the next round.
We did have two decent moves in this half, which came within moments of each other, and represented the sole entertainment in the 90 minutes provided by any of the Reading players. The first came from a good run by Sammy Igoe in the inside-right position. He beat several players and got a cross over, but it eluded our forwards in the box. Soon after Jim McIntyre had a fierce shot from the edge of the area, which the Swansea keeper managed to keep out of the net only with a full length diving save.
There was one other potential chance for Reading. Martin Butler chased a long pass into the Swansea penalty area where he was pushed over by a Swansea defender. It probably should have been a penalty but it's the sort of little push that probably occurs in the penalty area 15 times in every game, and you don't normally get penalties for that sort of thing.
Almost as though it was intentional we then threw away the game. Darren Caskey picked up the ball in our penalty area and tried to make space to play a pass. This involved him dribbling towards our goal (!) and he then gave the ball away. A Swansea forward got hold of it, put a cross over and Scott Howie had no opportunity to stop the header. You could almost imagine that it was a deliberate attempt to avoid playing a further 30 minutes or a further four games in this competition.
Alan Pardew had one substitution left, and with us losing 1-0 the obvious alternative was to bring on John Mackie! Last week, a brilliant young journalist interviewed Mackie and asked him if he had ever scored a goal. The answer was, "No. Not here, not at Sutton, not with Crawley, never." Mackie failed to open his account with a late equaliser here, and so Reading went out of the LDV Vans Trophy.
Just to compound the errors of the evening, we picked up four bookings in the last portion of the game.
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