| Competition | Date | Opponent | Venue | Result |
| Division 2 | Saturday, 17th March (3pm) | Wrexham | Away | Won 2-1 |
Reading goals: Butler (2)
Gamebreaker: Final whistle
Attendance: 5,080
Reading line-up: Whitehead, Murty,
Robinson, Parkinson, Whitbread, Hunter, Harper, Caskey (Igoe),
Butler, Rougier (Cureton), McIntyre (Newman)
Subs not used: Howie, Henderson
I don't think that anyone could have left the ground after this match without the impression that this is our year. After a very good start, we were put under enormous pressure from the home team for about 60 minutes during which time we conceded only one goal, and then towards the end we snatched a winner. As the second Martin Butler goal went in, we all looked at each other, said "Deserved!" and then collapsed in laughter. This was by no means our best performance of the season but we still came away with three points, whilst only one other team in the top six managed to win.
The Reading line-up showed two changes from the last game. As widely predicted, Anthony Rougier started instead of Jamie Cureton. Although Cureton officially has a groin strain, he was named on the bench, and I am still very cynical about the extent of this injury. A bigger surprise was that Barry Hunter replaced Adi Viveash, with Viveash not even on the bench. This must surely be because of an injury, but it did give Hunter a chance to shine against his old club. The vacancy on the bench was filled by Darius Henderson.
The hills around Wrexham were covered with snow, and when I arrived in the town 90 minutes before kick-off there was a sleety kind of rain. During the match itself, there was both rain and snow, but the game was not in any doubt at any stage.
Reading started off really well and almost got a goal in the first minute. We got a free-kick in midfield which then led to a corner but Wrexham were able to clear. We had further corners in the opening stages, and one of our attacks ended only when Jim McIntyre's shot was massively deflected away from the goal, but incredibly both the referee and linesman failed to spot that it hit a defender and so gave a goal-kick.
That was all forgotten after about ten minutes when we took the lead. Darren Caskey played a long ball over the top of the defence but not as far as the penalty area. A centre-back and the Wrexham goalkeeper made a mess of things trying to clear and the ball dropped nicely for Martin Butler to lob it back over everyone and into the net.
We continued to attack and Butler had an excellent opportunity to put us two ahead when he got the ball on or around the penalty spot and turned well to get in a left foot shot, but he didn't get enough pace on the ball. The keeper was able to dive to his right and make a save.
At this stage of the game, things were looking good. We were in the lead, playing well, and Wrexham weren't getting a look in. Their fans, after their recent run of four consecutive wins, must have been thinking that coming up against Reading was a completely different story from facing the other teams in the division. However, at around the 20 minute mark, all this changed. The turning point seemed to be a comedy collision between Anthony Rougier and Caskey. This not only broke up a Reading attack and left both of them looking slightly dazed, but also allowed Wrexham to move upfield. Fortunately they did not get a goal immediately otherwise the TV screenings would all have begun with our players looking like fools.
But for the second portion of the half, Wrexham put the Reading goal under serious pressure and we failed to make any positive moves beyond one shot from Matthew Robinson following a good run. As at Wycombe Robinson had to shoot with his right foot which made it easy for the defence to deal with it. Reading's problem at this stage of the game was that every time we had the ball we gave it away, whether by clueless long balls from defence, or because Rougier and Butler were unable to win headers up front, or because midfielders were closed down so quickly they just had to move the ball on before a good pass was available.
Fortunately our defence held firm, with both Hunter and Adrian Whitbread winning plenty of headers and stopping Wrexham getting close enough to goal to have a decent shot. The biggest cheer of the half from the home fans was when the scoreboard showed the result of some inferior contest going on elsewhere - the message is clearly that if they concentrated on proper sport they might have a better chance of winning matches.
The referee (rightly) played five minutes of injury time at the end of half, during which time we were just hanging on by our fingertips. If anything, it felt more like the end of a match where the home team were just permanently attacking our box during the whole extra period. We did hang on to make it still 1-0 at the break.
If we thought that half-time would make a difference we were sadly wrong. In the next 25 minutes, Wrexham rained attack after attack down on the Reading goal (just in front of the Reading fans so we did at least get a good view of the action). In the first minute of the half, Whitehead dealt with a long shot by diving to his right and chesting it away, presumably because of a late bounce that caught him out. That set the tone for what was to follow.
Minnutes after that let-off, a Wrexham attack down the left produced a hard cross that flew across the face of the goal and needed only a slight touch from anyone to go in. Later on, Wrexham did get past Whitehead with a shot, but Whitbread was on the goal-line to clear the ball away. A goalmouth scramble where several shots were blocked ended with Whitehead diving on the ball, then a free-kick on the edge of the box was only just over the bar with our keeper probably beaten.
Alan Pardew brought on Sammy Igoe for Caskey, in an attempt to relieve some of the pressure on the defence but this didn't have an immediate effect (well, apart from the exceptionally long time-wasting walk off the pitch that Caskey managed to get away with!). We did though get into the Wrexham penalty area soon after, with a Rougier run that ended with a shot which the keeper had to be smart to get down to and save. I'm pretty certain that attack was the only time we got that far upfield in the first 25 minutes of the second half.
And the pressure had to tell eventually. It was Wrexham's recent goalscoring find who levelled the scores, with a very good turn and left-foot shot from 15 yards out after they had worked the ball into our area with some good passes. There weren't many Wrexham fans at the game, but they all expected that their team could once again come back from being behind, and started to make noise on the three sides of the ground that they occupied.
Strangely, though, Wrexham seemed to sit back a little after getting the equaliser. They still had pressure, but now that they had something to lose they did not commit the same numbers of bodies to their attacks. I'm sure that most Reading fans would gladly have taken one point at this stage. Pardew instead brought on Cureton for Rougier in an attempt to give us some pace up front and this definitely worked. Cureton chased after some of our long hopeful balls in Butleresque style and so turned several of them into excellent passes over the Wrexham defence, when it looked as though they would go off for a goal-kick.
With the game starting to settle down a bit, Ricky Newman came on for McIntyre. Almost immediately Graeme Murty picked up an injury and was hobbling around at right-back. I didn't see how it happened but just before he started limping, Murty had to leap over the advertising hoardings to get the ball for a throw-in - with his track record (for example the pre-season injury from a log-carrying exercise), that was probably the incident that caused the limp. He stayed on the pitch though, and Wrexham missed their immediate chance to attack down the left before Murty was able to run the injury off.
Newman actually got a shot in just after coming on, but couldn't direct it properly and it went just wide. Then when a Wrexham attack broke down, James Harper got the ball in our half. He set off on a strong run down the left channel before pulling the ball back to Robinson. His left-foot cross found Butler at close range to the goal and he was able to turn the ball past the goalkeeper's despairing dive. Cue mad celebrations! Before the match, I thought we would have a good chance at catching Wrexham with counterattacks but this was the only time in the game that it really worked. Harper hadn't been that visible in the match either, up to this point, but he certainly has the knack of making a telling contribution.
Wrexham brought on some guy who clearly should have been on a basketball court. He towered over even the 6 foot 4 inch Barry Hunter, and not surprisingly won a lot of headers. What was more impressive was that Wrexham's dead-ball taker was able to pick this substitute out every time. This helped Wrexham put more pressure on our goal in their search for a second equaliser, but apart from one header that Whitehead had to turn over the crossbar they did not look as dangerous as earlier in the game.
In this half there were only three minutes of added time, which we were able to play out fairly comfortably to cling on to the three points. I've seen some people criticise Darren Caskey for heading straight down the tunnel after home games (something that I've never noticed, incidentally), but even though he had to come off the bench away from the tunnel to join in he was there on the pitch celebrating and applauding the travelling fans. As usual, it was Whitbread who was the most animated, though - it's still difficult to believe that he can act just like a fan even though he's only on loan. Meanwhile Pardew had taken Harper to one side, and was presumably running through all the things he'd done wrong in the game!
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