| Competition | Date | Opponent | Venue | Result |
| Division 2 | Saturday, 19th February | Scunthorpe United | Away | Drew 2-2 |
Match facts:
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Opposition goals:
Half-time:
Gamebreaker:
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Referee: Chris
Foy (St Helens)
Reading line-up:
Subs not used:
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Reading red cards:
Match report:
"Welcome to lan ord Park" says the sign visible from the railway line. This ground's only 12 years old, and they still don't show it any respect! This was my first visit to this particular version of the new Legoland grounds, and if you haven't been there, you've not missed a great deal.
Scunthorpe also show no respect for the game of football. They have two big forwards, and only one tactic. That tactic is to get throw-ins on the right-hand side of the ground, and take advantage of their guy with the long, and suspiciously illegal-looking, throw. Whenever a Scunthorpe player gets the ball he looks to get it out to the right wing, because they know there's a good chance of getting a throw-in.
In the first minute, they nearly scored from one of these throws. After a flick-on, one of their strikers landed a shot onto the top of the bar. Did we learn from this? No, of course not. For the rest of the game, we continued to kick the ball out in exactly the places that they wanted it. A schoolboy could have done better. Adrian Williams was particularly guilty of this.
In fact, Reading's whole approach to this game was shoddy. It is obvious that the players think that we are now safe from relegation, and have no chance of the play-offs, and they are going to take it easy for the rest of the season. Well, this is exactly what went wrong at the end of last season, and got us into habits that we have only just got out of, and I am not prepared to see it happen again. Fortunately, it appears that at least one of our management team feels the same way, because we played a much more up-tempo game in the second half, after what must have been a half-time rollicking.
In the first half, Scunthorpe had two chances apart from the one I have just mentioned and scored from both. The second was a good turn and shot by Reading reject Quailey, but Williams gave him far too much space. I couldn't see clearly what happened for the first, but it looked like the ball squirted out of a huge group of players right to the feet of a home forward, who had an easy chance.
Reading on the other hand had quite a few shots on goal, but none looked very dangerous. Forster shot just wide once and then well wide soon after. McIntyre got a 15-yard shot in but didn't get any power on it. Forster looked lively on occasions, and had a penalty claim after falling over in the area, but it looked more like a dive to me. Soon after that, we did get a penalty, though. From a cross the Scunthorpe defender handled a ball that he didn't really need to under pressure from Butler, and Caskey scored from the spot with a fierce shot into the top left corner.
We finished the half on the up, and continued the second in the same manner. It was no surprise when we equalised. We had an attack down the right, which broke down, but Scunthorpe only cleared the ball to Robinson. He played a ball down to the goal-line. It looked as though Caskey would not reach it, but he managed to get a good cross in, which McIntyre directed back across goal and into the top right-hand corner.
We should definitely gone on to win this game, against very limited opposition, but the final goal would not come. The best chance was from another very good run from Forster. He outpaced the defence, but shot wide, and it was impossible to tell how wide from the away end. Forster had another chance when he ran across the edge of the area to create space, but sliced his left-foot shot as the defender struggled to catch up.
At the other end, Scunthorpe had a shot that went just wide in what felt like their only attack of the entire half.
Towards the end of the game, Forster started to attract some bad challenges from the home defenders who had realised that they couldn't cope with him. With the last of these he needed lengthy treatment and was substituted soon after. We can only hope that it was not a recurrence of the old injury.
At the end we celebrated a draw, but that means that we've dropped four points against this very poor team this season, and no-one should be happy with that.
Last word must go to the fans. There was an exceptionally good turnout from Reading, with the convoy and win bonus obviously working. But we still didn't really turn on the noise, and those people who say there was a great atmosphere have short memories.
Match notes:
Match preview:
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Ticket information:
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