TWB is back for the second time this week, but alas, a similarly poor Reading showing is under the microscope.
Nothing. That appears to be what Leam Richardson has learned about his team six games into his tenure. It’s also the number of points we looked like taking at Bradford, and increasingly, the amount of faith supporters have that this group can turn things around.
At face value, Richardson’s comment could be dismissed as the weary sigh of a manager frustrated by another fruitless trip on the road. But he hasn’t been here long enough to be worn down by Reading’s long-standing away-day ineptitude. This isn’t the lament of a man battered by a season’s worth of failure. This is after six games.
That’s the worrying part.
He did row it back slightly, talking about players still learning about each other and him learning about them, but this group urgently needs to look itself in the mirror. Better still, look at each other, talk, argue, thrash it out. Anything other than drifting along in this fog of passivity.
Long-standing away woes
The defeat at Peterborough United was meek. Toothless. Devoid of intensity. And it wasn’t an isolated incident. Away performances, stretching back into the Ruben Selles era, have consistently lacked belief and bite. There feels like something fundamentally broken in the club’s mentality.
During the Dai Yongge era, there was a siege mentality. It was ugly and exhausting, but it existed. Once that disappeared, nothing replaced it.
On top of that, we lost players such as Sam Smith, Harvey Knibbs, Amadou Mbengue and Tyler Bindon, players who would have run through walls for the club.
What we’ve lost has not been rediscovered. That doesn’t mean the current group aren’t trying but something vital is missing from the fabric of the squad. Some will argue it’s quality, and that’s fair. But something even more basic is absent: belief.
Away fixtures now come with a default assumption. We’re not winning that. Week after week, it’s hard to see where the next point on the road is coming from.
Blackpool was the exception, a rare alignment of us taking chances and Blackpool being utterly dreadful. Remove that, and we’re a brutal watch.
We scan the fixture list and don’t see results coming. If we can’t see them, the players certainly can’t, and it shows.
What’s going wrong?
There are many reasons for this malaise, but one theme runs through it all. Too often we play like we don’t want it enough. We start slowly. The tempo barely registers. There’s little fight, little energy, little desire. The intensity just isn’t there. That basic mental toughness, the insistence on doing your job properly in every action, is missing.
Go a goal down and that’s usually that. There’s no collective reaction. Our weakness is our weakness.
It’s like being constantly told everything will be fine, that you’re brilliant and smart and it’ll all work out, without any evidence whatsoever. We were told we’d be up there. Told recruitment was excellent. Told to trust the process. Right now, most of those platitudes feel hollow.
“Lewis Wing is a wonderful footballer, capable of winning games on his own, but we do not need a quiet captain”
Recruitment, bluntly, has been poor. Matty Jacob and Matt Ritchie have not worked out. Jacob looked alarmingly out of his depth, quite possibly one of the weakest left-backs we’ve had in recent years. Ritchie has yet to even complete 90 minutes in a Reading shirt. The re-signing of Kelvin Ehibhatiomhan increasingly looks like a mistake: a player who can play in two positions but neither excels nor looks comfortable in either. I could go on.
The captaincy choice also feels wrong. Lewis Wing is a wonderful footballer, capable of winning games on his own, but we do not need a quiet captain. We need someone demonstrative, demanding, unmistakably in charge. When Joel Pereira is leading the pre-match huddle, that tells its own story.
“Leading by example” only works if the example is replicable. Wing’s best moments are individual. Nobody else can do what he does. So what, exactly, are they meant to follow?
We need a captain who is valiant, vocal and voracious. For all Wing’s quality, where are the collective moments? Where are the team goals, the togetherness, the ‘Bristol Rovers away’ spirit? It’s all vanished.
Pin this to the dressing room wall. Prove me wrong. Show fight. Show desire. Show that you actually want to win. Right now, it doesn’t even look like you particularly like each other. Everyone seems terrified of upsetting anyone else.
Stand up. Be counted. Fight like you mean it.
Because at the moment, there’s nothing there.
Category: General Sports
