Reading 1-1 Shrewsbury Town: A Tough Watch

Harry’s take as Reading slumped to a poor draw against Shrewsbury.

The last game I was able to attend was the last match of Ruben Selles’ reign - the comfy 3-0 win over Cambridge United in December.

The day after I jetted out to Australia for a few months of travelling, and am currently writing this from Sydney. This means I’ve been somewhat out of sync with the world of Reading. That’s good in some ways (I’ve managed to detach myself a little from the evermore depressing state of affairs), but obviously it hurts in others.

After many failed attempts at getting up at 2am to watch the Saturday 3pm kick-offs, the midweek kick-off this time gave me a chance to watch the game.

Just to let you know, we were never going to win tonight by the way: the matches I’ve managed to watch so far since departing for a land down under have been the 2-0 loss to Lincoln City, the 0-0 against Charlton Athletic and the last 20 minutes against Burton Albion when I missed the comeback to 2-2 but managed to catch the last-minute winner for the Brewers.

Of course I say this all with my tongue firmly lodged into my cheek. Although I never really expect a result (supporting this club does that to you), I was hoping for a lot, lot better than what we got tonight (or today? it’s 9am here).

I’ve seen a lot of comments on the Reading FC Twitter-sphere about how we’ve seemed to go a lot more direct under Noel Hunt - I kind of understand where people are coming from now.

Granted, it’s a very small sample size for me, and there were a lot of factors that didn’t exactly make the game conducive to some nice football: a Gareth Ainsworth side are never going to make it easy for you, and I’d heard things about and seen pictures of the pitch, but it was actually quite sad to see it in that state. It seems the Dai Yongge regime wasn’t fully content with sucking the proverbial life out of us fans, so it’s started to take the literal life out of the grass on the SCL pitch.

However, with all that said, the quality on show was really poor from both teams. As mentioned, Shrewsbury were never going to turn up and try to get the ball on the deck and play football, but we should’ve. There were more slices than a New York pizzeria, and more mis-kicks than an amateur mixed martial artist.

The first half was particularly poor. While we dominated possession, we did it in meaningless areas. It was the visitors who threatened the most, and only a phenomenal double save from Joel Pereira from Marquis’ lame penalty saved our bacon in the opening half an hour or so.

The opener came from the only moment of quality I can remember from the entire game to be honest. Kelvin Ehibhatiomhan rescued a deep cross from Lewis Wing before wriggling past his defender brilliantly and laying it on a plate for Jayden Wareham. But it didn’t get much better than that for the rest of the night unfortunately.

I want to say Shrewsbury got what they deserved with their equaliser in the second half, but I don’t think they really did. A more accurate way to put it would be that we got what we deserved.

Whether or not Ehibhatiomhan should’ve had a penalty in the latter stages is up for debate. From what I saw and the replays I’ve seen, I'm still not quite sure. I am one to go off reactions though and not only did his team mates seem utterly convinced it was a penalty, but Shrewsbury’s keeper looked a little bit sheepish and chose to just walk quietly over to taking his goal-kick.

However, in my opinion that’s by the by: we didn't put in a performance anywhere near being worthy of all three points, that's the long and the short of it.

Charlie Savage mentioned it in an interview after a game recently that Hunt has switched things up so that first and foremost we try not to concede and we make sure we’re solid at the back, then in the second half we have a base to take the game to the opposition. That’s absolutely fine for away games, but in my opinion we can’t let the kind of mentality creep into every single game.

Under Selles we went out to win every game, and the players flourished under that. We had a method that we stuck to and it was working. To me, having watched the games I’ve watched, particularly this one, it seems the players have fallen back into a bit of a shell. Hunt needs to find a way to break them out of it again, because that’s when they perform best.

There’s also more than something to be said that, when chasing the game in the last few minutes, all Hunt could do was bring on Abraham Kanu for Ehibhatiomhan, moving Kelvin Abrefa (a right-back who had just been playing left-back) to the right-hand side of attack, leaving Billy Bodin as the central striker. A timely reminder that this is a very thin squad punching way above their weight.

The dream of a top six finish is still there, but we can’t start hanging pictures on the living room wall until we’ve repaired the structural integrity of the wall itself - the Dai Yongge storm cloud continues to rumble on, and it seems to be darker than ever at this moment in time. That needs to be our priority.