The Weekly Bobbins: Reading’s Pompey Horror Show, Knibbs Exit Rumours
Bobbins has rebooted Five Things as The Weekly Bobbins but, unfortunately, there’s bad news on and off the pitch to discuss in the first entry...
Hello and welcome to a new column from an old soul. The post-match articles that were previously known as Five Things have been replaced with this: The Weekly Bobbins. So instead of specific commentary on a singular game, this has been updated to a weekly ‘what the hell has gone on now?’ with all things related to Reading Football Club.
As the club begins a new chapter, so are we at The Tilehurst End. But it’s still written by me, sorry about that. (Not really sorry.)
So, without further ado, what the hell has gone on now?
There would be no better (or worse) place to start than the rather dreadful performance against Portsmouth in our last pre-season friendly before the curtain raiser at Lincoln City. As with the previous home friendly - against Tottenham Hotspur - it was a fixture that nobody would have expected us to win, but unlike the showing against Spurs where we were generally quite tight and did not get exposed in open play that much, in this fixture we looked further away from being the finished article than when we started.
There’s no real good way to dice it up: it was a collective horror show. Time and again, Pompey found more space, time and quality, and they exposed us constantly. It may be suggested that they could and should do that because they are much more mature unit under John Mousinho, a head coach who is highly thought of and has improved Portsmouth incredibly well of late.
In truth, they looked a lot more composed, strong, tactically adept and so on. In every department they looked like the kind of side that we would want to be one day. In contrast, we looked so far off it. Almost nothing was done well or well enough to trouble the opposition.
Of course, there are many reasons for this and they’re to be expected, but we didn’t expect it to be this… bad. So, what went wrong?
Chiefly, our right side just didn’t work. Kelvin Abrefa, who would appear to be the de facto right-back (for now), seemed lost at sea. He was cruelly exposed by Josh Murphy (once a triallist for Reading), who rinsed him time and again. This wasn’t helped by Andre Garcia who, on an uncustomary right side, did not seem to have supporting Abrefa on his agenda.
I could go on and this would end up as a match report, but it’s safe to say that relationships all over the park are still forming and very much in their infancy. As much as we have lauded our midfield trios, this midfield of Lewis Wing, Charlie Savage and Ben Elliott looked power-puff and disjointed. The less we say about up front the better.
Obvious flaws in the game were highlight by the lack of Harvey Knibbs once again. Previously this had been largely due to an injury, but latterly down to the increasing rumours that he would no longer be plying his trade in this parish.
That’s not much of a surprise considering his output over the last two seasons, but it’s a tough one to swallow nonetheless. In truth, Knibbs deserves a shot at Championship football and, if the rumours appear to be true then Charlton Athletic have won his signature, with the fee being alleged in some quarters to be around £1.8m.
The loss of Knibbs will undoubtedly hurt us and we will struggle without him. The biggest problem being - and this is reflected in our other high-profile outgoings in Tyler Bindon and Amadou Mbengue - how much worse will we be for it?
At this point, and it is an obvious knee-jerk reaction, we will be worse off. Paudie O’Connor and Finley Burns may well turn out to be a fine partnership, we sincerely hope that they do, but the likely loss of Knibbs is one that we’ve not attempted to pre-empt.
It could be argued that Knibbs was already going to leave and the club would have wanted him to be sold sooner in the window so we could have re-invested that money earlier. There will be many theories on what our budget looks like, what lengths they are willing to go to get what we need in those all-important chance-creating and goalscoring areas. At the moment, the view among fans is that the mantra of sustainability is overly hampering our desire to not just succeed, but to be even competitive.
That said, we have to be mindful that, while the new ownership is a line in the sand, it’s not quite starting from zero. It is still picking up the pieces from the last life-threatening regime of the man who shall not be named. Who knows what further skeletons have been uncovered and what other costs that need to be cut along the way?
Ultimately, it’s chip-paper thinking. As fans we simply don’t know. As much as Rob Couhig likes to be bold and brazen, there are things he will never reveal.
Personally, I have always felt that this bedding-in period would be painful and it could last the entire season. Not for a minute have I thought that the club would go all out to get promoted this season. It is simply still trying to recover from being terminally ill first.
To come out the other side as being fighting fit and pushing the higher echelons would be something too much, too soon. That swing from near death to ecstasy in the space of a year just doesn’t seem realistic to me.
The coming week remains a massive one for the club. The defeat to Portsmouth will have knock-on effects: it should highlight the need for more bona fide first-team players to be sought, and quickly too, otherwise the first few months of the rapidly approaching new season could be a not-pretty sight. And even then, even if we do get two or three in the door, they will not have had time to gel.
Cohesion is the word that comes to mind when I think about the club in general: it seems to fit most aspects on and off the field of what is required. At the moment, we don’t seem to have a lot of it.
There’s a lot of playing of Whack-a-Mole, as new issues arise and the challenges to sign targets become harder. But one of the main aspects of pre-season is that so much is learned, especially from defeats.
Learning how to be more cohesive, on this showing at least, is something that is very apparent and cannot come soon enough.