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This Reading side is a conundrum. A confusion. A mystery wrapped in frustration.
And honestly, this edition is hard to write – not because anything new has happened, but because nothing has. We keep collecting points while playing nowhere near the level of a team hovering around the playoff places, but are we developing? Only the top three have lost fewer games than us, however. That has to count for something.
The stats will tell you we’re second-best in almost every metric you can throw at a screen. But the only number that matters – the one at the end of the match – keeps falling our way, or at least not against us. So why does being a point off the playoff possibility feel like a bitter pill rather than a pleasant surprise?
Because it’s all about the how.
Against Bradford City, it was the same old story: huff, puff and very little good stuff. Passes bounced off shins or weren’t even close to their target. On occasion we played it sweetly through the thirds, but we soon abandoned that for the long ball. And that long ball almost always went toward Kelvin Ehibhatiomhan and was lost again.
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He’s no Jack Marriott – not in movement, not in anticipation, not in understanding the role. Marriott creates angles and invites passes. Ehibhatiomhan drifts and hopes.
The contrast couldn’t be clearer, and with Marriott out for weeks (if not months) with a hamstring injury, that gap becomes a chasm.
Sean Patton, in his brief cameo, at least had more of an idea. That’s both encouraging and deeply worrying. If Patton becomes our de facto number nine, it’s because the alternative simply isn’t working – and we’ve seen enough to know it won’t.
Football, being the strange beast it is, handed us two goals in seven chaotic minutes – courtesy of two former Portsmouth players who’ve barely shown a glimpse of what we’d hoped they’d bring thus far.
Paddy Lane and Matt Ritchie finally delivered something meaningful, and Bradford did what we usually do: made changes to hold on, lost focus, and paid for it.
Ritchie’s post‑match comments stuck with me. He spoke openly about the lack of confidence and belief in the squad. It was the first time anyone from inside the dressing room admitted what we’ve sensed. Leam Richardson’s analysis rarely gives us that humanity; Ritchie’s did.
Yep, results have improved since Richardson arrived. The points tally looks healthy, we’re certainly not going down. But where is the swagger? Nowhere to be seen. Injuries haven’t helped, and a settled XI has been a rarity, but the bigger issue is identity. What are we? What makes us tick? Are we even ticking?
There’s a pulse, sure. But where’s the heart?
If this team reaches the playoffs – and that’s still a big “if” – they’ll need a level of belief and mental toughness we’ve yet to see. Imagine this group at Wembley. Would the occasion swallow them whole? Based on what we’ve seen so far, it’s not an unfair question.
Right now, we’re scraping wins, hanging on or capitalising on opposition mistakes. That’s not a recipe for playoff success. It’s barely a recipe for staying in the playoff race in the normal sense.
Some will say points are points – don’t worry about the aesthetics, and that’s perfectly fine. But if you scratch below that superficial level, I want to see control, confidence and game management that looks intentional rather than accidental.
According to Sigmund Freud’s Pleasure Principle, we want pleasure without the pain to fulfil our needs. At the moment it feels like a lot of pain and little pleasure!
How we get from a position of painfully grinding out results to actually arriving at the point where we get a pleasure of deserving them remains a contradiction. We’re seventh, a point off a position where we can dare to dream. If only we had a striker…
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