Six games left to go and it’s all to play for

About six weeks ago or so I typed these words on this blog;

“Well, it's not going to happen. It just isn't. There is no chance of Reading making the play-offs this year as we have drawn way too many games when a win was what was needed and, as has been proven against the top sides, we just aren't quite good enough.”

I’ll take my humble pie with cream please. Since publishing those words, Reading have gone on a run of seven wins out of eight (the one defeat coming at Manchester City in the FA Cup) and a six match winning run in the league, scoring 17 goals in said league games. At the time of writing, Reading were six points off the play-off places, having played the same number or more games than all of the teams around us and were on a run of one win in eight games. You can see why I was so pessimistic, right?

However, that run of games included fixtures against five of the top 12. With the combination of confidence gained from another Cup run (like last year) our form has improved immeasurably, so much so that we are the most in form team in Europe, joint with Barcelona, incidentally the first time these two teams have been mentioned in the same breath without a negative word also present in the sentence. Reading now sit 5^th in the league, six points clear of the 7^th placed team Milwall, with an outside chance of an automatic promotion spot.

So what has changed? From the look of it, not an awful lot. The starting XI has been largely consistent, as consistent as a team that can confidently flip between 4-4-2 and 4-5-1 can be, with injuries to a large swathe of players including Federici, Griffin, Cummings, Mills, Pearce, and Hunt, among others, being dealt with admirably. It is a credit to the squad how well we have coped with our injuries and arguably our first XI is as good as out second XI these days.

The run of six consecutive wins has hardly been achieved against inferior quality opposition either; the cliché that there is no easy game in football rings most true in the Championship. These wins have come against Middlesbrough (in a relegation battle at the time), Ipswich (outside chance of play-offs at time of fixture), Barnsley (never an easy place to go to), Portsmouth and Preston (two of the other form teams in the league) and Nottingham Forest (one defeat at home in 18 months before Saturday).

Perhaps what has pushed us comes back to the strength of the squad and the spirit imbued by Brian McDermott and his coaching team. The ability of consummate professionals like Brynjar Gunarsson to play out of position at right back so well for so long, the commitment of men like Brian Howard and Zurab Khizanishvili to be on the fringes of the squad to come in and make their mark and the talent of emerging youngsters like Alex McCarthy and Shaun Cummings to stake a claim for regular first team starters. The fact that so many players have come out and said how much they enjoy being at Reading and enjoy coming into work everyday (Khizanishvili, Tabb, Leigertwood for example) is a real testament to the skill of McDermott as a man-manager and is very key to our recent good habit of converting draws into wins, though the old Archibald quote regarding team spirit may well still be in evidence as none of the mentioned players were saying the same thing back in February.

However, I still have the feeling in the back of my mind of waiting for us to be found out. I feel that there is something there for teams to exploit whether it be our slightly slow defence, our reliance on Long, McAnuff and Kebe for creativity or our batch of talented but inexperienced goalkeepers, but as of yet, no teams have really successfully done this, as only eight defeats all season will testify to. Perhaps this is a year in the Championship where the teams that will get promoted are the ones which can hide their deficiencies best and for the longest, or most important, period of games, as even the leaders, QPR, showed on Saturday, every team in this league can be torn apart.

Looking forward to the next six games, the combination of our scorching-hot form and relatively easy run-in, we should have a play-off place secured as three wins from games against Scunthorpe (A), Leicester (H), Leeds (A), Sheffield United (H), Coventry (A) and Derby (H) will more than likely see us home. Five of those games are quite conceivably winnable but the prospect of an automatic promotion spot is completely off this blogger’s radar as the nagging doubt of being not quite good enough remains, though more humble pie will be happily consumed all the way to May 7^th should it actually happen.