Making a statement

Ten days ago, I wrote a meandering, dreadful piece of writing about the perceptions of the 1-0 scoreline in football. Really, do not read it at all unless you do literally have all the time in the world to burn.

The main point of the piece was to talk about how 1-0 wins in football are talked up by managers, pundits and commentators (no one-size fits all use of the word “media” here, friends) as “the sign of a successful team”.

This cliché is, inevitably, bollocks. The only time a series of wins by the odd goal looks good is come the end of the season, when hindsight becomes 20:20 and one can look back at that run of wins and say “yeah, that was where the confidence was built and promotion/title was really won”. At the time of those wins, confidence is never there, in the stands at least, to think a win is inevitable.

Much more confidence in your team comes from when you give another club a real dicking. It demonstrates a marked superiority, particularly when you add a clean sheet to the offering too. You can see both on the pitch and on paper that you are a lot better than a fellow team.

And so we come to Reading.

As we’ve quietly gone about our business since the turn of the year, picking up 31 points from 39 available (or 43 points from 51 since December 10^th), we haven’t  really destroyed anyone. Largely single goal or two goal wins have been the order of the day, built on solid defensive performances.

Whilst looking impressive, multiple games in which one unlucky break or piece of magic and the story could be completely different have, for myself at least, doubted how good we might actually be.

Nothing quite breeds confidence like some good solid numbers combined with an impressive performance. Winning well whilst playing badly is good and winning at the very least is also good but a superb performance married with a huge margin of victory is the business.

But, the game against Barnsley was so much more than some confirmation that we can destroy a team when we want to. There were a myriad of other factors to consider.

With our winning run coming to an end in midweek at Doncaster, it was interesting to see how we would bounce back from the smallest of setbacks. My own theory was that the pressure might have been released a bit as the overbearing nature of wanting to keep that run going would be lifted; an extended unbeaten run is a far more common occurrence than a long winning one. That would appear to have been the case.

Secondly, as is so often said, being the hunted is quite a different kettle of fish to being the hunter and Saturday marked the first time this season we were in that position with Reading going into the game second ahead of West Ham. Against a team in a decent run of form, we responded to this new challenge by hitting four goals, taking our goal difference above that of third-placed West Ham and briefly going top of the league.

On the other hand, our East London rivals have felt the pressure and slumped to three draws in a row. It would appear our squad has taken on the experience of last-years late-season pressure and how to cope with it. Pushing on for the whole 90 minutes to grab an extra goal to secure that improved goal difference also shows this experience coming to the fore.

There is still a long way to go this season and I’d still make us third-favourites for promotion thanks to our tricky run-in and the quality of our rivals but quietly going about our business is what we do and there still seems to be some reluctance to take our promotion push based on a “better-than-the-sum-of-our-parts” team approach. Long may it continue that way.