March 25, 2006, at the Walkers Stadium, a decade on

From the most extreme emotional experiences, there tends to be a handful of freeze-frame moments which remain with you.
These are probably the moments that are said to flash before your eyes when you are about to meet your maker.
One of those experiences for me came ten years ago today – football is the most relevant irrelevance so there is no harm in a day as visceral, intense and joyous as March 25, 2006, at the Walkers Stadium, Leicester, being classed as an extreme emotional experience. Plus, I’m male so emotionally stunted; sport being one of the elements allowed to pierce that.
The key thing on the day was context – Reading did not need to win to guarantee promotion to the top flight for the first time. It was going to happen that season, in the coming games, regardless.
On the face of it, there was no need for emotional engagement with the day. No jeopardy; no risk; the only failure being losing a game and even that could have seen us promoted. Why the stress?
But, the context. Going for our first ever promotion to the top flight, residual resentment over the events of 1994/95 (I was four at the time but the one promotion place, 2-0 with a penalty and bloody Fabian de Freitas was ingrained) and that nagging, nagging feeling all football fans have that it just cannot be true.

Moment one

It shouldn’t feel strange to fall behind in a game of football but that was the kind of season we were having. Leicester City away was our 40th of game of the season and this was only the 12th time we had fallen behind in a game. 12!
Nothing of Iain Hume’s goal sticks in the mind’s eye but what does is a feeling of slight confusion and disbelief at half time to be 1-0 down. This was our day to party in what was becoming a perfect season and someone had taken a piss in the punch. We couldn’t lose and get promoted, not after how we had performed all year.
We were probably going to go up anyway but it didn’t feel like it – it wasn’t anger or annoyance, it was quiet and nervous.
A regular enough feeling but in the wider context of the day, enhanced.

Moment two

The equaliser.
Even the very best goals you ever see tend to be lost in the mists of time and you end up remembering them how you saw it on TV. But not Kevin Doyle’s that day.
I remember thinking we won’t score from a right-footed inswinger of a corner. James Harper rarely took corners that season – the oft masterful left-footed deliveries of Bobby Convey and Nicky Shorey were the usual set piece routines that season.
I remember the mesh of bodies in the box and thinking for a split second the ball will just get lost in there before it bounced through a man in a white shirt (I had no idea who) got his head behind it. Time slows.
The middle of the net ripples.
The rest, a blank.

Moment three

Two or three minutes previous, the message had come over the PA system that Watford and Leeds had dropped points. We had done enough to win promotion.
Two or three minutes of forgettable but unforgettable jumping around, shouting, singing, hugging the complete strangers in front, to my right and behind.
Two or three minutes of enjoying the loss of control that football brings.
Two or three minutes before feeling I had a lot of space on my left-hand side. I look down. I see my father sat with his head in his hands; not in a despairing way but simply to take some time to himself and remember all the years that had led up to that moment.
Context. Then, release, he joined in with the rest of the incoherent, unconfined joy.

Plenty more happened that day but it often takes the fan videos (still stored on my laptop from the wonderful webpage of resources which emerged after March 25) and the season’s DVD to recall them.It was a delight to discover one of the fan videos was taken from three seats to my right, a keen refresher to fill in the joy-caused blanks.
These are my memories from where I was stood that day – their value only sentimental to me but to others, I would hope they bring back their own freeze-frame moments from that unrepeatable day.

Alexandre Gaydamak and Portsmouth vs Anton Zingarvich and Reading

I'm currently reading Jim White's (the writer, not the football transfer maniac with more mobiles than a modern day Pablo Escobar) ambitious 'Premier League; A History in 10 Matches' which explores...well, you can probably guess what the subject matter is.
The eighth match in the book is one Reading fans will never be able to forget as it was one of the most conspicstaging posts in the collapse of our greatest ever team.
It was on Saturday, September 29. Stephen Hunt, Dave Kitson, Shane Long and an OG from a Nicky Shorey short were our scorers. And we still lost.
Yup, it was Portsmouth 7 Reading 4 - a match which presumably still has Alan Hansen waking up in the middle of the night drenched in cold sweat and needing to turn the bedside table lamp on.
The chapter focuses largely on the largescale financial incompetence at Portsmouth under the ill-fated Harry Redknapp/ Alexandre Gaydamak axis starting in around 2006 and how the club are still paying the price for that to this very day. The Reading angle is largely sketched in (small club inferiority complex yada yada yada), but more on which later.
The overall summarisation being that Portsmouth's demise changed the way the Premier League saw the potential financial implosion of its members - from being something very distant to being a genuine threat (though one which one always got the feeling they were hoping to just keep Portsmouth going until the end of the season and then they would be the Football League's problem).
The chapter ends on a positive with the takeover of Portsmouth by its Supporters' Trust and highlighting the fact that their opponents on that strange September afternoon were a sustainable model they could seek to emulate.
This book was written last year and hindsight is 20/20 of course but given the events of the past year at Reading, it makes such a suggestion seem somewhat laughable. The pace of change in modern football, eh?
The club and Sir John Madejski are praised in the book for the self-sustainable model imposed and more or less achieved (in relative football terms anyway) from 2006 to 2011 - a model which many Reading fans were rightly proud of and perhaps, whisper it, even miss the security of.
While Portsmouth chased the dream and lived so scarily obviously - and obviously scarily - beyond their limited means, Reading cut their cloth (to use the parlance) and lived within their similarly limited means.
However, both ended up being sold on to a young owner with ties to Russia with no real indication given where they had earned their respective wealth with suggestions dubious Daddy was behind each of them respectively.
While Reading - or so it would seem if the latest takeover gets finalised - were saved by the early prudent bookkeeping and owning their stadium and their training ground (making them a much more attractive purchase), Portsmouth were not so lucky and League Two has proved to be the place where enough anvils were thrown out of the hot balloon to allow them to float.
Were it not for Reading's circumstances of owing a modern, income-generating machine of a stadium, the post-Zingaravich world could be looking a lot worse - indeed, genuine fears over administration earlier this summer suggests it may not have been all that far away.
All of which goes back to that 7-4 game nearly seven years ago where two similar-sized clubs met with markedly different immediate pasts, presents and immediate futures but ended up going in the same direction (though to differing extents) further down the line.