After his Leyton Orient side had been unluckily beaten 4-3 at Cardiff City Stadium a fortnight ago, Richie Wellens said you won’t see another opponent come to the ground and win the possession battle (54 to 46) while having 26 attempts on the Cardiff goal.
Mr Wellens was not proven wrong in the first league game after that seven goal thriller because City had 56 per cent possession to 44, but today’s opponents, Reading, matched the 26 shots Orient had.
Cardiff were doing so well prior to the first international break and then appeared to lose their way between the first and second break when they had five home matches to play and just four away ones.
Three wins and a draw from the away games was perfectly acceptable, as indeed were the performances at Burnley and Wigan, but Bradford, Burton and Newport all won in Cardiff and Orient should have done.
It certainly felt at the time that City had lost their way as October replaced September and, yet as we go into the spell between the October and November international breaks, we see that one win has taken us to the top of the league again!
Make no mistake about it, I’d say that only at Wigan have we played remotely like a top of a table side in recent weeks. It’s a concern that all too familiar doubts are resurfacing at home, but, on the other hand, we’ve turned losing positions in three home games this season into wins.
Of course, being a level lower than we’ve been used to being in the last couple of decades makes it easier to recover deficits, but, I saw nothing but defeat looming when we trailed 3-2 around the hour mark against Orient and it was the same again at half time today when it was Cardiff 0 Reading 1.
I mentioned after the Orient match that I don’t getBBM’s almost obsessive desire to change his centreback combination from one game to the next. I think the start he’s made here has earned him a fair bit of latitude , so I’m not going to call for his sacking or anything like that, but, I would welcome some sort of explanation as to why his tinkering extends to our centrebacks.
Today, having decided to go with Gabe Osho and Calum Chambers at the back, There was a further change at half time when the former was replaced by Will Fish.
Sadly, Osho was continuing a trend begun on his debut against Bradford when he gave away a daft penalty, then, against Orient, his poor back pass conceded us a goal while today he gave Reading an easy chance to score the game’s first goal and then conceded a really soft corner under no pressure.
The reaction when we signed Osho was that we’d bought someone who was too good for League One and when you consider that he’d played in the Premier League and Ligue A without making the sort of mistakes that he’s making every week for us it seems, something!g needed to done.
Bringing Fish on made sense, he improved our defending and made a brilliant block on the line to maintain out 2-1 lead. However, soon after he came on, Fish completely lost Jack Marriott and we were, yet again , indebted to Nathan Trott for getting us out of trouble. Fish was playing week in, week out earlier in the season and he had a consistency to his game which, hardly surprising ly , is not as clear now as it was.
That said, I thought the other three members of our back four all improved after Fish replace ed Osho.
Reading had the chances to be well clear at the break. Lewis Wing had a free kick deflected on to the cross bar, Trott denied Doyle and then the keeper was slightly at fault when Wing’s effort from thirty five yards flew into the net in a central position with Trott unsighted by Calum Chambers.
All City could offer in response was a scramble in front of goal which saw Yousef Salech and Joel Colwill denied from close range by desperate defending and goal keeping and they left the pitch to the sound of boos at half time.
City needed a quick response and got it with a first goal for the club by Omari Kellyman. At first viewing , it looked like the result of weak goalkeeping, but replays showed a deflection which made life awkward for Jack Steven’s.
Kpakio, City’s best outfield player provided the assist and when Kellyman’s replacement Isaak Davies combined with the young full back, Kpakio’s cross was turned in from eight yards by Salech to win the points.
City had improved, but Reading must have been wondering how they lost, particularly when Fish denied Paddy Lane and Trott saved from Charlie Savage.
An exciting afternoon then, but you can’t help thinking we cannot keep on winning like this.
