The Royals’ good form ended on Saturday after a disappointing 3-1 defeat to Leyton Orient at Brisbane Road.
Former player Dom Ballard scored all three Orient goals on a fantastic afternoon for the home
side. Jack Marriott scored for Reading to equalise but Orient finished strong.
The defeat leaves us in 11th, four points from the play-offs and six points off the relegation zone. Here is what manager Leam Richardson had to say, he spoke to Royals TV.
Richardson on the defeat
“First and foremost, congratulations to Leyton Orient, I thought from the first minute we probably had a bit of a whack around the head and we never recovered.
“I thought they outran, outfought us first and foremost and that’s the fundamentals of football. That’s why we went on the run because we started with a really good foundation, outworking teams and then our football came to fruition, but we never got going today.
“We’ve got to respect certainly the opposition and respect ourselves more. We can’t just turn up to the stadium to win cause we think we’re a good footballing team, we have to make sure we respect ourselves first and foremost and do the fundamentals.
“We have to win our duels, win our races, headers, tackles, start there and once you do that, then you can build from that platform and be good which we have been doing.”
Richardson on the break in fixtures
“That will be an excuse because if we would have won, we would have said we’re really fresh.
“We didn’t get the result we wanted. We weren’t in a rhythm coming off the back of a couple of good performances, and you could see that, but no, we’ve been playing since August.
“We give the lads a couple of days to reset their Christmas break, hoping that we’ll come back a lot fresher. But nothing to do with that today.
“That was down to each and every individual losing their battles and we never recovered from it.”
Richardson on moving forwards
“We get on the training ground, we work hard. We start another run. There’s only us who can help each other. So we’ll certainly do that tomorrow morning.
“Digest it, and we’ll come again because we’ve set a level and to be fair to the players, they have set a level over the past couple of months since we’ve been in, but we shouldn’t be able to let that dip below that level because we’ve set our standards and we want to maintain that.
“It’s a good thing about football, there’s always a game around the corner where we’ve certainly got to give ourselves a better platform than we did today.
“You’ve got to be mindful that the lads have been doing really well the last couple of months. So we’ll give them that one today and then we’ll move on.”
Richardson on the game after the equaliser
“I think, you know, we worked hard, we got through to half-time, probably a little bit fortunate, 1-0, from truth to be known. But then we came out a bit more of an intense, got a really good goal, which is probably the only positive of today.
“Got ourselves back in it, but then again, we didn’t give ourselves a platform or a foundation to build on that”
Richardson on Dom Ballard’s hat-trick
“Fair credit to him. You have got to cope with it. It doesn’t matter who it is. You know, he scored three goals without a finger laid on him today. So fair play.”
Richardson on Will Keane’s debut
“Will’s only been here a couple of days. He knows a lot of how we want to play, but he’s got to know the group to move on. We saw flashes of his quality that he’s got and he’ll be a really good addition to the squad”
