To clarify, this game is not a derby. Never has been, never will be. It’s a local game that is ironically hard to get to.
The train journey from Reading is a nightmare (have a look now, go on). Driving is easy until you want to get to the ground. So while this game is good geographically, the actual travel time is silly and ridiculous.
As a general rule, I don’t mind Wycombe as a place. I don’t like the hills or the traffic, but Buckinghamshire in general ranks highly on my counties of the UK list.
I chose to drive (because I haven’t spent enough time in the car this week ha ha ha) and park at the station. I met my fiend in the Flint Cottage, the pub opposite the station, and then got a cab from there to the ground.
There’s only one way into the ground and out again. It’s a bit like one of those old western films where the cowboy rides in on a horse, hitches it by an old wooden pub and then gets the horse some water and goes “good horse, thanks for getting me here”.
Except there were no horses, no wooden pubs and no cowboys. Just people milling around in replica football shirts and going “oooh I hope we win today”. At a guess, I’d say the Reading fans outnumbered the Wycombe Wanderers fans by at least five to one. At least.
I think the rivalry with Wycombe has been forced over the years and clearly the police thought so too. There was literally overkill on this outside the ground – I’m not sure what they were expecting but I’ve always found Wycombe fans to be reasonable, balanced and not insane. While there were a few cheeky Reading fans in attendance, I think Bucks police will find they wasted money on this fixture.
The beer tent was hot. It’s an intriguing set-up and one that, to the naked eye, looks chaotic with lines pouring out of the canvas-clad structure. In actual fact, the lines move quickly and the service was decent. A nice drop of Rebellion lager outside on the concrete concourse was just the ticket and our fans, despite the poor start, were in good spirits.
Oh, forgot to say, I saw Sim at the station and I asked him for a drink but he didn’t want to speak to me and turned his back when I tried to speak. That’s OK, that’s fine. It is what is Sim…
(Editor’s note: Ben is deliberately omitting the fact that I was on the phone when he walked up to me and rudely interrupted me regardless.)
We smuggled into the ground at around 2.53 and found some seats near the front. Away-day etiquette was in full flow where people just sat/stood anywhere and that’s OK. It’s an odd ground but quite endearing – none of the stands match size-wise, there are trees at the back (basically a forest) and there are always plenty of seats spare in the home ends. I like it as a place, I really do.
The voice of 1,900 fans could be heard singing loudly but these were shot down like a clay pigeon on a middle-class stag do when Fred Onyedinma scored early in the game, against the run of play. Rumbles from our fans came in quickly and you feared the worst at that point. We struggled to grow into the game and were losing the ball rapidly.
And then, out of nowhere, Mamadi Camara tucked away one of the best headed goals I’ve seen since Pavel Pogrebnyak at Chelsea in 2013. Shortly after that, Lewis Wing thought “F it” and thwacked the ball into the net, destroying Luke J’s camera in the aftermath. An absolute jostle in the away end followed and, in the chaos, I shouted” “Luke are you OK and is your camera fine?” But he didn’t hear me and that’s OK.
Despite 1,900 fans being in attendance, you didn’t feel the concourse corner was that busy, I guess because they let fans out to the beer tent in that time. It’s a good system and works well to be honest.
Once we scored the goal, I felt we were the better team overall. We looked solid, composed and much better than previous games. Ben Elliott and Charlie Savage were both taken off around the 80-minute mark and, from that point, we lost the power and creativity in midfield. We sat back and didn’t push up the pitch: as a result, we ended up conceding in the 89th minute. Disaster.
An overall better performance was marred by us dropping two points when three would have been perfect. This was a game that could and should have been won but wasn’t, and that’s frustrating. There’s no other word for it. Five games without a win isn’t ideal in the slightest and leaves a big gap for us to close moving forward.
We are desperately lacking forward impetus in the final third. While Derrick Williams looks a great addition at the back, the other signings are yet to really sparkle and we are pinning our hopes on the players who have been there previously to spark our results into life.
Port Vale next week now looks like a crunch game for us and there can’t be anyone connected with the club who is happy with this start. Everyone at the club needs to get on the same page and share the expectations for what we can and should achieve quickly, otherwise it could be a season that is over before it’s truly begun.
Until next time.
