It all seems a bit ‘meh’ at the moment. I argued after the 2-2 draw against Exeter City that there is a bigger, perhaps more positive, picture than the last few results and performances had suggested.
However, even I left the unique AFC Wimbledon home ground feeling pretty flat, detached and apathetic, which wasn’t helped by my train back to Birmingham being delayed for over two and a half hours.
Here’s how the fans reacted to a game defined by uncharacteristic errors…
Sloppy errors
It was a lacklustre performance all round, but all three of Wimbledon’s goals stemmed from poor individual errors. Joel Pereira would’ve had a sleepless night from the first two goals, and Liam Fraser gave the ball away far too cheaply for the eventual winner.
The errors were perhaps symptomatic of the wider performance, but they still shouldn’t be happening, and it’s a kick in the teeth for all three to happen in one game.
There was despair, shock and anger from the fans…
The performance
As mentioned, although they certainly didn’t help, the errors were not what lost us the game – the performance over the entire 90 minutes did.
I’m more of an optimist than most, I think, but there needs to be so much more evidence of progress than we saw against the Dons. Jack Marriott’s equaliser aside, I can’t remember a genuine chance we created from open play, and although we managed to fight back twice, we also allowed Wimbledon to do the same.
Wimbledon seemed to find the extra few percent that we just couldn’t and that’s always a difficult pill for a fan to swallow…
A tale of apathy
It seems on Saturday evening the Reading FC hashtag turned into a bit of a melting point. Perhaps this loss is the one that has broken the camel’s back.
I think the consensus is that the club have lost something in recent times. The rebuild after Rob Couhig’s takeover hasn’t been what we all perhaps envisioned, and it’s a real struggle for fans to emotionally attach to this team at the moment.
Some fans reminisced on former managers and players after the game, while others are just a bit fed up…
Conclusion
I’m not really sure where to start in summing up this game, and in particular the last hour or so I’ve just spent scrolling through the reaction of the fans.
While none of us want to experience anything like the last two or three years again, it brought us all together as a club – fans, players and staff. We were a united front, it was us against them.
So while Couhig was inheriting a club quite frankly a mess off the pitch, he – or the owner group in general – just haven’t been able to build on the momentum and cohesion. The conclusion of a Fans Verdict isn’t the place to delve into the nuances of that, but it’s led to a pretty sorry state of affairs.
