Surprising absolutely nobody I’m sure, Jack Marriott is your player of the month for September 2025! And it’s very well deserved indeed.
Reading’s number seven has had an electric start to life in Berkshire, after signing from Wrexham
for an undisclosed fee in the summer. He made four starts in September and netted each time: away at Swindon Town, away at Barnsley, at home to Leyton Orient and away at Stockport County.Accordingly he romped home to victory, with a whopping 94% of the vote. Kamari Doyle
and Matt Ritchie made up the final 6% of the voting. Marriott joins Derrick Williams in getting a POTM win this season, with the veteran centre-back taking August’s award.
With many thanks to Nigel Meeks for providing this information, it turns out that Marriott’s goalscoring form after isn’t quite without similar precedent (although you’d have to exclude his debut substitute appearance in August).
Only two players in Reading history have scored in four consecutive competitive games from their Reading debut: Harry Millar and George Reid. They both played for the club in the 1890s and have official heritage numbers 141 and 196.
Millar managed this in late 1898, scoring on October 29, November 19, November 30 and December 10. All of those matches were in the FA Cup.
Reid however did even better, scoring multiple times in two of his four games. He kicked off with four strikes in an FA Cup on October 12 1895, before netting in the same competition on November 2 (two goals) and November 21 (one goal). On November 28 1896 he scored in the Wellingborough Charity Cup.
Why the big gaps between competitive matches? Well, there were very few of them back then. Reading only began league football in 1894, when the club joined the Southern League (16 games per season), and it wasn’t until 1920 that we entered the Football League.
Marriott’s gone beyond a four-game streak of scoring in matches he’s started, netting in his fifth, at home to Mansfield Town). He’ll hopefully get to six when the Royals travel to Exeter City on Saturday.
As things stand, he’s one of 22 players in Reading history who’ve managed a five-game continuous scoring streak (not necessarily from a debut). Only four have made it to six games, with three on seven: Henry Hewitt (1892/93), Hugh Davey (1924/25 into 1925/26) and Tommy Tait, who played for the club in the 1930s.
The man Marriott should be aiming to match is Arthur Bacon, who achieved an incredible goalscoring run of eight games in early 1931 (actually totalling 16 strikes in that run!).
Can Marriott get there? We’ll see, starting in Exeter…