TheBrownBottle

Smash and grab mate. They’ve been all over us. Lucky to be 2-0 up. Nah, I’m joking. Playing the fuckers off the park. Absolutely joyous.

I (and the team) have missed Willock a lot. The left wing looks completely different with him powering away behind the winger

I don’t think anyone said they couldn’t - plenty were puzzled why they weren’t when Burn and Trippier looked burned out. This actually proves the point.

Get in there youngun

Yereeeess

Livramento just oozes quality. Some player that lad.

Lovely finish by Almiron too mind

Tino *chef’s kiss*

Yaaaaaas ya fuckas

Hannibal looks ‘B-Team’ to me

That Hannibal lad is going to get himself sent off

Christ on a bike. This number of injuries of this type isn’t normal like.

Ho’way United

No, you’re right - got the tune mixed up in my head, hence the deleted comment from me saying I was talking bollocks - early hours here in Sydney, brain mixed up

Shiiiiiiiiiiit on, shiiiiiit on, shit on the bastards below, below

Bump

The funniest part will be the bit that the Reading fans don’t know. That’s that Ashley doesn’t know anything about football, and doesn’t appear to enjoy it very much. He learned nothing in a decade and a half at NUFC - the mistakes were the same, the philosophy was the same. Repeated failures punctured by two lucky breaks - Graham Carr’s scouting at the start of the 2010s, and Rafa’s approach in 2016. And that’s it - 14 and a bit years of the doldrums, having taken over a club which had a higher turnover than Spurs and Man City in 2007 despite finishing bottom half that year. He couldn’t be told he was wrong, and refused to learn anything.

It’s bizarre that other fans still do. No-one knows what went on at a club better than it’s own supporters - I tend to pay heed to what others say about owners/managers/players. You can approach things with scepticism, of course, but the noise coming out of Newcastle re Ashley should have been deafening. But the likes of Reading will be infused with regional-based bigotry and years of shite spouted by sympathetic elements in the press. The ‘deluded Geordies’ narrative.

NUFC has had terrible bad luck with injuries as far back as I can remember (though I don’t doubt that someone can produce stats on this which shows we’re just average - it could just be a perception thing).

There’s nothing done to date which suggests that PIF view the KSA league as a feeder for NUFC. My guess would be that the other way round is more likely.

Previous performance is pretty solid data for estimating future performance. On the basis of what he did at NUFC, I wouldn’t be overly confident of him making a success of Reading.

This whole confederation rotation horseshit isn’t likely to come to an end, but it should. Bloated world cups played in completely inappropriate places. I’m losing all interest with international football

Likewise. I feel like how one of those trophy wives who marry 90-year-old billionaires must feel - the prospect of him keeling over is thrilling, no matter how much of a bad person it makes me

Honestly, Ashley is the perfect fit for a club like Reading. They don’t have a history to speak of (unlike Newcastle, Coventry, Derby), aren’t from a big football area (the town is one of the blandest I’ve ever been to), and his mismanagement is unlikely to attract any media attention. They’re assuming that he’ll have them lower mid-table like we were - which would of course be epoch-making at a club like Reading. He won’t though; he would actually need to invest in the club to get them to that point, which he didn’t need to for us to be there.

I really do think he’ll be the hardest member of the squad to replace. A guaranteed goal scorer, who is also ‘happy’ (well, accepting of the need) to be rotated, and isn’t on insane money. Absolutely love the bloke - I’m not sure you can actually be a Geordie and not love a proper no.9.