The Royals suffered a disappointing 4-3 defeat to Luton Town at the SCL Stadium on the opening day of the league season.
Jack Marriott was the first-half hat-trick hero, helping Reading turn an early deficit into a 3-1 lead at the break. However, the second half brought echoes of last season as Luton fought back to complete the turnaround and take all three points.
Here’s what Royals boss Leam Richardson had to say when he spoke to Royals TV after the game.
Richardson on the defeat
“It is sickening to lose a game like that. Sickening to lose at a time like that, certainly coming off the last year when it was too many times in them moments.
“My take on it straight away: we’ve gone from looking like a team in the first 50 minutes, so connected, such a threat, to then so disjointed. There were too many individual errors.
“The third goal’s offside. We can’t score three goals at home and lose a game. We can’t. It’s impossible.
“It’s like déjà vu for myself, déjà vu for the players. Like I say, I thought there were so many good things within the game.
“I don’t think we deserved to lose, but when you score three goals and concede four, of course you deserve to lose, especially in the manner that we conceded a couple of them as well, because of the individual errors. They’re easily avoidable.
“We had a chance straight away in the second half with Daniel to make it 4-1 and we don’t capitalise on that. Then we had a five or ten-minute spell where we were so disjointed and disconnected, and the individual errors cost us.”
Richardson on the emotion
“You’ve seen it last year a little bit, and it’s something that we’ve tried to educate and work on.
“I think once you play with emotion, you stop making the correct decisions. You’ve got to play without emotion, with the correct mindset, with clarity in what you’re trying to do.
“As you can see, I’m sure everybody in the stadium has got similar views, or different opinions of it. But you go from a first-half team who looks like a threat every time we have a transition, every time we go forward. We could have scored four or five in the first half; we should have scored again in the second half.
“And then we looked so disjointed in periods in the second half. I thought we kind of half got back into the game, but it was too late.”
Richardson on the missed opportunity
“No positives at the minute. We conceded four goals at home, in front of our fans, against a team who will be up there.
“But I thought we did enough to come and win a game of football today. But we also did enough that we didn’t win the game of football today.
“I really enjoyed large parts of it, the football obviously on show in the first half, the fans, the atmosphere and everything else. But the 10 or 15 minutes in between that spoiled what could have, should have, been a really good performance and a really good day.”
Richardson on making changes for the EFL Trophy
“We’re still looking for lads to get on the pitch. The lads who were probably on the bench will start, including a few others.
But again, we want to win. It’s a game that we look to continue learning, adapting, to try and be more penetrative in what we’re trying to do and, going forward, score more goals.
“Fingers crossed we’ll turn up with a good appetite. We’ll certainly digest this. It will hurt tonight, it will hurt today going into tomorrow, but we’ll pick ourselves up from that.”