Zinckernagel got a nasty stamp in the balls from Craig Forsyth! Could have earned the latter a red card .
Djibril Toure has joined SV Horn in the Austrian 2. Liga on loan for the season (which means no work permit for next season either)
Odd destination. Had a look at them just now. A young squad with the chairman Keisuke Honda. I thought they may be a club that develops youngsters but they have a pretty poor track record judging their outgoing transfers in the past. Just hope he bangs them in and finds a better club next season if he is following the Cucho model.
I can only assume we couldn't find a suitor in a better league (which isn't too surprising due to his lack of professional games). As you say, hopefully he does well and can get a loan to a work permit friendly league next season!
When he went on loan to a Belgian top flight team as his first move in Europe as an 18 year old, I thought we had a wonderkid on our hands, but we ****ed that move right up! This seems a weird loan, even if it may be more his level right now
Hungbo left on the bench for the second game in a row, just 20 minutes of football for him this season. Looked like an awful loan for him but maybe he's not as good as some of us thought he was, me included.
Personally I think a team towards the top of League 1 would have been good for him, the Scottish League is probably a mix of Championship and League 1 level, but Ross County look likely to be down the bottom of the league. Think they've played Rangers and Celtic since he's joined, not exactly the games a team like Ross County would be looking for a player like Hungbo in!
Do we have to mention Gray here lol, technically he does fulfil the criteria of the thread, but he's very much in the past, Dele-Bashiru and Co are hopefully the future
Sad to read this . Awful for a young player to hear . https://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/s...keeper-myles-roberts-racially-abused/?ref=rss
Looks like we have a replacement for Capoue in the driving too fast stakes ! https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/scottish-news/7696180/rangers-dapo-mebude-speeding-glasgow-m8/
Dele-Bashiru gets his first goal for Reading, his first league goal ever I think, to go with an assist against QPR at the weekend
Shot from the edge of the area: Brilliant forward play from Puski. Got around the back on the right and opened things up. Sent in a low cross, which evaded the first target... but @tomdele10 was there to collect and slam in from the edge of the area.
Really glad to see that he's accumulating better experiences at the Madejski than last season! Could be very important for us next season, certainly in the Championship, maybe also in the Prem
It’s funny looking back how many youngsters came in and out of the team last season (Wilmot, Ngakia, Dele-Bashiru, Hungbo, Garner, Quina among others) but in the end only Sarr, Pedro and Sierralta cemented themselves in the starting lineup as we settled on a mixture of youth and older and mid-career pros. While it’s a bit disappointing how many of them didn’t establish themselves in the first team (for the romantic in me and I imagine many others it would’ve been nice to see us go up with a youthful squad as an antidote to the staleness that saw us relegated the previous season) I think trying all these youngsters played a part in producing a generally hungrier and more eager squad, albeit largely after Ivic was sacked and Deeney was dropped.
Fair play to the people that identified TDB's talent and potential as an immediate first team squad member after his short appearances, he looks mustard
I wonder how TDB would have done had he not picked up that horrendous injury, I reckon (not that there's much to back it up!) that he'd have been great, such a shame
Yes, but for all his faults he did set the ball rolling in instilling an ethos of hard work and players who were happy to play at the club and eager to progress their careers and playing youngsters played a part in that. Unfortunately, results and performances deteriorated towards the end of his tenure as it became apparent the players became increasingly unhappy with his strict training methods and unsmiling demeanour and there were still a few bad apples that needed sorting out (Capoue didn't want to be here, Deeney was too much of a influence and Gray and Chalobah needed to pull their socks up and accept they weren't the players they hoped they'd be). But the foundations were there to achieve promotion with a more positive manager in place.
About the time Ivic left, Hughes and Masina got healthy. That helped us more than anything. Doing things like playing Ngakia at left back was a disaster. Those two in the side, players returning to natural positions and Xisco's positive approach meant we started getting the ball forward faster. This is something we need to return to this year - at least against side that don't have orders of magnitude more talent.
Fair point for Garner (who didn't deserve to get into the team after Hughes came back), although Ngakia only played very occasionally at LB, when we absolutely had no other option, when both he and Kiko were fit, it was Kiko who played on the left