What Doesn’t Kill You...
Guest writer HowieTRoyal explains why longer-term hope for Reading is already playing out in front of us.
I’m not dropping any fact bombs when I suggest that recent times… months, seasons, years, even decades... have not been kind to supporters of Reading Football Club, nor those within the club itself. But ownership issues, points deductions and transfer embargoes aside, how’s the longer-term looking for our current men’s squad? What gold dust can we pan from the stream of misery? Prepare to fill your pockets with hope.
First up, a healthy disclaimer - this is my opinion as a fan - I’m not a sports psychologist and I don’t have an insider’s view of the club. That said, we can still draw some reasonable conclusions from what we have witnessed, personal experience, data, and by looking at what academic research can tell us.
Sport reflecting life
In many ways some answers lie within. Most of us, at various points during our lives, will face adversity for one reason or another. It’s an unfortunate fact of life and it can be extremely tough - I’m speaking from experience. As the old adage goes, ‘what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger’, and while it’s hard to brush things off and crack on with renewed vigour, it’s a very human trait to learn and adapt (not ‘man up’ to it), and that’s to be celebrated.
Believe it or not, there’s limited academic research into how sports teams handle adversity as a group, beyond the individual. (Surely this must make Reading FC a juicy target for further study?)
Stephen D. Mallalieu, a professor of sports psychology, has written a useful review paper on how adversity can lead to growth at multiple levels of a sports team - drawing upon his own professional experience and other studies. In relation to ‘group growth’, there are some very relevant findings that we will revisit further down, but Reading’s unique situation also requires our own line of enquiry.
So, let’s apply our same theory about adversity in life to our Reading team, the class of 2023/24.
If you strip away everything else currently going on at Reading Football Club, at the start of this season we were still left with a once clear characteristic that united most players and staff alike - inexperience - individually and therefore collectively.
That word, which feels like a fair assessment, has been a big thorn in the Reading side this season. It’s also the fertile ground where real growth lies and we’re already seeing that play out (pun intended).
For the staff, especially Ruben Selles, inexperience is not having managed at League One level before - he’s also relatively new to management itself. On the flipside, he’s an experienced coach and very knowledgeable, so are the rest of his staff.
For a quick (if slightly lazy) comparison, another person new to management in this league, John Mousinho at Portsmouth, has tons of prior League One experience as a player, not to mention having actual money to sign new recruits.
As for the Reading squad, a decent portion of whom are young and/or fresh out of the academy, inexperience is not having played in League One before, or played many senior matches for that matter. League One is perhaps more physical than the Championship or academy football with a seemingly poorer standard of pitches, officiating and creature comforts they may have once been accustomed to.
Another key consideration, and hardest to know, is how each individual handles their own personal hurdles or any perceived ‘failures’ this season.
Failure is often something to be celebrated by motivational speakers, and we’re encouraged to use those difficult moments as stepping stones to a better life. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” wrote Samuel Beckett, who believed that failure was an essential part of his work. If only it were that simple. You can either run away from failure, or you can treat it as a useful friend to learn from.
For the Reading squad specifically, ‘failure’ is not clear-cut because of so many unique external factors at play. If we get relegated again, would it really be the squad’s ‘failure’?
Individually, failure may look different depending on who you ask at the club, but that ability to bounce back from any personal challenge is, collectively, going to help define this season.
Let’s address the stress
Along with tennis balls, our Royals team have had to pick themselves up off the floor/pitch time and time again for various, well documented reasons. And to find real progress, we should get one key distinction out of the way first.
It’s October 7 2023 and Reading have just been beaten away (again) at Leyton Orient.
At the final whistle, some of the squad head over to the irate Reading fans to face the music. BBC Radio Berkshire’s Tim Dellor described it as “the stuff of nightmares” for the management and clearly for the players too, although this action appeared to be encouraged by Selles, who suggested “we need to accept our responsibility” in a post-match interview.
As if the run of results or the club ownership situation wasn’t tough enough, to be a team with an average age of 23 and facing that level of anger close-up and personal is surely deeply impactful, toxic and very stressful. Rightly or wrongly, we still cannot discount moments like that as being ‘learning experiences’, because they are, one way or another.
As a side note, hopefully the club has a robust system in place to support everyone’s mental health needs at the moment, from the men’s and women’s teams to the wider staff.
Stress is a complicated beast. It’s a short-term gain, long-term pain thing. We all know that certain types of stress are beneficial to enabling our fight-or-flight response, in the same way that sudden stress can help us think clearly or learn quickly. Some athletes thrive off high-pressure situations to perform better and studies show that the more in control of the stress we feel, the less cognitively impairing it can be.
More generally, many people take a ‘Goldilocks’ approach to stress - a little is a good motivator, whereas too much can leave you feeling overwhelmed and susceptible to a wide range of health issues. One academic review from 2017 underlines the fact that numerous disorders can originate from severe, longer-term stress.
But that moment at Leyton Orient is a distraction in this instance.
A recipe for success?
Because it’s not all about stress - we’re talking about adapting and learning over time here, and this is where those golden nuggets may hide.
Studies suggest there is one particular area of ‘group growth’ that we can apply to our current Reading team. Following a long slump in results or underperformance, the introduction of either new coaching staff, or at the very least, new training practices, fitness regimes and tactics can lead to a ‘perceived psychological growth’ in a team.
In other words, a fresh start. As we’ve all seen in football over the years, this type of reset can lead to better player cooperation, communication, cohesion and overall team performance - although it can be short-lived.
While Reading have not had any major changes in coaching staff, something has happened to enable a change in the team’s trajectory. Could there be hints at this becoming the magical longer-term thing we’re after?
From my perspective, two separate moments stand out - that watershed away win at Wycombe Wanderers and a break away from the 4-2-2-2 formation, used earlier in the season. These appear to be the psychological footholds the team needed to really start progressing. No doubt changes in the training sessions have also evolved over time.
The green shoots of optimism are there. Since late November, Reading have become a team who can at least compete against anyone in the league - a far cry from where we were before. The league results have drastically improved - before the Wycombe game, we had a win percentage of 19% (16 matches - 3 wins, 11 losses, 2 draws). From the Wycombe game onwards, we’ve achieved a win percentage of 44% (18 matches - 8 wins, 3 losses and 7 draws).
It’s safe to say the staff and players seem to be learning from their shared experiences so far. In addition to their initial inexperience and how they may adapt, there are some key ingredients in the mix that bolster potential for long-term benefits.
- A hungry, young team: Generally, you don’t become a professional footballer without some degree of self-sacrifice and ambition. Our young squad will be keen to learn and succeed and thankfully the talent is also there. While Selles’ hands have been tied with further recruitment, he will now have formed a group of players who he trusts and who, hopefully, trust him. Certainly for those players who have come through our academy, we already know they arrive with a respected pedigree. Having a young squad could turn into one of our greatest assets.
- Experience of adversity: How many young players across English football can say they have seen their club on the brink of folding and mass protests, while at the same time experiencing the baptism of fire that is a League One relegation scrap? That’s character-building stuff and some of the players will feel like they’ve had a career’s worth of experience already. You can argue it’s the same for the coaching staff. It’s all valuable knowledge.
- Willingness to change: We’ve already seen positive signs that Selles and his team can adapt formations, tactics and mindsets to their new environment, although it took time. Those are qualities in our manager and his staff that must provide hope for fans - especially when compared to other recent Reading managers. As we’ve looked at above, making the right changes and providing the right conditions for positive group growth are vital. Given this has been done under external pressures at the club, makes it even more impressive.
- Time: We’ve seen in recent matches against Portsmouth and Fleetwood Town that the path to progress isn’t straightforward. This season our main aim has been to avoid relegation, so while it’s not been an enjoyable ride, we’ve had time for our team to grow and adapt. Due to the transfer embargo, any further leaps in strength must come from within the group - that is a lot of expectation to shoulder.
And there we find our gold - by sifting through all the current noise and chaos, against all odds we find more than just a hope of sealing League One status in the short term.
If Reading can survive this season (in many ways), and we can keep a core group of players and staff into the next, then I feel we’ll be starting on a strong footing. If we can eventually strengthen that team, continue to learn from this adversity and grow as a group, then those are very solid foundations indeed for the revival of the club we love.