Reading FC fan view: 'I feel like I’m losing the Reading that I love'

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As a 21-year-old Reading fan, I’ve grown up supporting the club in its most successful and notable period - I’ve been to Wembley three times, Old Trafford about a million, seen us at the Emirates, at City, and at Spurs. We won the league when I was still in nappies, then we did it again six years later when I was still too young and too short to go on Stealth at Thorpe park, but old enough and big enough to be in the away end at St. Mary’s. I sat in the Madejski as a spotty teenager as we battered Bradford to reach an FA cup semi, and by the time I was 16 and going through the Spike-Island-Oasis ‘we’ll see things they never see’ phase, I’d seen us a shootout away from a return to the big time.

Five years and 11 months on from that rainy May Day underneath the arch, I’m a month out from finishing university, 1300 quid in my overdraft and struggling to grow a beard. At the time of writing it's 9:30 PM and I’m on a creaking, cramped and stinking rail replacement bus which has just pulled away from Royston station and is trundling at the pace of Andy Carroll to my university house.

Four-and-a-half hours on from sitting through a drab 1-1 draw against Wigan which etched the proverbial writing on the wall, and I’m still not home. Today, a devilish combination of the British Railway network and Reading FC have left me with a bitter and twisted view of the world. Indeed, this boring, depressing, tedious and totally banal journey has been an apt and cruel metaphor for the boring, depressing, tedious and totally banal regression of my beloved Reading since that so-and-so Schindler crushed the souls of 40,000 Berkshiremen in North-West London. 

If nothing else, this journey has given me time to reflect on the depressing decline of Reading FC.  I don’t really care to go in to the ins and outs of the absolute, total effing disaster that the last five years of supporting this club have been. I could berate Dai and Kia and the various other halfwits who have been hellbent on making my Saturdays miserable. But what’s the point?  It’s been done before and as I’ve grown older, I’ve realised the club isn’t defined by Pogrebynak, or Mo Barrow, or Chris Gunter (thank goodness, by the way). For me, Reading FC is so much more than a sum of these rotten parts, it’s the principal mechanism through which I’ve been able to spend time with my Grandad. It’s given me life-long memories of travelling to some dive hours away with my dad and hugging him when we’ve scored a last minute winner. 

Yet in spite of this, and to coin the most over-cited cliche in all of football, I feel like I’m losing the Reading that I love, and my childlike obsession with the club is being slowly replaced by a steely apathy.  Maybe I’m just growing up, but I rarely look forward to going to watch the Buscuitmen these days. At university, I share a house with a Brentford fan, he follows the Bees home and away, and I envy him, massively.  I’m not jealous of his club’s Premier League status or the fact that whilst I’m on my way back from Reading versus Wigan Athletic, he’s gearing up for a trip to Stamford Bridge on Tuesday, or the the fact that he gets to watch quality football every week. I’m jealous that every away end he’s in is a sell-out - that the fans with whom he shares his Saturdays with are enamoured and excited by their club. I’m jealous that he holds genuine belief that his club will continue improving, and I’m jealous that he relishes going to each and every football game. 

There’s a philosophical theory called ‘Theseus’ ship’. It begins with a plain old, ship. One day, the ship owner decides to replace the ship’s sail, and replace it with a new one;  it's still the same ship - it just has a new sail. But then it has another part removed, and although it’s the same ship, it now has new decking, and a new sail, and so on and so forth. The ship continues to have its parts removed and replaced until at some stage, very few, if any of the component parts of the original ship remain, leading philosophers to question whether a new ship lies before them. 

Reading remind me of Theseus’ ship,  where slowly, but surely, in a boring, long and attritional process, the parts of Reading FC which made me fall in love with the club have been taken away, one-by-one. An owner who understands and cares for the club? Gone. Attendances above 15k? Gone. The bloke who used to sit near me who brought a fake dog to every game (strange and random, but wonderfully true)? Gone. The match day programme? Gone. Those pies you could buy on the concourse which had the little Reading FC badge on them? Gone. The van outside the north stand which used to sell unreal, grease-laden, cholesterol filled pork rolls? Gone. Y26? Gone. Decent results? Gone. ‘The Madejski Stadium’? Gone. These constituent parts of the real Reading FC have been replaced with inferior versions of the same thing, and so it feels like I’m left with this skeletal version of what I fell in love with, where the fleshy parts of the barmy naughties’ Royals have been taken away, and now I’m left with some parody of the real thing - a dodgy simulation of the Reading FC I know and love - like one of those terrible celebrity lookalikes.

‘We want our club back’ and  ‘we’re not doing things the Reading way’ have become tired cliches of the ReadingFC hashtag on Twitter - to be honest I don’t really know what they mean, I don’t think anyone does - yet I resonate with these tweets, I agree with them. Maybe it’s the result of the club’s sail, decking, wheel and starboard being ripped out over the last six years, maybe it’s mindless groupthink, who knows - either way they seem true.

To the older generations reading this, you’d be totally right to label me a jumped up, naive and arrogant young man, who doesn’t remember the bad old days in the 70s and 80s when some old-fashioned number nine from a nondescript division four side was banging in goals against Reading at Elm Park and tormenting Charlie Hurley. As my grandad of 90 years frequently reminds me, he has supported Reading for much of his life not through thick and thin, but through thin and thin. Yet, when my Grandad stood on the crooked terraces of Elm Park, although the football was dire, he frequently tells me how Reading were always 'sensibly ran', a community club, and a fundamental part of the town. My Grandad became pals with Charlie Hurley through living on the same street as him, he met and knew the players, my mum went to school with managers’ sons and daughters. There was an attachment, a locality and a familiarity which compensated for the god-awful football being played. 

Well, those days in the lower leagues watching brutal football on a mud bath in front of a few thousand disgruntled saddos are beckoning ever closer as we seem destined to be headed for the footballing purgatory of League One, and this time, they are not accompanied by the compensatory nuggets of a well-run, cohesive and community based club. There’ll be no match day programmes, no owner who cares about the club, no pies with reading badges on them, just a few fun away-days, coupled with a detachment from the club and what it is, or what it’s trying to be. 

My squeaky, packed bus has arrived into town now, thank God. It’s 10:30 and it seems like an awful long time has passed, money has been spent, and sadness has been felt since I was sat in the Select Car Leasing Stadium watching 11 fellas struggle to do the thing they’re paid 20 grand a week to do. And even though my diatribe has painted a depressing picture of the state of the club, it’s still just about the same ship I fell in love with, if not a little more tired, ugly, depressing and bad. But I’m stuck with it. We all are, Shipwrecked together on a League-One island devoid of hope or quality football.