Caversham United are looking to make Sunday a celebration of Reading football as they welcome Reading Women back to the town.

Reading Women, who have spent over a decade in the Women's Super League and reached an FA Cup semi-final five years ago, were forced to drop into the amateur leagues over the summer due to funding cuts.

Not only this, the team was taken on by the charity arm of the club [Reading Community Trust] and moved operations to Arbour Park at Slough Town.

Losing all matches to date in Southern Region Women’s Football League but progressing to the first round of the FA Cup, the Royals will face Caversham United in the Berks and Bucks Cup.

Strong allies of the town and its flagship football club, Caversham are hoping the community comes out to support the return of the club.

Famously, Royals legend Dave Kitson featured for the non-league side's men's team to coincide with Non League Day, scoring on his debut.

Chairman of the Goats, Paul Gutteridge, spoke of immense excitement ahead of the game but admitted that there is more than a tinge of sadness about the circumstances.

"That's exactly right [surreal but sad]," he told the Reading Chronicle. "I just wrote a little piece for the programme and those are pretty much the exact words I wrote, actually. I never thought we'd be able to do it- the circumstances aren’t what we had imagined with Reading going the wrong way and us not going up. Whilst it is incredibly exciting for us to play against Reading, the circumstances around it are sad.

"Over the past couple of seasons, we’ve been quite vocal on our support for the club. It feels nice to be the team that get to host Reading back in Reading and hopefully it will be a draw for some of the fans to come along and watch when they’re back on the doorstep rather than at Slough. Slough’s stadium [Arbour Park] is good but the location is probably less so.

"We are planning to run a bar from Mapledurham pavilion- we’ve got the licence sorted so hopefully that will be our sponsor, Phantom, running that. We’ve hopefully got a couple of food vendors lined up to buy refreshments. STAR and the Community Trust are going to bring down some of their kit, like the inflatable dartboard, to have a few little bits on around the game and draw in both regular fans and potentially some who aren’t and want to check out women’s football for the first time."

Kick-off is at 2pm on Sunday, October 20 at Mapledurham Playing Fields, with admission free to all supporters.

The Burger Society will be on food, and Sloth Coffee on hot drinks.