Slight Drop For Jose Gomes’ Approval Rating

Last week, we asked you to rate Jose Gomes’ management of Reading, and you’ve given us a score of 3.84/5. Although that’s not a bad score by any means, it’s down slightly on Gomes’ 4.26 highlight in May of this year when he’d just secured Championship safety.

It’s also worth mentioning at this point that the bulk of your responses will have come in before the Cardiff City game. Understandably, a first home win of the season - and one that came in such style - would have pushed his score up a bit if we’d run the poll a little later.

To break his score down, almost three quarters of you said you were either happy or very happy with Gomes - four or five out of five. Almost 20% went for 3/5, with just under 10% judging him unfavourably.

That score reflects a bit of frustration with the poor start to the season, with Gomes overseeing a three-match winless run to kick off the campaign. Reading lost 3-1 at home to Sheffield Wednesday on the opening day, fell to a 2-1 defeat at Hull City the following Saturday, before scraping past Wycombe Wanderers on penalties in the League Cup.

However, despite those disappointing performances and results (even though we eventually knocked out Wycombe), there was still a sense that Gomes was having to work with a side that was going through a lot of change.

That was most obvious in the first two league games of the season, with Reading first putting out a pretty young side against Sheffield Wednesday, before handing out a string of first-team debuts at Hull. Bedding those players into the side will understandably take time, even if they performed well in front of the Sky cameras against Cardiff on Sunday.

How well the likes of George Puscas, Pele, Lucas Boye and others acclimatise to life in the Championship over the course of the coming weeks and months will go a long way to determining the next approval rating you give Gomes.

If he does manage to bed them in properly, we could well see his score edge back up beyond 4/5 and stay there. As the chart below shows, the last time that happened was in the 2016/17 season when Jaap Stam was leading us towards the play-off final. Hopefully Jose can go one better.