Fans Verdict: A Royal Crumble On The South Coast

If you look up ‘Jekyll & Hyde Performance’ under the dictionary, I'm pretty sure you’ll see a screenshot of Saturday lunchtime’s result.

The first half was everything Paunovic would’ve wanted from an away performance. The players were absolutely fantastic, and numbed one of the most potent attacking teams in the league.

It was a return to the Reading we got used to at the start of the season: resolute but clinical. Sone Aluko’s goal on the stroke of half time put the Royals in dreamland, and with how well we’ve seen out leads this season, I would’ve put a lot of money on us going on to win the game.

I’m really trying my best to put the second half showing more down to Bournemouth’s undoubted quality - but however you put it, it was just unacceptable. The hosts got one back through Solanke and, from then on, there was only going to be one winner. Our heads dropped and the Cherries capitalised on that and severely punished us, and we deserved to be punished.

I’ve gone for something a bit different this week. Rather than the three key talking points, I’ve rounded up the reaction of the fans to the first half, and then how they reacted at the full-time whistle. Half of it is good reading, the other half is pretty painful...

The first half

I think the overall take from Saturday’s game will be that we crumbled and let a two-goal lead slip, conceding four in the process. Rightly so, as that was the end result at the end of the day.

However, without wanting to sound like the broken Nigel Adkins record player, we must take positives where we can - and the first half was a huge positive. It was the perfect away performance and something we have to replicate where possible - but for 90 minutes next time.

The majority of the tweets below are from when we were flying high at half time, so look away now if you don't want any PTSD...

The second half

Where it all went wrong - or where it all went right for the hosts - depends which way you want to look at it. I think it’s important to see it from both sides. Lapses in concentration and individual mistakes again led to the majority of Bournemouth’s four goals, with the other one being a worldie into the top corner.

Bournemouth were very good in the second half, far too good for the Championship. But even so, we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and think if we do want to be up near the top of the table come May, we just can’t have performances like that.

The fans were left fuming, and took that frustration to Twitter...

Conclusion

I don’t know about you guys, but losses seem to stay with me a lot longer this season. The last few seasons I’ve sort of just gotten used to losing and then surprised when we do win.

It hurts so much more when we lose this season, because we’ve built the foundations to do something really, really good. If we end up letting that go that’ll really hurt.

But, I still have a lot of faith and think we’re one good result away from really turning a corner and kicking on again. We just need to get that result on Wednesday, or else things could start getting toxic again.