Rovers Preview: Reading (A)

Blackburn Rovers begin the season run in with a match against Reading at The Madjeski Stadium this afternoon.

This is a match that could go one of two ways isn’t it?? Rovers will either continue from the performances against Leeds United and (in particular) Liverpool when pride was restored with real passion and commitment shown to win again or it’ll be a nothing match that neither side will be that interested with playing, more so Reading with an FA Cup match in mind!!

Rovers beat Reading 3-1 at Ewood Park (in November) with us holding a very good record against The Royals, losing only one of the fourteen competitive meetings previously when we lost (4-0 away) an old Division Two match in October on 1986!!

Reading haven’t won in four matches since a 2-1 win against Brighton (on the 10th of March) at The Madejski Stadium, with that win the only home match they’ve won in their last five.

With Rovers losing to Liverpool on Wednesday evening our record in all competitions doesn’t read too favourably as we’ve lost three of our last four matches in all competitions in roughly the same tim period as Reading. However, our last win was as recently as last Saturday afternoon (at Elland Road) when we won 3-0 against Leeds United and we’ve not lost in any of our last six away matches since Watford (on the 7th of February) when we lost 1-0.

Reading might be without Michael Hector, who has a knee injury, Danny Williams, who came back from a recently International match with The USA with a knock and Nathaniel Chalobah because of his foot injury. They’ll take absolutely no risks with the Arsenal match in mind. Groin injuries to Jure Travner and Anton Ferdinand’s calf mean they’ll definitely miss this match.

Gary Bowyer is able to add Paul Taylor, Jay Spearing, John O’Sullivan and David Raya to the squad again after they were ineligible for the FA Cup defeat against Liverpool. Jason Steele should play for the first time in three matches after Raya made his debut against Leeds and Simon Eastwood (as he had all season) played in the FA Cup. Alex Baptiste battled through the pain with a superb performance but a leg injury makes him doubtful for this one with the risk to Rudy Gestede’s hamstring making him available for less than thirty minutes so I’d doubt he’ll play and Craig Conway’s hamstring might rule him out as well adding to the list that included Grant Hanley, Josh King, David Dunn, Chris Taylor, Shane Duffy, Jason Lowe, Chris Brown (and the ineligible players) that missed Liverpool due to injury, which makes our performance and the fact we ran Liverpool so close even more amazing!!

With Reading safe in The Championship and having an FA Cup Semi-Final against Arsenal next weekend I’m not sure they’ll have too much interest in this one, however, will we?? Hopefully (at least) a little more too!!

Rovers win this one (if we’re more interested) I think with some of the frustrations from Wednesday evening taken out on Reading with us completing the double and winning 3-1 again, as we had at Ewood.

I’d love more of you to discuss this match below or (better still) in the VBers Forum. Read more: Click Here.