Reading 3-1 Burton Albion: Tactical Analysis

Tom unpacks a comfortable home win over the Brewers.

Burton Albion may be nicknamed the Brewers but the only bitter on Tuesday wasn’t served out of a pint glass, but instead from the mouth of Mark Robinson in his post-match interview. His scathing assessment of the Reading players’ “lap of honour” in front of a slightly depleted home crowd hit the headlines following his side’s 3-1 loss.

In completely unrelated news, a recent Burton Albion home match attracted a crowd of 1,522 people. In even more unrelated news, that number is roughly a quarter of the crowd that the 2024 Gloucester Cheese Rolling Race attracted. Unbrielievable.

Anyway, a game did happen too, which Reading won convincingly. Let’s take a closer look at Tuesday’s match.

Amadou Mbengue has been a real asset breaking down teams this season. As well as completing the most carries of any Reading player this season, averaging around 13 per game, he lies among the highest distanced carries in the squad too.

Under high pressure from left-wing-back Tomas Kalinauskas in the picture here, he takes it over the halfway line into lots of space in midfield and provides a through ball to Chem Campbell.

A bit of luck comes the Welshman’s way as the Burton defender struggles to get the ball out of his feet. Campbell nicks it back and produces some nice footwork to make some space, and works the ball between two opposition players and the goalkeeper into the bottom corner.

What’s really impressive to me though is the off-the-ball work here. Harvey Knibbs and Ben Elliott, as soon as Campbell gets the ball, both make a sprinting run forward into the halfspace, into the corridor of uncertainty where the ball could easily deflect to should the goalkeeper save it. The two midfielders are shown in the screenshot below approaching the box.

This is while the Burton midfielders jog back with very little enthusiasm, and Sam Smith is in a prime onside position too to plant some doubt in the defenders’ minds and be there for a tap-in.

Now to talk a little bit about Lewis Wing. I don’t think we’ve seen the best of him yet this season - not that he’s been bad, but the standard he set last season has left us with rather high expectations too.

However, I think on Tuesday night he was back to his best on the ball.

In this situation below, Burton make a mistake while playing out, overhitting a pass, and Wing intercepts. Elliott and Knibbs were previously in much wider positions to aid with the press, but as soon as we win it back, both sprint inside to support him in a congested midfield with four Albion players in the vicinity.

Twinkle toes Wing steers the ball expertly through the Burton midfield, feeding Smith with a good ball, but on his weaker foot the striker fails to trouble the keeper.

Wingy completed 14 progressive passes, created four chances and cleaned up deep in midfield like his name was Henry Hoover.

Unlike Hoover with his large nozzle though, Wing was rather good with corners. It feels like a while since we’ve scored from one: the last time I can remember is Kelvin Ehibhatiomhan in a 2-0 home victory against Stevenage in 2023 (I’ll let our editor correct me if he can remember any more recent ones!).

Editor’s note: Sam Smith scored a header at Barnsley towards the end of last season, but I had to look this one up!

While Burton have committed every player into the box, Reading only have five, so it was going to take some inventive movement to beat a man in yellow to the ball.

During Wing’s run-up, four Royals players are lingering around the back post, but as soon as he takes the corner, all of them rush more centrally. To fill that gap, Campbell makes a late run to the back post.

Smith sneaks round his man and flicks the ball onto the underside of the bar and into the back of the net, uncontested, as his marker Nick Akoto can get nowhere near the cleverly placed corner.

I’m not sure if there are any other readers that subscribe to the idea that if a player can’t beat the first man on a corner he should get fined some unproportionally large amount of money, but this game slightly changed that view for me.

What if every “poor corner kick” is merely lazy movement, a badly executed set-play routine or some switched-off attackers?

Of Reading’s three corner-kicks that were crosses in, which were all taken by Wing, they were all aimed towards the front-post area, as shown in the map below.

I think Ruben Selles and his team have got it right with this call. Corners nowadays are notoriously unproductive in terms of scoring rate; couple that with a young Reading team and you’ve got a recipe for the beasts of opposition centre-backs that we face in this league to easily head it away at the back post.

A combination of ingenuity and quick movement though is how we will do best from set-pieces this season.

Let’s hope we can keep this vein of good form going as we head to Rotherham United on Saturday, to face Steve Evans’ Millers. A man whose ego is almost as big as his trackie bottoms, but has more explosive post-match interviews than wins on the board so far this year, so it should be an interesting clash.

Personally, I’m still having Joe Lumley-related flashbacks from our last visit to the New York Stadium though...