Reading opened their 2022/23 Championship account with a 1-0 defeat to Blackpool at Bloomfield Road.

Conceding inside the opening 15 minutes, a battling performance lacked the final edge to put the ball in the net.

Here is what manager Paul Ince had to say...

 

Ince on the defeat to Blackpool

"I thought we were excellent in the second half. Things didn’t really drop for us but anyone was watching that today they would’ve said that we deserved something from the game, if not won it. It’s hard to take positives when you lose but I took a lot of them. We just have to be competitive; we will win games and we will lose games. We were passive in the first 10-15 minutes and then we conceded a silly goal. Joe makes a great save; we don’t get the second ball and we’re 1-0 down. Last year we probably would’ve capitulated, but we didn’t and if anyone was going to win that game it would’ve been us. The system worked well, we got so much joy out of it. We caused Blackpool a lot of problems.

Sometimes we need to analyse what we see. Yids playing right-sided centre-half, Junior playing right-wing-back, a young kid at left-wing-back. The performance was encouraging for me. sometimes we look at the result and be mopey, but I said to the lads if you perform like that for the next 45 minutes, I’ll be happy. I’m proud of them.

Ince on injuries

Mamadou has trained with Porto B so he’ll be ready to come in, Scott Dann will be on the grass but could be two or three weeks away, Lucas could be two or three weeks away, Hutch could be two or three weeks away. It could be four weeks before we see a team gel. Femi pulled his hamstring and could be six to eight weeks. We go again, I don’t want to be too downbeat about it. What you see here today is what you’re going to get next week.

Ince on Naby Sarr and potential incomings

He's not done a lot with the team, he’s been alright with his PT but it’s a different type of energy, so he wouldn’t have been ready for today. Maybe next week or the week after.

The left-backs we're looking at are either on loan or not in contract. You don’t want 10 loan players as you lose the spirit and the core of what we showed today. Financially we can’t do a lot, we’re fishing from the bottom of the pond. Nesta is still young and learning so he’ll grow. We need a left-back, a midfielder and a striker, but maybe I’m being greedy."