Next Reading Manager Betting: Royals suffer as owner fails to think forward

 

A week on from the sacking of Brian McDermott and there's not yet a clear favourite in the market to succeed him - never mind an appointment. Ralph Ellis warns the  club will suffer from its owner's lack of a clear vision.

 

The Cass Business School is part of the City University in London. According to its website it is "the intellectual heart of business." It boasts that it teaches  academic excellence and forward thinking research.

 

Among the people to have studied there is Reading's Russian owner Anton Zingarevich. We can only presume he had a bad cold and was at home in bed the day they did the  "forward thinking research" lessons. Frankly it is impossible otherwise to know why Eamonn Dolan was in charge of the Royals in their 1-0 defeat at Manchester United  on Saturday, and may yet still be the caretaker when Reading play at Arsenal in two weeks time.

 

That is nothing against Dolan, who is a fine Academy manager for the club, and may yet become a fantastic first team manager either there or somewhere else. The point  is that if he is the right man for the future he should already be in charge - and if he is not then somebody else should have taken over the day after Brian McDermott  was shown the door.

 

Reading's club statement on the day they dispensed with McDermott after more than 12 years of loyal service made it very clear that Zingarevich was behind the  decision. "In our current situation the owner, Anton Zingarevich, felt that a change was necessary," it said.

 

Paolo Di Canio had been snapped on somebody's phone watching the weekend defeat by Aston Villa, the picture found its way very quickly on to Twitter, and everybody sat  back and assumed that he would be taking over. On Betfair's market to be the next Reading manager he was matched as low as 1.8.

 

A week on Di Canio is now priced anywhere between 10.5 and 26.0, Nigel Adkins is the nearest to a favourite at 3.9, and there's no sign of anybody taking charge. It's obvious now that while Zingarevich felt a change was necessary, he didn't have a clue what that change should be. As Wolves discovered a year ago, sacking the manager is the easy bit - finding the right man to take over is a whole deal more challenging.

 

This season both Queens Park Rangers and Southampton have dispensed with their head coach because of bad results. You can debate those decisions, but in each case the  owners had already investigated the options and decided what was happening next. You could call it "forward thinking research," I suppose.

 

At Loftus Road Tony Fernandes had Harry Redknapp in his sights; at St Mary's Nicola Cortese knew he wanted Mauricio Pochettino. Either decision might have been right  or wrong, but both had been prepared in advance.

 

It wasn't as if Reading's directors couldn't have foreseen the need for change. From the moment they got promoted they were always going to be fighting to survive  their first season in the top flight, and that would mean, at some time, that the manager's position would be questioned. Surely any good chairman would constantly  review the options if he had to make a change?

 

Would he want to replace the quiet, thoughtful and methodical style of McDermott with a firebrand like Di Canio? Would he take another equally studious coach like  Adkins? Would he look abroad for experience and pay fortunes to prise somebody like Dick Advocaat away from PSV Eindhoven? Would he prefer somebody like Roberto Di  Matteo who proved his ability to take over in a crisis by winning the European Cup? He should have already known the answer.

 

Instead it seems like none of that homework happened. Reading have lurched through another game that has come and gone and are now 1.6 favourites to finish rock bottom, in addition to being 1.09 certainties for relegation.

 

Reading is now Zingarevich's business and the 30-year-old should have been providing its "intellectual heart". Instead he's reacted to a bad defeat with all the logic  of an angry fan on a phone-in and made a bad situation even worse.

 

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