Why Nicky Hammond is the unsung hero at Reading Football Club
Article by Christian FrankClick here to follow e-Reading on Twitter!
With 2 games of the season gone, Reading fans were shocked to hear of the swift departure of 23-year-old centre-back Sean Morrison to Cardiff City FC for £4million. The start of the 2014/15 season seemed to suggest an air of optimism was gathering around the club, the opportunity for an embarrassing opening day defeat at Wigan being spurned as a 2-1 win slipped away only in the dying seconds of the match, and a potential banana skin at home to Newport in the cup was brushed passed (if unconvincingly). Combined with the nearing conclusion of the boardroom confusion at the club as the Thai takeover is nearly completed, the pre-season gloom has lifted and the future seems bright for Reading FC.
So why did giant centre-back Morrison choose to leave the club, joining former Royals star Adam Le Fondre in the Welsh capital? Reading fans remember the departure of Matt Mills in 2011 and will see similarities; a promising centre-back with big ambitions jumping ship for supposed improved chances of promotion and the lure of bigger wages. Reading fans will remember with a smile the chants of ‘are you watching Matty Mills?’ as the club marched to promotion the subsequent season, and last season’s experience of scoring 7 goals against Bolton with the hapless Mills at the heart of their defence. Only time will tell if Morrison suffers a similar fate: watch this space.
But the real interest of Reading fans should be drawn to their own club – schadenfreude towards former players, Swindon and Oxford aside – so Morrison’s departure left a sense of fear as to who would fill the 6ft 4inch void which he left in the centre of the club’s defence. Saturday saw academy graduate Michael Hector step up, neatly slotting into the space next to Alex Pearce and keeping a clean sheet against a dangerous Ipswich attack as the Royals struggled their way to a 1-0 win, with Hector putting in a man of the match performance. Hector provides the balance at the back which Morrison did not; Pearce and Morrison were almost too similar, too easily exposed by pace, to be as effective together as a Hector-and-Pearce partnership threatens to be. With marquee signing Anton Ferdinand also working on his fitness and set to provide further options in that role the sale of Morrison does not appear to be as big a loss to the club as it might at first glance, as pocketing £4million up front for a player who has proved injury prone in his time at the club does not appear to be a bad piece of business.
In fact, aside from the forced sale of Le Fondre this summer, a move you could not begrudge an out-and-out goalscorer who was not being used effectively by the current Royals management, the departure of Southampton’s recent £12million signing Shane Long, and the sale of current Swansea and Iceland star Gylfi Sigurdsson, few Royals players have left the club and truly given Reading fans a reason to think of what could have been if the transfer had not taken place. Of the record-breaking 2005/06 season’s team only one player left and plied his career at a consistently better level, with Steve Sidwell the hard-working player who has finally re-established himself in the Premier League.
Despite the reluctance of Reading fans to admit it, we have seen our best squads develop rarely as a result of a truly talented group of individuals, but usually as a tightly-knit group of players which emerged to be able to beat most teams on their day. Even with an expected decline as they aged we cannot have predicted the fading of the likes of Nicky Shorey, Ibrahima Sonko, Kevin Doyle and David Kitson from that famous squad, and all left for impressive fees. Maybe more predictable was the stalling of development of less disciplined players such as Andre Bikey, Greg Halford, Stephen Hunt, and the aforementioned Matt Mills, but still, these players commanded multi-million pound fees, despite the fact that Reading fans were not too sad to see them leave.
The mastermind behind this was undoubtedly Director of Football Nicky Hammond, a man who has shown great loyalty to the club in his 18-year spell at the club. A former goalkeeper at the club, his career was cut short by injury and he stepped into a coaching role, becoming Director of Football in 2003; to many fans his abilities in the role have been some of the best in the country. After being the subject of vocal criticism from fans during the morale-damaging friendly defeat to Oman in 2013 his reputation has been rebuilt as former chairman Anton Zingarevich’s was destroyed, and his work in the year of 2014 could be seen as some of his best yet. Last year I was frustrated that Nigel Adkins was distanced from the questionable signing of Royston Drenthe while Hammond, and mostly Zingarevich, were assigned blame. This year I hope that the unassuming man from Hornchurch is credited for the past summer’s quiet, yet shrewd, dealings in the transfer market – especially if the move to re-sign one of the few that Hammond mistakenly let slip away, former academy product Simon Cox, pays off.
Quite simply, the season looks like it could be another crazy one, but the squad which Hammond assembled, if used correctly by Adkins, is one which could do wonders in the Championship.
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