Royals thumped by Magpies

It's very early days, but the Championship table shows the Royals languishing in the bottom three after a drubbing at St. James' Park. An impressive crowd of 36,000 saw Brendan Rodgers' young side start impressively enough but fall behind to a Shola Ameobi header ten minutes before half time. Up until then the youngsters had performed well enough, passing with confidence and looking purposeful on the counter-attack. Nervous home supporters had little to cheer about, and after Kevin Nolan's sumptuous through ball was fluffed by Gutierrez it looked like it could have been anybody's game. Everything changed when Ameobi rose above Alex Pearce and headed down past Federici. The second half was very much a case of boys vs. men, chasing the game was going to be hard for an inexperienced royals side, made virtually impossible when Ameobi headed home the second after some sloppy defending. The third came from the penalty spot after Shane Long was judged to have handled, but by then we were looking a little ragged and very short of ideas. Noel Hunt, Jim Harper and Hal Robson-Kanu were thrown into the frey to no avail, although Hunt went close late on with a decent shot that went just wide.

So no goals and a heavy defeat. No shame for the kids to lose against a side with plenty of top flight experience. Brendan didn't seem too perturbed afterwards, we lost to the better side, it's been useful experience, now let's move on. However you can't help feeling that as hungry and talented as these youngsters undoubtedly are, we really need to add some more experience and maybe some more attacking threat to bolster the squad. I've no doubt that bringing the likes of Scott Davies and Robson-Kanu into the first team is the right move, after all there is no point in having an academy if you don't use the talent you've nurtured. The concern might be that if we go a couple more matches without a goal or a win the the pressure begins to mount already. I'm sure we'll see a couple of additions before the end of August (Tommy Smith surely?) and everything will come right. Interestingly we travel to bottom club Swansea City on Tuesday night...