JAAP STAM says it was all about the result as Reading sealed their place in the play-offs with a 1-0 win over Wigan Athletic at Madejski Stadium.
Yann Kermorgant headed in the only goal of the contest after six minutes, but the game went flat following a nine-minute stoppage following a serious looking injury to Latics midfielder Shaun MacDonald after he clashed with George Evans.
And Stam says the performance must be better when the play-offs come around.
Speaking to the media after the game, he said:
On the game…
It was not the easiest of games because we were playing a side fighting for their lives to stay in the league. We spoke before the game about starting well, working hard, starting well and being aggressive going forward. We did that and scored that first goal, but after that you
can’t slow down, you’ve got to keep going and make it more difficult for them.
We didn’t do that basically. We gave them too much space to play and made it difficult for ourselves. You’ve seen throughout the season that the difference between the top teams and the bottom teams is not the biggest. Everybody can beat everybody. But it’s can you be consistent.
Of course you want to do things a certain way but, as we’ve learnt in Italy, it’s all about the results. We Dutch don’t always think about it, but sometimes we do like today. But in the next games we want to play a bit better quality wise.
On if today’s performance was good enough for the play-offs…
We need to step up. I think we need to do better. We need to play better. We haven’t done what we can do, I don’t know why but I don’t want to dwell too much on that. Play-off games are totally different. I’ve played great games in my career against some very big teams, but if reach those games in a certain stage of the cup, like in the Champions League then it’s totally different to the league games.
On the play-offs…
For us it’s already a very big achievement that we are up there. There is no pressure on us. But we want to go up, we’re going to make it very hard for whoever we are playing and make it a real battle hopefully.
On people questioning his move to Reading…
I know what I can do. There’s always people in every country that you go who are sceptical. The people were quite happy when I came over here, from what I’ve read, so I’m very happy with that as well. People always say you need to have experience to do well, but you get experience by working and getting the chance at a certain level with a certain club. I’ve lived with sceptics all my life and I’m used to it, that’s fine.
On the injury to Shaun MacDonald…
George got the ball, he miscontrolled it and wanting to retrieve it so he went in with that tackle, the same as MacDonald did. Unluckily for him he clashed and hit his leg. I don’t know how bad the injury is, but it looked pretty bad. I feel sorry for him because he’s a good player. You don’t wish for players to break their legs in games, but George is not the type of player who does that on purpose. George is a great lad, great professional, very good mentality and he never kicks somebody on purpose like that. It’s a thing that can happen in football. It looks serious and I wish him all the best and hope he can return quick.
On thinking about taking Evans off…
You tell him that he needs to keep on going. It can affect certain players because I’ve seen that in the past, certain players think about what happened and take themselves out of the game basically. But we spoke about it and George is the type of person who wants to carry on and do well. Of course he doesn’t like what happened but I think he did OK today.
On McCleary’s injury…
He’s been having that problem for basically the biggest part of the season. We had to
manage it. In the first half of the season he did quite well and it was under control. But with the amount of games and intensity of the games that needed to be played, it got worse and sometimes we needed to take him out and give him a couple of days rest, extra painkillers then he could play again. But towards the end of the season and today it wasn’t good enough. He didn’t train a lot this week, yesterday he was OK and had a good training session and we hoped he could give us 60 minutes or a bit more, but you could see in the game that he had problems with his groins.
It’s not bad that he needs to have an operation. Maybe eventually, we don’t know. But we need to have a look at it with the physios tomorrow and see what we can do towards the play-offs.
