Ghost of wembley put to rest?

[The whole year inn]

Nope - Ghosts of '95 will never be laid to rest in my book - the biggest injustice football has ever seen.

I never thought Reading would get near Bolton that day. Having watched them run Liverpool close in the LC final a few weeks before I expected them to sweep us aside.

Anyway, no need to open old wounds.

[Coppell's Right Footed 11]

Nope - Ghosts of '95 will never be laid to rest in my book - the biggest injustice football has ever seen.

I never thought Reading would get near Bolton that day. Having watched them run Liverpool close in the LC final a few weeks before I expected them to sweep us aside.

Anyway, no need to open old wounds.

A wounded beast is a dangerous beast...and we are now seeing the benefits. Think it was too early for us to grace the top flight if we had of beaten Bolton

[Behindu]

Think it was too early for us to grace the top flight if we had of beaten Bolton

Agree - whilst it hurt in 95 it was IMHO one of the best things to happen to us in our history.
We'd have had one season of struggle and then dropped back through the leagues.
We came up at the right time, and what didn;t kill us made us stronger.

[Diamond]

IMO - that was the day RFC became a team everone "knew" about. Before then, we were just small fry.

Sat in the Olympic Gallery that day. Remember the seats moving up and down like a roller-coaster. Not convinced it was safe!

[paultheroyal]

IMO - that was the day RFC became a team everone "knew" about. Before then, we were just small fry.

Sat in the Olympic Gallery that day. Remember the seats moving up and down like a roller-coaster. Not convinced it was safe!

I was there too - you were not the young lad who cried on my shoulder?

[RoyalBlue]

This question has been asked several times before: When we beat Bolton 3-2 at Elm Park (Quinn in goal!), when we won promotion to the Premiership etc

We got some sort of revenge against Bolton when we beat them at Elm Park, we got over the "missing out on the Prem" thing when we made it. But for me this wrapped it all up: to be in the Prem at teh same time as Bolton, play them in their ground and beat them.

Of course those of us with the ability to move on from things wouldn't need such events to occur but for the likes of me it was necessary. I could never forget the northern b*stards shouting down at us unnecessarily taunting and mocking us relentlessly as we walked away from that day in 1995. So it was particularly sweet for us to catch up after all these years and massively dent their hopes of European football on their own turf in the Prem.

For me, as someone with an elephant's memory, the ghosts been finally put to rest.

Ghost laid to rest? You have got to be joking! I was left scarred for life by what happened at Wembley that day. In fact I'm thinking of suing Archie and RFC for leaving me with Post traumatic stress!

Brentford, The Walkers Stadium and Reebok may all help ease the pain but none can remove the scarring!

[Rawlie19]

The worst day ever.

Like the worst sick joke you can imagine.

Unlike you though, we bumped into sympathetic Bolton fans that day, but I'm happy that we did the double over them and gave them a bit of pain this season.

Like you I don't remember any unsympathetic Bolton fans that day but, then again, I was in a world of my own when I walked away from Wembley after the game.

That was a shocking experience that I think took at least two seasons to begin to get over. In football terms nothing has hurt since like "that" game and I still think there's an element in me even to this day that feels immune to the pain of defeat thanks to the play-off final of '95.

But I still can't find it in me to dislike Bolton as a club then or now really.

I thought the same about being immune to the pain of defeat, but when the third goal went in after only 6 minutes against Man Utd the feeling came back.

After that Wembley game I had to wait to get out of the car park as we were surrounded by Bolton cars. The driver of the car in front of me was laughing at me sitting there and said "how does it feel to be a bunch of losers?" I replied: "Pretty crap thanks, how does it feel to see nice big key scratch down the side of your car?"

It wasn't me that keyed it btw.

[Uke]

It was banished for me when we got promotion. I genuinely thought that with the whole finishing 2nd in '95 and not going up, that I was effectively sentenced to a lifetime of watching a lower league football club. Not so.

Typical of a fickle plastic fan

[ElmParker]

There are two periods of my life: BW and AW.

Before Wembley, I was a respectable middle-class lad. Worked hard, side-parting, went to Church regularly, tried not to masturbate too much.

I had always believed that the universe was basically a just place. God gave us football and kept an eye-out to keep things broadly fair. Not everyone can be a winner, of course. You learn more through defeat than victory.

But on that day, it wasn’t Bolton that beat us. It was a cruel, vengeful Old Testament God, with Reading as Job. Jason McAteer was the fallen angel.

After Wembley, I lost my way. My father was sent to prison for several complicated tax evasion schemes and my mother lost her hair. I went to university where I fell in with a bad crowd and took up sociology. I fathered an illegitimate child by a local barmaid. Reading signed Robert Fleck.

I returned home without graduating to find Reading in a lower division. He took our promotion. He took our family of beautiful players. He took our wealth and gave us Darren Caskey. He destroyed our ancient home. We signed Andy Hughes.

The years drifted past until one day I found myself on a pitch surrounded by cheering folk. I looked at the score board and we had beaten Derby 5-0.

Then, I sensed a change. It was then I realised God had relented and we had suffered enough. I knew it was true only weeks later when Murty’s penalty went in.

Truly that was my catharsis. My life began again.

Hallelujah!

[Huntley & Palmer]

It was laid to rest for me a few years later when i read of some lad who had been knocked down by a car, and was in a coma; his parents played the BBC Lancashire commentary of the game to him day after day (he was a Bolton fan) and it helped him come out of the coma.

Put it into perspective.

With hindsight, losing that play-off final was the best thing that could happen to Reading - had we gone up, we would have ended up paying ridiculous salaries to keep the team together, and with a 14,000 max capacity at Elm Park would have not been able to get the revenues in. Shaka, Scott Taylor, Simon Osborn et al would have probably left anyway, so we would have struggled to survive in the League, then stuggled to survive full stop.

The gates we were getting toward the end of that season showed Mr Mad that there was the potential support to fill a new, large stadium, and that was the lasting legacy of that campaign; I suggest that, in Years to come, moving to The Mad Stad will be shown to have been a major component of why we reached the heights we have done (and will continue to do into the future), together (obviously) with Mr Mad coming to the club, the training facilities at Hogwood, and the appointments of Nick Hammond as DofF, Pardew and then Coppell as Managers.

I think the thought of watching, listening to that game again would drive me into a coma. It hurts still, especially with my family connections to Bolton as well. It was a continual point of reference for over 10 years.