Here’s To You, Andy Yiadom

If you split every Reading player of the last eight years into either unanimously liked, split opinion or unanimously disliked, the latter of those categories would be distinctly more populated than the first. Andy Yiadom fits into the second though. There will be some fans that simply see him as a player who joined when we were an established Championship side and leaves us at the end of our third consecutive season in League One.

However, for me, any player who sticks with a club through the period our players have had to endure over the last eight years deserves respect – and even more so if they’ve showed the kind of professionalism, character and humility that Yids has. To put into context the various transitions that Yiadom has been through and come out the other side of, he’s played under eight different managers and represented the Royals alongside Saeid Ezatolahi, Alfa Semedo and Sam Hutchinson. And up until the last couple of seasons, which have been a tad injury-ravaged, he’s been a mainstay in all of those various iterations of Reading FC starting XIs.

At times I feel he’s been made a bit of a scapegoat, à la Chris Gunter (maybe it’s a right-back thing? ) but there’s a reason so many different managers relied on him and saw little to no reason to replace him: he’s been a ruddy good defender. And I say defender, rather than specifying a particular position, because he’s played pretty much everywhere across the defence during his time here.

Right-back, right-wing-back, right of a back three, centre-back in a back four, left-back and left-wing-back. Having a player in your ranks with that kind of versatility has been a godsend for us in recent years, and is no easy thing to replace. But perhaps where Yids’ qualities shone through most was in how he conducted himself off the pitch.