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Reading have had a rather inconsistent start to the season and that saw Jose Gomes sacked as manager despite keeping the Royals in the Championship last season.

Mark Bowen replaced him as first-team manager and that surprised many, with the Welshman already Sporting Director at the football club as well as the fact he'd never been a manager before in his whole career.

However, the performance on Saturday showed a lot of what was missing during Gomes' tenure, and the Royals got a 1-0 victory over a high-flying Preston side.

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It was a well-earned three points, and they'll be looking to carry that on against QPR this Tuesday evening. It's vital that what they showed on Saturday sticks with the Royals.

The key was effort and determination, regardless if the ball was too far away or if the Royals had just lost possession, they fought for it back and put their all into working for each other to have the best chance of coming away with a victory.

In terms of the style, Bowen actually lined up in the same system of playing five at the back but he made two key changes that somewhat surprised Preston and actually outlined where Gomes had gone wrong previously.

The first was kicking the ball long some of the time. One of the things that Championship teams sometimes need to learn is that they cannot pass the ball around their penalty area the whole game, Reading have done that far too often in the last few years and it's proved costly on so many occasions.

On Saturday, they decided to get rid instead of be risky, and it worked brilliantly with Preston rarely having a sniff of the Royals' goal.

The second key change was in the build-up play as they were able to get the ball up to the strikers much quicker, this is through the excellent work of defensive midfielder Pele and the strong runs of George Puscas and Yakou Meite.

It is just one game, but the signs were promising, purely because Bowen highlighted what Reading were missing and then tried to rectify it, which he did brilliantly.

QPR will be a whole new test, especially away from home, but it's one they can go to with a lot of confidence.