But Michael Gray also said this...
He said: “I do speak to a few of the players and they tell me no [him leaving didn’t affect them], they said if he’s not happy there no point keeping him at the football club, which is totally right, you don’t want somebody upsetting your dressing room.”
Gray also believes a win against Wigan next weekend is vital for the Mackems to turn around the horrendous run of from.
“They’re in such a slump at the minute,” he told the Weekend Sports Breakfast. “They can’t even buy a win, one point in [27] isn’t good Reading, but I’ve been to see them quite a lot this season and yesterday they played well, like Steve [Bruce] said, they just need that goal, something they can hang on to and at the minute it doesn’t seem to be coming.
“It’s a really difficult one to put your finger on, they played well [against Birmingham] but they’ve just got to get out there on the training pitch again, work their socks off and make sure they get the right result against Wigan at the weekend because now it’s a massive game.
“They’ve got to understand the situation they’re getting dragged in to, what they’ve probably said is, ‘you need one win and you’re safe’, but they could have said that seven games ago, so with the amount of games going by it’s getting a bit worrying but we’ve got games in hand, teams below us are about five points away, so we have got a little bit of a gap.
“We’ve just got to keep our fingers crossed that the win comes quicker rather than later because going into the last couple of games of the season you don’t want to still need that win.”
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