Reading vs. Manchester City: Complete Premier League Preview

Match: Reading (19th in Barclays Premier League) vs. Manchester City (second place in BPL)

Venue: Madejski Stadium, Reading, UK

Date: 14 May 2013

Time: 8:00 p.m. BST/3:00 p.m. ET/12:00 p.m. PT

Odds (per Ladbrokes): Reading win 5/1; Draw 11/4; Manchester City win 4/9

Reading Leading Scorers: Adam Le Fondre (11), Hal Robson-Kanu (7), Pavel Pogrebnyak (5)

Manchester City Leading Scorers: Edin Dzeko (13), Sergio Aguero and Carlos Tevez (11 each)

Reading Form Last Five (BPL): W, D, L, D, L

Manchester City Form Last Five (BPL): W, D, W, L, W

Imagine, if you will, that you prepaid for travel, maybe even lodging too, for this second-to-last Manchester City match of the Premier League season.

For most of the fall and into the winter, that seemed a wise choice. City was still within touching distance of the Premier League lead. That is, Manchester United had not finally pulled away without looking back.

So you were holding those match tickets and those train tickets and hoping that City would be playing for something meaningful in the middle of May.

Look at this trip now.

City has long since lost its now distant memory of a league title. City could conceivably be dispossessed of second place in the table by Chelsea, but only if City loses to Reading and Norwich City while Chelsea beats Everton.

Reading, of course, has been damned to relegation for two weeks now.

Here you have the saddest of all potential late-season pairings: a lopsided match between sides with significantly different talent pools and no reason for either team to care about the result.

Of course, save for that last clause, that same sentence could have applied to the recent FA Cup final, which saw the Sky Blue Goliath take a stone in the temple from Wigan.

Perhaps the only real reason to even make the journey to Reading to watch this match is to see whether Roberto Mancini emerges from the visitors' changing room. As of this writing, he is a definite maybe to make the trip at all, per ESPNFC.com.

Key Battles

In all sincerity, dear reader, your humble correspondent has no idea how to approach this section of this piece.

Right now, we do not even know that Mancini will manage this side against Reading. Who does Brian Kidd like? If we had that answer, we might have a sense of City's XI.

Moreover, why would City risk even one of its core stars (Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany, Yaya Toure, Sergio Aguero) in either this match or the finale against Norwich City?

Remember the slipshod XI City trotted out against Swansea City last week? Expect something similar, but good luck trying to figure out exactly who is playing where.

Ditto Reading. And, really, who cares who plays and where? Even the players' families will probably watch this one on DVR, if at all.

Prediction: Reading 0-0 Manchester City.

Condolences in advance if you in fact have tickets to this one.