Chief Scout Brian McDermott believes new signing Jimmy Kebe has the potential to make a real impact.

Kebe joined the Club in January from Lens, and has made three substitute appearances in the first team.

He has also lined up three times for our reserves, who are managed by Brian, and is finding his feet with every game.

Brian said, "Jimmy has massive amounts of pace and potential. It's difficult for him because he doesn't know the language. But he's showing his ability in spurts. He could have scored against Everton, and he's come off the bench for little spells.

"He's still got to settle, I've got massive hope for him when he settles and learns the language. It took Drogba a year to adjust to the game over here after his move from France."

Kebe was something of an obscure signing, coming from the second tier of French football where he was out on loan at Boulogne, and Brian believes he can follow in the footsteps of other similar players here at Reading.

"That's what we do, obscure signings. What was the point of signing a player like Kevin Doyle from Cork, or Dave Kitson from Cambridge? Why would you take Stephen Hunt on a free from Brentford? The list goes on.

"We look at our players and try to identify players we can work with, they are the ones we go for. We don't get the finished article players, and I've said before that if we tried to sign the players we have currently playing for our first team we couldn't get them.

"We've always tried to go for players who are young and hungry. When we recruit we always go down that road."

Brian oversaw our reserve team's impressive 2-1 win over Chelsea on Monday night, and it puts us in contention for the league title.

We beat a team that included Andriy Shevchenko, Claudio Pizarro, Steve Sidwell and Tal Ben Haim, and it was a very good evening's work.

He said, "I was pleased when I saw their team. They normally put out younger sides, but when I saw the five or six names they had in there I was really pleased. It was a good game and it could have been a couple of Premier League sides out there.

"I'd like to think that players feel that if they play well in the reserves they have a chance of getting in the first team. The gaffer made changes last week and I thought our team at Chelsea were excellent. We were good value at 2-0, gave a soft goal away and had a couple of other chances.

"We played some really good stuff, passed it well and it gives a chance for the gaffer to look at things and feel he has more players who could come into his first team.

"Our defence coped well with the likes of Shevchenko. We gave a poor goal away and we knew that, and Shevchenko headed one over at the end. They had quality in their side and so had we. Jimmy Kebe had a couple of runs where he showed his real pace. He's growing into it and all round I was chuffed with the performance."

Reading have a consistent policy of playing first team players in reserve matches, which goes against many other Premier League clubs who use it pretty much as an extension of their youth setup.

Brian believes tha tother clubs could soon follow in our footsteps though, saying, "I spoke to someone at Arsenal, and they said they might start to play first team squad players who weren't getting a game, and if you looked at Chelsea this week that was the case as well.

"Players want to play, and if they're not playing on a Saturday for the first team they have to play somewhere. If you haven't played for eight weeks and just trained, if it was me, I'd want to play for the reserves. That's the gaffer's philosophy. He wants to see players play, and I think that's right."

Extended highlights from the reserve game are live on Reading World now. Sign up for a four-day trial for just 99p.