For all the talk in recent days about how coaching the England Under-21 team might impinge on his duties as manager of Manchester City, it seemed deeply ironic that Stuart Pearce did not have to travel far on Saturday to discover just how good at least one of his new protégés is.

City’s supporters have reacted with a mixture of concern and dismay to Pearce’s appointment by the FA, but maybe they should be thankful for it because a little more time spent in the company of Leroy Lita might help the manager to realise precisely what he is missing up front at club level.

While Lita’s two goals served principally to highlight his own budding talent, they also helped to expose the failings of Darius Vassell and Georgios Samaras, who, together with Pearce’s other misfiring forwards, may well prove to be the reason why City end the season in a relegation dogfight.

No wonder Pearce was so desperate to lure Mido away from Tottenham Hotspur, although only time will tell how costly that particular miss turns out to be. City have now drawn blanks in 13 of their 25 games in the Barclays Premiership this season and it does not take a scientist to figure out why.

By the time Lita scored his first, City should have been out of sight, even though the Reading striker had a perfectly legitimate goal ruled out in the 39th minute when the ball was wrongly judged to have gone out of play as the excellent Stephen Hunt teed up his teammate with a cushioned header.

Joey Barton, the midfield player, was the first to err, shooting straight at Marcus Hahnemann when sent clean through. Vassell then squandered an almost identical opportunity midway through the second half while the gangly, languid-looking Samaras lacked anything approaching conviction in front of goal.

That Pearce, with 16 minutes remaining and the game still goalless, opted to replace Samaras with Daniel Sturridge, a 17-year-old debutant, instead of Bernardo Corradi perhaps tells you how highly the manager really regards the veteran Italian.

Lita has scored nine goals in his past nine games. Corradi, Samaras, Vassell and Paul Dickov, by contrast, have mustered only seven between them in a total of 81 Premiership matches.

For all City’s deficiencies, though, it is hard not to admire this Reading team, who have reached the coveted 40-point mark with 12 games to spare. Not bad for a side with the “L plates” still on, as Steve Coppell, the manager, reasoned afterwards.

Both goals — blistering finishes from searing counter-attacks — offered further proof that, with the obvious exceptions of Arsenal and Manchester United, Reading are playing probably the best football in the Premiership at the moment, while their utter fearlessness is embodied by the rampaging Lita.

After Saturday’s showing, part of Pearce must feel like punishing Lita by confining him to the substitutes’ bench when England Under-21 take on Spain’s young guns in Derby tomorrow, but on present form, the 22-year-old deserves to start.

“I’m doing my bit for my team [Reading] and he’s [Pearce] doing his bit for his team [City] and I’m sure he respects that,” Lita said. “After the game he was cool, he shook my hand and just said ‘see you tomorrow’ and I will look forward to it. Hopefully I can impress him in training during the week and try and get into that starting lineup.” Something suggests that he has already done so.