As Mark Hughes moves out of Loftus Road, Harry Redknapp seems set to move straight in. Are QPR simply repeating the same mistakes all over again?
I don’t think I’ve ever disliked an article of mine as much as the assessment of Mark Hughes that I posted earlier tonight.
That’s not because anything in it was untrue or unfair – it’s a real challenge to find anything positive about an 11 month, 30 league match reign that contained just six victories – but because it was just the kind of wise-after-the-event Richard Littlejohn-type nonsense that I’ve always hated.
Littlejohn once infamously described his job as “sitting at the back and throwing bottles.” And isn’t that just so easy to do? People at the front try hard, come up with ideas and live with their successes and failures while people like Littlejohn sit at the back doing nothing except throwing things at them. I’m reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s line that ‘those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.’ These days it’s ‘those who can, do; those that can’t, write for the Daily Mail.’
I’m proud of LoftforWords because it proves just about everybody I’ve ever encountered in my own journalism career completely wrong. “People have short attention spans, people don’t want to read 3,000 word articles any more, people want things summing up quickly, people are on the move all the time these days, people aren’t going to sit and read five pages of in depth analysis on Akos Buzsaky on their mobile phone,” said one sub editor after another as they imposed 300 word limits on me. Well, I’ve taken very great pleasure in ignoring them on my own time, and making a success of a website that does the exact opposite of all the present-day rules and now brings in 95,000 page impressions on a good day, and holds up around the 60,000 mark on a quiet one.
Whenever I work on pieces for LFW – mine or guest submissions – I think ‘would I like to read this myself?’ which brings me back to my Mark Hughes article, which I loathe.
You see it’s all very well me sitting here now, after Hughes has made a monumental mess of managing Queens Park Rangers, and saying he was arrogant for walking out on Fulham, he was an idiot for spending massive money on the likes of Wayne Bridge at Manchester City, he was foolish to get rid of so many players who felt something for QPR and replace them with big names and so on. But when he was appointed I glossed over these things and talked up his achievements at Blackburn; the signings of people like Chris Samba, Vincent Kompany and Mousa Dembele; the eighth placed finish at Fulham. When Hughes was appointed I framed him as the man who performed wonders for two clubs of similar size to QPR and signed players who proved key to Manchester City winning the title last season, now he’s gone I’m saying he’s the idiot who is too involved with Kia Joorabchian and blew millions for no trophy return at Eastlands.
I hate the lack of accountability in sports journalism. Shaun Custis can say QPR are about to be deducted 15 points and splash it all over the back page of his paper, then when it turns out to be rubbish nothing happens to him – just onto the next story that might be true but probably isn’t. Likewise Patrick Barclay can write a piece in the Evening Standard haranguing Chelsea for the way they’ve dealt with the John Terry affair after the FA threw the book at him, when just a month beforehand he’d written a column for the same paper suggesting QPR would owe Terry an apology if they refused to shake his hand before a match and he was subsequently found not guilty. When you raise this with him on Twitter you’re either ignored, or he denies all knowledge of the first column. And it’s best I don’t start (again) on Sky Sports News and their ‘throw enough shit at the wall’ approach to transfer deadline day.
I’m not wrong in what I’ve written about Hughes, but I wish I’d been right earlier.
This is the difficulty in writing about a club that I love so completely. I may make myself abide by the Richie Benaud mantra of never, ever saying “we” when referring to Rangers, and I may try as hard as I can to approach every article objectively, but deep down I’m still that eight-year-old boy running around Bushy Park in his Brooks QPR home shirt with a Les Ferdinand poster on his bedroom wall.
My dad used to hate Mark Dennis with a passion. When Dennis was charging around in a Southampton shirt cutting Wayne Fereday in two my father could be found hanging over advertising hoardings to abuse him. As soon as Dennis pulled on the blue and white hoops he was alright: “Well done Mark Dennis” my dad’s booming voice would yell from the P Block as the full back sliced some poor unsuspecting winger in half.
Partly through the blind loyalty that all football fans have to their clubs, and partly through the new modern day fear of being branded “a closet Chelsea fan” on Twitter, I always find myself looking for positives in new signings and managers. “Yeh he’s been dog shit before, and he did lose a leg to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, and he is into his forties now, and an alcoholic, and a former Chelsea player, and that botched sex change operation hasn’t done much for him, and he was never the quickest anyway, but maybe he can do a job for us at right wing,” I’ll say as the latest crock moves in.
When Jose Bosingwa signed I queried whether he’d have the fight and motivation to play for a struggling team after an entire career spent winning matches every week – but I resolved that somebody with his international caps and medal collection couldn’t be a bad signing. Likewise with Park, despite evidence at the end of last season that his legs had gone, I resolved that this was a great deal for the club. In the summer Hughes turned down the chance to sign Taye Taiwo, who played well at the end of last season and seemed to really like it here, in order to sign Fabio Da Silva on loan instead. I queried whether that was sound long term thinking, but then went running back to his Brazilian youth caps and 60 appearances for Manchester United.
In truth, I was as delighted as everybody else about the big name players coming into QPR in the summer, and I think I said something about Hughes being the only sensible option for the managerial job last January. So it’s a bit rich of me to sit here now talking about what an unbelievably awful job he’s done.
Of the QPR fans I speak to or read only three have said consistently, from the start, that both Mark Hughes and the club’s transfer policy were recipes for disaster: message board regular Dai Hoop, who is Welsh and hated Hughes before he even took the Blackburn job; mainstay of the LFW Travelling Crew Neil Dejyothin who gave me a detailed 30 minute run down of exactly why this season was going to be an unmitigated disaster on the way to the Swansea game in August and all I could say to him at the time was “stop being so harsh”; and journalist David McIntyre, whose words look so wise now but were met at the time via social networks with abuse along the lines of “not a proper QPR fan” and “never say anything positive.” Congratulations gents, such a shame we’ve found out you were right all along in such lousy circumstances.
This is why having supporters on the board of directors at a club can be problematic. Supporters are emotional and it clouds their judgement. Even now, after everything that’s happened, supporters across message boards and Twitter want more signings, more new players, more blood. Get Harry Redknapp in here, get rid of this lot, get in a new lot, right now.
The QPR board of directors may not be QPR fans, but they are football fans. Headhunting goes on in all forms of business, but to come out and say that Mark Hughes interviewed them for the QPR job, as much as the other way around, shows the problem with this. For whatever reason, Tony Fernandes and the board decided Mark Hughes was the ideal manager to lead their revolution and did everything bar suck him off to get him to agree. They let him buy whatever players he wanted, appoint whatever staff he wanted, mould the club however he wanted, and they gave him a contract so extortionate with a pay-off so great that they had to beg him to resign from it before eventually biting the bullet and sacking him.
They have no football experience and it has showed. I remember reading a piece from Chris Wright, who was a QPR fan, talking about just how illogical football makes reasonable businessmen. Would Philip Beard ever have got himself into a situation when he was the manager of the O2 Arena where he only considered a single candidate for a senior position, and then when that candidate arrived the questions were directed more at Beard than the other way around? Would Tony Fernandes appoint somebody to run his airline or hotels in that manner? So why did they allow it to happen with Hughes? Because somebody turning up to work for Air Asia would be just another executive, whereas Mark Hughes played for Manchester United.
Again, it’s easy to say all this now, because Hughes was a disaster and has gone. I didn’t raise many of these concerns back in January so I’m back in Littlejohn mode again. What is absolutely crucial now is that QPR do not make the same mistake again. There should be a managerial appointment, not a coronation.
Sadly it seems that Harry Redknapp is going to march straight into Loftus Road as the only candidate given serious consideration. If he does, and is welcomed with open arms, then QPR’s board and their fans have learnt zilch. The last 11 months of complete and utter dreadfulness on the pitch will have achieved nothing.
Ultra short term, Redknapp would be an improvement. He’s a motivator, and boy does this QPR team need motivating; he plays attractive, positive football, and my oh my do the QPR fans deserve some of that; and although he took over Southampton in a similar situation to the one we’re in now and got them relegated, he did later return to Portsmouth and rescue them from an almost certain demotion. Plus, let’s face it, unless he fails to win any of the next 13 matches he can’t do any worse can he? Short term, with the Premier League money skyrocketing next year, you could make a good case for this being reason enough to appoint him. In truth, I’m excited by the prospect of him taking over.
But in many respects Redknapp would be a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” – from The Who’s rather aptly named song Won’t Get Fooled Again. Redknapp is going to name his terms and negotiate a big fat contract, then this January he’s going to go out and buy five or six players and so the whole cycle begins again. Expect Willie McKay, like Kia Joorabchian with Hughes, to start furnishing us with big name players on big name contracts who will no more muck in when the going gets tough than come round my house and cut my lawn for me. And, judging by the “come and save us Harry” banners at Loftus Road, everybody is all in favour of this. Well, sorry, this time I am sticking a warning flag in the sand nice and early.
QPR need to look at what is working for football clubs at the moment. Ignore the Manchester City, Chelsea, Paris SG, Barcelona, Real Madrid stories of throwing money at it until it works. The real success stories are coming at clubs that are focused on a long term plan, on youth development and on a strategy. West Brom, Norwich and Swansea in this country, Ajax in Holland, Dortmund in Germany etc etc. They often make managerial appointments that seem a little left field but are made after an exhaustive process aimed at finding not the best candidate on paper, but the best fit for the club. They don’t get them wrong often as a result, and even when they do it’s not the end of the world because it’s the system and the strategy that’s running the club, rather than the manager as Hughes did at QPR.
When QPR were last in the Premier League having a chairman as wealthy as Tony Fernandes, and as happy to spend money on the team as he is, would probably have seen us win the whole competition outright – Blackburn Rovers did just that by spending a similar amount to that which Fernandes has shelled out. But these days every club has a rich owner and it’s only when you get somebody like Roman Abramovic or Sheikh Mansour that it’s enough to propel you beyond the rest. For everybody else, success these days is to be found in sound, strategic planning. It’s why QPR were foolish to simply crown Hughes and hand him the keys to the safe, and medium to long term they’d be just as daft to do the same with Harry Redknapp.
QPR need to be bringing in hungry, young players with plenty to prove who will provide excellent sell on value further down the line. Look down the divisions and wide across Europe and concentrate hard on developing your own. While Rangers were handing Jose Bosingwa a stupid contract this summer, 200 miles up the M1 there’s a fabulous young attacking right back playing for Huddersfield called Jack Hunt who would relish coming here and having a crack at the Premier League. By all means supplement these players with the odd big name, or “marquee signing” as the modern parlance has it, but not more than two or three.
There’s no guarantee of success – for every Leon Britton at Swansea there’s a Tom Soares at Stoke – but QPR are finding to their cost now that there’s no guarantee buying proven, big names either and when things do go wrong with that strategy they’re much harder to shift, much more expensive to keep and much more damaging to the team and the club.
What I want to see from QPR now is a widespread, thorough search for a new manager; a detailed, prolonged interview process of a dozen candidates or more from all over Europe; and finally an appointment of somebody who talks about ethos and targets three to five years away more than he mentions who he’d like to sign this January. Ask Harry Redknapp where he sees himself in five years time and I should imagine playing golf would figure quite prominently in his answer.
If the club learns from the mistakes of the Hughes coronation and does this, I’m pretty confident we’d end up with a similar European appointment to the one that Swansea City made in the summer, or with somebody similar to my two personal choices for the job Malky Mackay at Cardiff or Gus Poyet at Brighton.
And we’d (sorry) be all the better for it.
Tweet @loftforwords
Pictures – Action Images