Blackburn/Sunderland/Charlton - Awaydays Monday, 26th Sep 2022 17:01 by Clive Whittingham Did you think/hoped we'd forgotten? The international break belatedly gives us the chance to return our popular (debatable) Awaydays travelogue feature to the airwaves, starting with the opening week of the season and some serious mileage. The Lancashire and District Senior LeagueInto my heart an air that kills, From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. Alfred Edmond Housman. He is not here. And nor should we be really. It is not yet passed July, the country is in the midst of record-breaking heat, water-sapping drought, and hosepipe bans. Bits of London are actually, literally on fire. You do the Open Golf in July, you pretend you’re interested in Wimbledon (tennis, not AFC) in July, if you’ve got kids you take them on holiday at the end of July and if you haven’t got kids you absolutely don’t go on holiday at the end of July because all the people with kids are there driving the prices up and pissing in the swimming pool. You can - if you need the ground, if you’re at a loose end, if you need a fix, if you’ve given up hope of ever getting laid again - go to a pre-season friendly. A group of exactly that head to Crawley by way of an excuse to get out of the house and drink around Borough Market for a sunny afternoon. Some clogger the Crypto Bros picked up off the internet boots Tyler Roberts up in the air after 20 seconds and an old codger near us on the terrace shouts “DISGUSTING”. It’s live. A couple of us take a chance on Metropolitan Line beers for Wealdstone away - as sure an admission as ever there could be that our lives and hairlines have not travelled in the direction we hoped. Lyndon Dykes looks like Ares the Greek God of war. George Thomas scores. George Thomas scores. And now we’re here, last Saturday in July, on the 09.30 to Preston (and hopefully eventually Blackburn) which, even at 09.28, nobody packed into it, or driving it, seems very sure is going to be going anywhere at all. People like me chuck around terms like “chaos” and “carnage” and “dogs and cats living together” to try and summarise QPR’s defending of corners. It’s lazy stuff. It pales into insignificance when trying to catch a train out of the giant, rundown, abandoned aircraft hanger that is Euston Station. It’s always been like this — one out of every five ticket machines working, zero staff apart from the poor besieged fuckers in the little information booth in the middle of the concourse, platforms and trains hidden from view until the last possible second before departure at which point a number appears on a board and an announcement declares “this train is ready to leave” leading to a stampede of the only people who can afford to travel by train in this country now — i.e. the sort of suitcase-laden, shuffling, chinless wonders who you absolutely don’t want to be behind in a stampede situation. “Will my seat be reserved?” Listen, Derek, you’ll be lucky if your £389 return to Oxenholme (Lake District) gets you past Watford, never mind if you’ll be sitting down while we’re stationary watching the tube trains creak past at Harrow and Wealdstone. There are people sitting three to a seat, there are people sitting in the luggage racks, there are people standing down the aisle, there are people pushing to get through the doors to try and grab a piece of air space prior to a departure we still don’t know is definitely going to happen. An email arrives on our phones in unison informing us the 19.02 we’re coming back on from Preston tonight no longer exists. On a day when QPR are at Blackburn, Charlton are at Accrington and Reading are at Blackpool, there will be one train from Preston to London between 18.30 and the end of the day. And oh what fun that train promises to be. Tracey, who only signed up to this trip in a fit of pique/BealeMania is trying to explain over the phone to long suffering James why she’s still intending to remain on the rumoured 09.30 and head north anyway. The train, when it does miraculously leave, looks like one of those Indian numbers Michael Palin used to cheerily cram himself into for the BBC circa 1993. “I don’t know quite where we’re going, or how we’re going, but we’re going,” he’d say as some local child clinging to the outside charged him the equivalent of 3p for a veg cutlet served through the window. Oh, how we shook our heads and laughed at how advanced we were by comparison. I need a piss just after Stafford and have to ask four people to vacate the toilet, where they’d been sitting on the floor for the duration of the journey. The Avanti rail franchise is a castle built on sand. Privatisation, and the way it was done, just at the point that British Rail had got its act together and was thriving contrary to so many lazy depictions of dodgy sandwiches, was disastrous. One of the few positives to come from it was several of the companies used it as a chance to have a wholesale revisit of the contracts, terms and conditions that didn’t leave them relying on the “goodwill” of their employees. Avanti, or Virgin as it was at the time, was not one of them. It means that on any average week 450+ of the trains on their timetable are only able to run because the drivers agree to drive them during their time off. All fine for everybody — trains run, drivers get overtime — until industrial relations sour, at which point the goodwill is withdrawn and the timetable collapses. Our opening day trip to Blackburn coincides with the start of this collapse. Since it, Avanti has been unable to sell advance tickets, unable to confirm its weekend timetables until the Friday before, unable to guarantee getting anybody anywhere really. Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, London, Liverpool. Milton Keynes is a shitarse town. These vast population centres, in 2022 Britain, left without any manner of meaningful public transport system connecting them. The usual government tactic is to point the fingers at the unions — and that worked beautifully when Millwall-man Bob Crowe would call strikes for relatively well-paid drivers at a moment’s notice over one of them being sacked for knocking one out in the break room. Now, they’re in trouble. While they lie, dodge and obfuscate on Good Morning Britain, the union has Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey, who are able to communicate a position that aligns with how so many feel in the country at the moment, clearly and honestly, in a beautifully clippable two-minutes, and a voice and accent like somebody you wouldn’t mind having a pint with down the Crown. That’s not good news if you’re on the opposite side in an age driven by social media, messaging and storytelling. Who you going with, Mick Lynch or Jacob Rees-Mogg? Who’s on your side? Whether it’ll hold up through prolonged strikes in the winter I’m not sure, Bristol City away being torpedoed is a real eye-roller, and you can only rely on the support of the public while shafting the public for so long. But, for now, on the 09.30 to Preston, there isn’t a single voice, including the four poor bastards on the floor of the toilet, saying a word against the drivers and staff just trying to get a bit extra to get them through the looming clusterfuck they had nothing to do with but now have to cope with. We’re faced with a choice of missing the last ten minutes of the Blackburn match and making the 18.25 back from Preston, or taking our chances on the last chopper out of Saigon at 20.15. It’s not a difficult decision to make. Osman Kakay, Mide Shodipo and Andre Dozzell all get a start and 80 minutes is more than enough. If we could ever find one, single, half decent pub in Blackburn we’d probably have bailed at half time. A check back on Sunday morning reveals the 20.15 was delayed 40 minutes on departure due to over-crowding, got steadily later at every stop it made, and eventually crawled into Euston a little before 1am. It's too soon to be back. I see my land of lost content, the happy highways where I went, shining plain. It is this time a year ago where I thought the minimum — the minimum — QPR would achieve was a place in the top six. I was in that side stand at Bournemouth in September, I’d been on that beach, I’d drunk that beer, I was singing “2-1 down, who gives a fuck, we’re QPR and we’re going up” with the worst of them. After an unbeaten January I genuinely thought we might chase those cunts down for second. Work rostered me for a month in LA through May and I said I couldn’t do it after we beat Reading 4-0. I’m sorry gaffer, I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t be in LA, in a sports bar, trying to find one of the screens in some far distant corner, showing us on mute, walking out into a packed Loftus Road, Dean McKee’s words ringing in your ears but not in mine, for a play-off, semi-final, second leg, all tied up from the first game, against some idiot scum like Huddersfield, all on the line, and my seat missing my bum. I can’t. We won four of 19 after that. Four. Six would have got us there. That one of those came at Swansea on the final day, when it was all over and didn’t matter, precluded me from writing the final Awayday of last season. Because I’d envisaged a promotion, a trip to Wembley, a book, maybe. And instead in beautiful sunlight, in a pub next to Swansea’s marina, we clung to Andre Gray’s goals-per-minute ratio, while bits and pieces started to leak out about what had actually gone down. If you travelled by car, you might have been lucky enough to end up in the same service station as a certain QPR player’s father, more than happy to decry the decisions taken in January and the parachuting in of Jeff Hendrick. Everybody with a story to tell suddenly, everybody with a position to shore up, everybody with an agenda to peddle. Phones running hot. And as that sun set over Swansea Bay I sat there and felt bitterly let down. That QPR, who I thought had got their act together, were actually just acting all along. As ever was, and ever shall be, it seems. It took some getting over. Certainly more time than it took for us to be back on the poxy 09.30 Avanti West Coast service to Preston (and, eventually, hopefully, Blackburn). Revisiting every other 1-0 defeat we’ve had at Ewood Park did nothing to bleed the pain. Fret/ThreatWhile I was wallowing in all that misery, the Championship unhelpfully skewed north. Bournemouth, Fulham, Derby and Peterborough all left to be replaced by Rotherham, Wigan, Sunderland and Burnley. Norwich now counts as a local game for QPR who operate in a city of 13 professional football clubs but share a division now with just two. West Ham, Fulham, Brentford and Palace who, at one point or another, we would consider ourselves vastly superior to, have all now accelerated off into the distance, leaving us with of so many trips to Lancashire. QPR play away games in Blackpool, Preston, Blackburn, Burnley, Sheffield, Rotherham, Wigan, Middlesbrough and Sunderland this season. We shall have to attempt to catch that bloody Euston to Preston “service” on four further occasions. Vengeful God is vengeful. Fuck me. Luckily (luckily, is this thing on?), we’re getting them out of the way early. After the most Lancashire of all the Lancashires in round one at Blackburn, now we’re at Sunderland in round two. Best get it all in before the six months of perpetual darkness I suppose, but Jesus Christ that’s some mileage in the first week of a season isn’t it? Mick Beale, first week in competitive, professional football management, has to take our notoriously limp group of glove-cladded excellent young boys to Blackburn and Sunderland before he’s even got his feet under the desk. Good luck mate, I’m sure you knew you’d been dealt a bad hand here anyway, but here it is. Two pair? You went all that way on two lousy pair? I’ll give you a lift with me, on my way to the river. The good news is it’s hot. It’s really hot. On the Thursday prior to the trip to the North East my interactive burglar alarm, that has cameras around the house and sends me alerts when I’m out if Simmo scratches his balls and sniffs his fingers, texts me to say the living room is so hot it suspects it might actually be on fire and I should go check it out. I am sitting in the living room at the time. The bad news is there’s another train strike — look, Mick, I like you, I get what you’re saying, but don’t push me here. We decide to do half the journey on Friday night, stay at my mums which sits on the banks of the Humber estuary waiting for the reckoning to come, and then we’ll do the rest in her car on Saturday. She’s absolutely delighted by this plan, and to see us all stumbling off the train at Doncaster where she has to pick us up courtesy of multiple delays, cancellations, and a geezer chucking himself in front of a train at Stevenage — good luck and God bless mate, best off out of it I reckon. A year ago I did this trip, play for play, to see us win 3-0 at Hull and 3-2 at Middlesbrough. The week before, at Leyton Orient, I’d ended up, quite by ticket allocation chance, sitting next to one of my dad’s best friends Mick who told me at he was staying in Scarborough for Hull away, but wasn’t going to Middlesbrough, because it wasn’t convenient/bloody ridiculous to get to Middlesbrough from there. I argued the toss that it wasn’t while we waited for the penalties to be taken and ended up proving this by picking him up, dropping him off, and getting flashed doing 88 on the Beverley by-pass while banging the steering wheel and singing Sleeping Satellite by Tasmin Archer at two in the morning. I took the option of a “national speed awareness course”, which was done online, by a very nice man I think was called Steve. Decent bloke. Also on the course was provocatively downtrodden gent who I felt a kinship with called Gary, from Southend, who drove a lot for his job, and had also been flashed very late at night by the “variable speed limit” gantry on the M1 coming past Luton — a cunttrap so flagrant and blatant that I actually sold my car and took permanently to trains rather than drive through the bloody thing any more. Gary made it very plain at the start of our three hours together on Zoom that he thought the whole thing was a “bloody racket” and “a joke”. My big learning from the day was that if the motorway gantry shows 50 on the inside lane and the rest of the screens are blank than it’s 50 for all lanes, not just the one the 50 hovers over. I felt this a bit of a liberty, but ok. Gary erupted. He said this was “exactly the sort of thing he was talking about” and a classic example of the powers that be “trying to rip off blokes like me just trying to earn an honest coin”. He’d been done in the dead of night, on an empty motorway, doing 80mph, in a job that requires constant car travel, and the insurance premiums that bring. At the end of the course we were invited to say what we’d learned and taken away from it. He proudly, steadfastly said “nothing” and that he felt it was still “a joke, an absolute racket”. I’d have very much liked to buy Gary a drink. Anyway, mum agreed with neither me nor Gary and so a condition of travel this time was handing the keys over to my younger brother to do the driving to Sunderland while I sat in the passenger seat and scrolled through the people calling me a twat on Twitter. He got flashed doing 86 on the M62 on the way up there and his course is next week. Mother was ecstatic. I want to re-assert at this point how hot it was in the week of the Sunderland game. On the way home we’re delayed because the central reservation is on fire. The whole country is like a box of matchwood. And yet, as we trundle across the bumpy A19 overpass through the snoggy chem works of Middlesbrough and up towards our first visit to Sunderland since 2017 something weird starts to happen. Off to the right of the car, towards the sea, there’s a deep and rolling fog, like one of the factories has started belching out something it shouldn’t but now can because of this country’s “slashing of red tape”. It’s weird. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, it’s a million degrees, the central reservation is on fire, but to our right there’s this weird cloud loitering a foot off the deck. Chris, from the back seat says this is “sea fret”, but we ignore this because Chris says a lot of things, and what on earth is “fret”? By the time we park up at Roker Beach (Sunderland has a beach) fret is most definitely a thing. There’s a lighthouse here, on the end of a pier, but we can see neither, despite standing on the end of both. I’ve come in t-shirt and shorts, a bold choice for somebody who sits under a blanket on the sofa watching rugby league’s Magic Weekend in the height of summer. I regret it the instant we exit the car, and we lose the car as soon as we move 30 feet away from it. Time was a little boy would come and ask you for a pound to mind it, but even if such a child could find us in whatever the fuck this is I guess they’ve all got YouTube channels now, jumping up and down shouting “SIUUUUUUUUUU” for £150k a month. The challenge will not be getting the car nicked, but finding the fucking thing afterwards. It disappears off into the “sea fret” (Chris is reading from a Wikipedia entry at this point which describes it as a “cold sea fog” on a day when the rest of the country is literally on fire) and we make our way to a nearby hostelry chosen for logic I cannot remember. We meet two groups of people here. The first, is a northern wedding. Despite my ongoing, militant attempts to have as few friends as possible, and make those friends very aware that I have no interest at all in coming to their bastard wedding, I’ve been to a few of these, and this one clearly has potential. There’s a lot of "muscle fit" Next three-piece suits and a lot of people drinking heavily before midday. They look like that lot that do coke off the table of the Waterloo train on the way to Ascot. There’s a beautiful underlying, simmering tension of something, somewhere going on. It’s 11.30 in the morning, they’re signing along to the Cyndi Lauper version of Time After Time, but they don’t feel it in their hearts. I end up behind a bloke at the bar ordering 18 pints of Madri (why are you lot obsessed with this, it’s piss?). You can just feel it’s going to go off. Somebody, somewhere in amongst this, doesn’t like somebody else. Somebody’s shagged somebody they shouldn’t, somebody disapproves of the union, somebody’s too drunk to know better. It’s got enormous potential, and sitting through 88 minutes of QPR limp dicking Sunderland makes us wish we’d stuck around and gatecrashed the bloody thing, like that wake we ended up at in Gillingham on the “hand of Bean” night (another Awayday), rather than go to see the game. Look, I wasn’t there, I didn’t stay, but that wedding definitely went off. It carried a vibe from early doors. Like an episode of Air Crash Investigation where some tired pilot takes a chance in a thunderstorm and wraps a 737 around the catwalk at the end of runway in Provincial Shithole PA while trying to land flight 12/12 on his exhaustive rota and the ATSB say “the scene was set for this disaster five hours prior”. It had been a long duty day. You can see the carnage coming. You shouldn’t look, but you can’t look away. God I wanted to hang with the Madri/Piss boys and watch all the bile spill out later in the day. In the end, we were obviously glad we not only went to the game, but also stayed to the end. Sunderland, despite their enormous stadium and support, despite their immaculate new training ground, despite the potential, are a club that, like us, can turn a routine trip to the post office into a fire at a nursing home that kills 89 pensioners. They just can’t help themselves. If there is disaster to find, they will find it. Despite our obvious differences, I always feel a bit of a connection with this lot for that — if there’s a way to fuck it up, we’ll find it, and so will they. On the way into the ground two Britain First floats are beating a hasty retreat from an attempted recruitment rally in the car park, blaring “Jerusalem” while fans both QPR and Sunderland block their path and give it the big finger through the windscreen. Very different clubs, very different parts of the world, but we’re equally downtrodden, and we retain a belief in what’s right and what’s wrong. We’ve often benefited from “well if you can’t beat this lot then you must be shit” against these. Mike Sheron/Sad Ken scoring a late double one Good Friday against the best Sunderland team in recent memory to salvage a point for a QPR team we didn’t even like that much on a night so cold I succeeded in begging my dad to take me back to the car when we were 2-0 down; Paul Furlong striding towards us like one of the five richest kings of Europe and bastarding a 30-yarder into the top corner with us standing right behind the trajectory of the ball, my dad’s best mate Stuart who took me to games after he died just standing, applauding, hugging me, saying “you’ll never see a better goal than that son”; Neil and I trawling all the way up there on a Tuesday night amongst national floods, finding the only non-electric train running that far north that day (at times slowing to crawl through water as far as the eye could see) and jumping it with no way of getting back only for Bobby Zamora to volley an underrated goal in off the post for our first away win of the season in front of an away support of 150. Leroy Fer played well. It’s that sort of place. Even we do well here. Si brought his tiny bladder up with us on Friday, stayed at my mum’s (delighted to see him/us), and is going to attempt to make it home on the only train running in the whole country this day — the 17.33 Grand Central Sunderland to Kings Cross. What are the chances? Probably substantially less than Polish/Boglaski being on it too. I swear I could be arguing the toss over a lost suitcase at Kathmandu Airport at 1am and he’d be there to mediate. They debate, at 2-0, how long they can push it. Paul, now on a walking stick (don’t go drinking with my dad kids), bails after Chair top bins a late free kick, and he only stayed that long to take the mick out of me for my “more chance of me being queefed to death by Yoann Barbet’s missus than us ever scoring a direct free kick” routine. Si stays long enough to see QPR’s goalkeeper score an equaliser. It’s never happened before. I charge towards him, as he charges towards me, and we smash into each other, and off towards a concrete staircase. My brother is there. He’s beside himself. You’ll never explain to a non-believer what it feels like. The away end at Sunderland is a fucking detention centre, up in the clouds/sea fret, miles away from anybody or anything. It’s like watching ants running around. Following QPR here is like paying £300 to go to the other end of the country to watch somebody who is not very good at Sensible Soccer player Sensible Soccer on a portable television in somebody else’s house while you watch through a letter box. It is, though, the perfect spot to see Seny Dieng meet that ball as he did. Such a perfectly flighted cross, such a well matched header, that as it all happened I had time to do a big belly laugh, like Santa Claus, because you could just see it all unfold. Ooooooohhahahahahahahha. The fucking goalkeeper is going to score look. Only at Sunderland. Only at QPR. These two clubs should never have a child.
Which brings me to the second person we met in the pub. The place has a hooky sports feed - which you would in an energy crisis when Sky are quoting Shepherd’s Bush pubs £16k a year for a legitimate feed while “Bulb”, or whoever your energy provider is parading as now, wants £20k before you even start trading. When we arrive, just before Madri man, they’ve managed to tune it into an SD feed of Cardiff v Birmingham, which is the football equivalent of watching a loved one being administered chemo therapy but is at least a departure from the escalating aggression of the wedding chat. Anyway, here he is, knocking on one o’clock, Mr Everton 2008. Their lunchtime game at Villa has been going 20-odd minutes already when he arrives but - he makes it clear to both the wedding party, and to our little QPR gathering - is vitally important to him. He knows the barman, or at least he’s pretending to know the barman in the way people like this do when they want an unpopular decision to be made in the pub. “Put it on la” “switch it on la” he implores of the pimply 17-year-old who’s only midway through pouring that round of 18 Madris. It’s important this game, really important, Premier League, not like any of your Championship bilge, it’s Stevie G v Fat Frank all over again, just like back in the day when Sven shagged away England’s best ever chance of winning anything ever again, except now they’re managers see, and there’s narrative, and it’s so fucking vital, and important, that me, Mr Everton 2008, who wants to talk to everybody in the pub about it, but not so important that I go to the game, or get here in time for the kick off, or pick a pub that actually has the fucking channel the game is on. After a protracted search through a myriad of nonsense foreign language channels the pimple faced barman decides they neither have the Everton game, nor anyway of getting back to the Cardiff bilge, which I didn’t care about upto here but now count as a point of principal. I insist on a landlady being brought down from whatever she was up to and restore the dodgy satellite feed of Birmingham’s intensely boring 1-0 win in South Wales. Si is fuming, he’s got a chicken dish on order that would go down a treat on Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares (“looks like something Jordan would eat with her hands behind her back. Fuck me. That’s for the embalmers’ table you know. Fuck me.") and I’m delaying its arrival. Everton’s supporter of the year elect follows their 2-1 defeat on his phone from the bar. When it’s your day, it’s your day, and moments like Seny Dieng's equaliser are why we keep going. If you’re not there when your goalkeeper heads in a last minute goal then where are you? Sitting at a bar pretending to be the world’s biggest Everton fan is where. South of the riverCharlton away was the first game we lost to lockdown. We’d decided, en masse, that we couldn’t face yet another trip to Preston on the Saturday (a wonderful win, with a brilliant Ebere Eze goal, muchos regret) but would do a half day, and three line whip, at The Valley on the Tuesday instead as the “play-off push” gathered pace. As time ticks by you can’t help wondering more and more whether a team with Nahki Wells and Jordan Hugill up front with Ebere Eze, Ilias Chair and Bright Osayi-Samuel in support should have done a good deal better, and pushed those play-offs a lot harder. But not half as much time as I spent looking at those dozen tickets to Charlton pinned to my kitchen noticeboard for best part of two years, wryly smiling at how silly our “maybe we’ll get this one in before they lock us down” WhatsApp groupchat seemed in hindsight, how much we regretted the casual turn and wave out of the Crown post Birmingham at home without realising we’d never see some of those people again. Any poignancy of a belated London Bridge drink-up in the sun, and return to The Valley for competitive action, was tempered by QPR’s performance in a fairly dismal early League Cup showing, and the vast swathes of what is a very well developed and atmospheric ground at its best being closed and empty. The only constant was the near 3,000 idiots behind the goal in the away end, being let down once again, and it was at least gratifying to hear Mick Beale reference that in his anger at our latest phoned-in performance in this competition. I took two learnings from this one. The first, contrary to whichever dick of you it was who told me this in The Crown, the Jubilee Line station at North Greenwich is not, in any way, nearby or walkable. Thanks for that, a big thick 30 minute trek through another one of London’s missed opportunities to build nice, affordable houses for the people who do the work here to live in — (if the queue back to London Bridge is too bad at Charlton go a stop or two the other way and use The Elizabeth Line I know now). The second, is that as soon as you get off the train in actual Charlton you know you’re there, and who plays there. QPR talk a lot about being a community club, a family club, and through saintly Andy Evans’ Community Trust they do indeed do a lot of work in our area. But you can walk through Shepherd’s Bush and not know we exist. I was in Westfield this Saturday for a new pair of work trousers, a new pair of goalkeeper gloves, and a bit of breakfast, and you’d never even know QPR existed 500 yards away. There are West Ham kits in Westfield. At Charlton, such a simple thing as painting the railway bridges in their colours really makes you think and feel like you’re in their territory. Palace have weaponised this, through marketing, recruitment for the first team, their academy, their PR. Even just painting the Hammersmith and City Line bridges blue and white, as they’ve done at Charlton, feels like a fairly affordable, achievable, small win. And God knows, after watching Seny Dieng try to save these penalties, do we need to take the small wins when they’re on offer. Scores on the doorsBlackburn: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 5/10 >>> Blackburn performance 6/10 >>> Referee performance 5/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 6/10 >>> Home support 5/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 4/10 >>>> Stadium 7/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 6/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 6/10 On the train >>> Journey 2/10 >>> Cost 2/10 Sunderland: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 6/10 >>> Sunderland performance 6/10 >>> Referee performance 5/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 9/10 >>> Home support 8/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 8/10 >>>> Stadium 7/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 6/10 >>> Atmosphere 6/10 >>> Food 4/10 >>>> Cost 6/10 On the train >>> Journey 4/10 >>> Cost 4/10 Charlton: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 4/10 >>> Charlton performance 6/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 8/10 >>> Home support 2/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 2/10 >>>> Stadium 7/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 7/10 >>>> Cost 3/10 On the train >>> Journey 5/10 >>> Cost 5/10 Totals, Blackburn 74/140, Sunderland 86/140, Charlton 77/1402021/22 >>> Hull/Boro >>> Reading/Bournemouth >>> Fulham/Peterborough >>> Cardiff/Blackpool >>> Bristol/Birmingham >>> Peterborough/Coventry/Millwall >>> Barnsley/Blackburn >>> Luton/Nottingham >>> Sheffield/Preston/Huddersfield If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via PayPal using loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. 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