Any hope QPR’s battling weekend victory at home to Watford may herald a turnaround in their dramatic season slump was extinguished at Blackpool on Tuesday night where the R’s turned in one of the worst performances in living memory and were beaten 6-1 by one of the few teams left below them in the league.
Even if you’ve only been following Queens Park Rangers for a decade, perhaps drawn in by Neil Warnock’s title winners because you wanted to watch Adel Taarabt write his own chapter in the book of this club’s mavericks, you’ll have experienced them conceding six in a game on now half a dozen occasions.
They’ve done it in big local derbies, in front of packed away ends, at Fulham when Taarabt was on the bus home by half time time, and Chelsea when Djibril Cisse celebrated his late consolation strike like he’d won a World Cup (a £10,000 goal bonus will do that to a mercenary). They’ve done it at Manchester City, which you may think fair enough given the relative resources even though Rangers were, in theory if not in practice, "battling” relegation at the time. They’ve done it at home, in a league game, in the Championship, against Newcastle United and while, again, the relative strength of the teams, managers and size of the salary bills at that point might justify the mis-match, it gets harder to live with when barely 18 months and two managers later they were doing it again, away at West Brom, and conceding a seventh goal into the bargain. If you follow this club, you’re becoming used to it humiliating you.
To that we now add a real genre classic: a 6-1 defeat at Blackpool. Blackpool one of the five teams still currently below QPR on the league table, Blackpool one of the teams in this division operating on a smaller salary bill than Rangers, Blackpool six points adrift of safety at the start of play, Blackpool with one win in 19 league matches leading into this one, Blackpool who’d failed to score in three of their last four games and had taken nine games to score their previous six goals. Blackpool who we sat in the Crown and Sceptre and watched lose 2-0 in fairly woeful fashion at Bristol City on Saturday, target man Gary Madine injured after 23 seconds to join an absentee list already heavily populated by Charlie Goode, Tom Trybull, Rob Apter, Marvin Ekpiteta, Liam Bridcutt, Kevin Stewart, Shayne Lavery and Jake Beesley. Lewis Fiorini and Ian Poveda had been left out for disciplinary reasons at the weekend, Keshi Anderson had only played half an hour all season and made it back as far as the bench.
No £100,000-per-week Mitrovic here for us to point at, throw our hands up, and wonder what on earth we’re supposed to do. Not very much of anything, truth be told, with the line led by Jerry Yates, who scored five goals in 52 appearances for Rotherham before moving to the seaside, and when he went through on goal at Ashton Gate just kept dribbling the ball Forrest Gump style until he’d run out of pitch and was in the stand behind the sticks with the ball to bring up 18 games since his last goal. And yet they, and he, would score here in the opening minute. A free kick, given away directly from the kick off, was partially volleyed clear by Lyndon Dykes and then, thanks to the half-arsed effort of Jamal Lowe underneath it, immediately returned straight back on top of the Scostralian who then seemed to think he’d be able to allow it to drift out for a goal kick only for full back Chris Hamilton to whip it back around him and low into the box from where carnage ensued. All three centre backs — Rob Dickie, Jimmy Dunne and Sam Field — were drawn into the near post together in a group, without a Blackpool player to mark between them, meaning home players were obviously scattered around the rest of the penalty area unchecked. The first of those, Morgan Rogers, saw a shot blocked by Dunne and when the rebound fell to a second, Andy Lyons, Rob Dickie chucked himself in front of the ball with his arm outstretched and cocked upwards. The ball was belted at him from little more than a couple of yards away but we know the score in the game now when you go around your penalty area with arm outstretched or away from your body in any way — a modern day penalty it may have been, but a penalty all the same, and Yates had his duck breaker.
Daft thing is, with one legal block from Dunne, and an illegal one from Dickie, this would actually represent something of a high point for QPR’s defending on the night. All downhill from there chaps. It was 2-0 to the hosts by the eleventh minute, as it’s always fucking going to be if you defend as Rangers did for it. Blackpool started with a throw in, midway inside the opposition half, wide on the left. All night QPR treated any such Blackpool dead ball situation like the snooze button a chance to roll over and have another kip. Hamilton took it, with nobody near him, and threw it unchallenged to Husband, who was also unmarked — Lowe’s arrival to mark his man would have been considered shockingly late even by the management of Avanti West Coast. Immediately you’ve turned a throw in into a situation where three Pool players have the ball in their possession, on the ground, with only youth team full back Aaron Drewe, on a third full league start, for company. Husband, Hamilton, and now Yates, who Dickie has come out of the box to tend to but lost almost immediately, set about playing it around and into the space behind the exposed kid. Drewe and Dickie now out of the picture and the ball on the byline, Hamilton was able to cut back to Lyons, who started the move marked by Field but distracted him with a shiny piece of paper, and he slid in number two.
Number three, scored before we’d even made it to the quarter hour, came from another shambolically defended free kick. Now, as with the penalty, you could perhaps question the validity of some of the multitude of refereeing decisions given against Rangers in this game by Matt Hancock’s less well-sexed body double Jeremy Simpson — a Lancashire-based official we get a lot when we come to this part of the world, who seems to hold us in the sort of esteem usually reserved by Suella Braverman for the people of Albania — but there were also a number of stupid, lazy, half-arsed challenges that invited the opposition to plant balls in our box time and time and time again. When your increasingly out-of-form goalkeeper, presently operating at 90% footballer lifestyle to 10% footballer, comes out to the edge of the box to catch a routine ball from the free kick and drops the thing cold, allowing Curtis Nelson to roll into an empty net, you can’t be pointing fingers at the referee, however obviously ridiculous his running style is.
Number four. What was number four? Oh yes, I remember now. After half an hour QPR began playing that game again where they start making opposition corners look like opposition penalties. Don’t worry too much about any clever routines or movement, don’t sweat the video review or the scouting reports, don’t bother even that much with the quality or direction of the delivery, just sling the bugger in there and let us take care of the rest for you — like some sort of bespoke concierge service for beleaguered Championship attacks, everything thrown in but the rim job (which was to come in the second half). Charlie Patino, he knew the place to go, he chipped the ball away from the sea, towards Jordan Thorniley. Given every single member of the QPR team was back in their own box, and none of them were marking a post, quite how you leave this many players unattended for a free header, I just cannot get my head round. You’d think somebody might end up marking an opponent, even by accident, through sheer weight of numbers. Amateur hour in Toon Town.
A prolonged bout of deckchair shuffling commenced as a violin quartet began to play. Aaron Drewe, who’d had an absolute mauling from Hamilton with zero back up and support from up ahead and the right sided centre back on his inside shoulder playing like he’d been kicked in the head by a horse, was mercy killed over to the left to swap with Osman Kakay - no puff pieces dropping the names of academy coaches this week I presume. Field pushed further forward out of the three to try add something to a midfield which, it says here, contained Andre Dozzell and Tim Iroegbunam but I’m offering a free fortnight in Venice for anybody who registered a live sighting of either all evening.
It won’t make much of a Good Will Hunting sequel but just how simple things could be if you know how was demonstrated when Kakay was allowed to head a bouncing ball down the line three times without anybody coming near him, Lyndon Dykes seized it and crossed, and Chris Martin got across his man to score. You’re losing 4-1 to this lot lads, and it could be just that easy.
Now, as we know, as well as conceding six goals, one thing QPR do like to do every so often is go 4-0 down and recover the game. Just for laughs. Not many teams in the world quite as dangerous as us when 4-0 down before half time, and with Martin’s goal the long trek back up the mountainside had begun early. Get in at half time, have a proper sort out, start again, get the next goal, and let’s see. Let’s see how confident this lot really are. Let’s see how their rotten run of results is playing on their mind. Let’s see how panicked their defence, crowd and team get if this gets to 4-2, 4-3. Let’s see if the 414 brave souls in the side stand could add the Blackpool comeback to the Port Vale late show and the Newcastle miracle to their CVs. Let’s see. Let’s at least see.
Ah. Fly in the ointment. A minute into the second half Blackpool have another corner. Patino. 11 men back in the box. Half the population of Blackpool left unmarked. No challenge, no desire, no effort to win the first contact, nobody competing for the header. Lyons, again, basically just allowed to run into the six-yard box and meet the ball as it arrived, without jumping, and guide it into the corner of the net. This one compounded by Seny Dieng starting on the spot the ball was headed in from, but deciding as the ball was delivered to go wandering off towards the corner taker with his hands in the air for reasons I cannot comprehend other than it’s exactly the sort of dumb fuck move that gets you a long contract and a big car at our club these days. Oooh Flappy McGrew, I like the heft of your jib, have four years and a diamond necklace as fat as the sun.
How far into this are we now? Four? Five? Five. From the away contingent, Chloe Kelly quietly beat an early exit home — not, sadly, despite our pleas, getting up from her seat to come on as a second half sub.
Six was only a matter of time, and with so much of that left on the clock things like seven, eight and nine didn’t feel that far fetched. QPR, barely present to start with, existed in this thing now purely because the laws of the game insist the opposing team have to kick off after each goal conceded. Gareth Ainsworth may come to reflect that Saturday’s apparently super-human effort to overcome the sporting colossus that is Watford Football Club, that left half our team prostrate on the ground throughout the final ten minutes of play and at full time, didn’t ideally call for him to name the same starting 11 again — Lyndon Dykes doing an hour on Saturday a month after he’d been in hospital on a ventilator felt like some bloody shift, to ask him to back it up again on the Tuesday? Real talk though, goals like the sixth one here have fuck all to do with you being tired and everything to do with you being thick as a whale sandwich, and not ready and willing to do the basics of the sport you're paid handsomely to play. Underneath one long ball forward from Chris Maxwell — he’s the Blackpool goalkeeper, by the way, nice to meet him briefly, seemed like a nice lad — Rob Dickie went and stood the wrong side of Hamilton, misjudged the flight of the ball, positioned his body incorrectly, and allowed himself to be physically manipulated by an opponent, all in one, flowing, stupefying hurricane of liquefied molten horse shit. Having gone through the dos and don’ts of centre half play and fucked the cum out of every single thing you’re supposed to never, ever, ever do as long as you’ve got a hole in your arse, he then calmly stretched and headed the ball back, towards and across his own goal, taking out both Dunne and Field in the process, and presenting a tap in to Kenny Dougall fresh from the bench. Was he marked? Reader, he was not.
You talk about the players lacking confidence and morale being low, but we’ve been conceding goals like this from set pieces for years now. I was asking Mark Warburton about this in the summer of 2020. Right through this team being confident and successful to now the theme has been amateurish shambolic goals off corners and free kicks over and over again.
I enjoyed Morgan Rogers hitting the inside of the post, Dougall skying another chance over the bar from 12 yards out when left completely unattended once more, and a late header from Callum Connelly missing the top corner by an inch and ruffling the net as it went out, because it was nice to know Blackpool could go into our half without scoring a goal occasionally even if, on all three occasions, that was more luck and poor finishing from them than anything we were doing by this point to stem the bleed out. Dickie, by now an absolute costume of a man and clearly desperate for the ordeal to be over, also did that thing where he goes to cut a cross out with his right foot, misses it entirely, connects with his standing left foot, has a fall, and rockets the ball back towards his own goal — this time, unlike at Hull when it went into the net, he missed the goal by a good five or six feet, so maybe Gareth is having an effect after all because he’s at least stopped our centre back from spaffing his beans into his own goal. Marginal gains.
These misses kept the scoreline down to a dull roar, along with what felt like some weird ceasefire through the last quarter of the game where Blackpool agreed to stop the savaging as long as we just kept the ball nice and calmly in our own half. Time was essentially played out with the QPR defenders knocking the ball around between them, not even daring to cross halfway except to occasionally have a big row between themselves about who might have run where and why a pass wasn’t played when it could have been — it looked a horribly divided, miserable, angry camp to me. Consequently, Rangers lost 6-1 with 62% of the possession, and I think you’ll be waiting a long time before we technically have that much ball in a game again under this regime.
Whether you’ll have to wait that long to see us handed our own arse like this again I am doubtful.
The emotions on days like this, particularly when it’s a night fixture far from home with all the expense, time, travel and time off work that entails, are raw. Though, it should be said, still people at the end clapping the players off, begging shirts off them. Birmingham lost here 6-1 last season and there was a fucking riot but at QPR this weird tolerance of extreme and increasing levels of disrespect of the supporters just seems to permeate. Perhaps a lot of people are just numb to it now. For the rest, anger, disappointment, fury, rage, distress, and profound levels of feeling let down by a group of professional athletes who cannot stand up to the slightest hint of adversity, cannot win a header when one needs to be won, cannot stand next to an opponent and stop him getting to the ball first. Point about the team possibly needing some freshening up after Saturday’s exertions notwithstanding, just like the season as a whole this was another example of these players showing they can do it if they put their minds to it, and then immediately regressing to unacceptable, unprofessional levels like this.
It was only the third time in history a Mick McCarthy team had scored six times, and the first time it had happened since 1993. For Gareth Ainsworth, in his decade of management, conceding six is a first (though he has had a seven). And yet the surprise result was not this one, it was Saturday’s, against what I wrote at the time was in many ways a perfect opponent — a team in an even shittier mood than ours. I thought/hoped we might take some confidence and belief from that and at least come up here and fight out a valuable draw, maintaining that gap to the bottom three. The defence actually kept a clean sheet on Saturday, Dieng without a shot to save, they were winning headers and playing together as an effective unit — maybe there’s hope after all? That lasted 30 seconds, and a goal preventable in half a dozen different ways by four or five players. Look at Jamal Lowe, as just one for instance, as Lyndon clears the ball in the run up to the penalty decision, allowing the Blackpool free kick taker a free hit to get to the ball first and just plant it back in on top of us unchallenged. That’s after a half a minute of play. You compare his performance on Saturday, when he was interested, and we were winning, with this one. Same with Iroegbunam, Dozzell, Field, Dickie, Dunne… This rubbish has been going on for months. You think we’ve turned the corner, and then there’s just another bloke standing there ready to serve us a dog shit sandwich.
The fundamental problem is the team is not very good. We very, very rarely knock over a team easily, 3-0, 4-0, 5-0, or win a game by accident when not playing well. For this team to win it needs to have most of its players fit, it needs to have confidence, it needs to be on it, it needs to be fully concentrated and committed, it needs to play from first minute to last, it needs luck and it needs the majority of things to go for it — even then the victories we do get are usually narrow, tight, tense affairs that feel like trying to force a kidney stone the size and shape of a sea mine through your third eye. If anything, any of those things, dips even very slightly, we get beaten. We are so painfully fragile as a group, so utterly devoid of voice and leadership, so spineless, that the merest hint of adversity, injustice or set back sparks a collective anxiety attack that sees us crumple entirely.
So, would I be surprised if this happened again? I would be surprised if this didn’t happen again. It is a matter of time.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
Blackpool: Maxwell 5; Nelson 7, Thorniley 7, Husband 6; Lyons 8, Patino 8 (Anderson 83, -), Connolly 7, Fiorini 7 (Dougall 69, 7), Hamilton 8; Yates 8 (Carey 70, 6), Rogers 7 (Thompson 84, -)
Subs not used: Bowler, Grimshaw, Poveda-Ocampo
Goals: Deep breath… Yates 3 (penalty, handball Dickie), Lyons 11 (assisted Hamilton), Nelson 14 (assisted Dieng), Thorniley 36 (assisted Patino), Lyons 48 (assisted Patino), Dougall 88 (assisted Dickie)
Bookings: Yates 65 (delaying a restart)
QPR: Dieng 0, Drewe 1, Dickie 0, Dunne 1, Field 1, Kakay 1; Dozzell 1 (Johansen 57, 3), Iroegbunam 1 (Amos 57, 2), Lowe 1 (Armstrong 68, 3); Dykes 3 (Adomah 67, 2), Martin 4 (Richards 68, 2)
Subs not used: Archer, Gubbins
Goals: Martin 43 (assisted Dykes)
Bookings: Dunne 44 (foul), Amos 75 (foul), Dickie 87 (foul)
QPR Star Man — N/A
Referee — Jeremy Simpson (Lancashire) 4 Some very generous stuff for the home team here, particularly in the first half hour, on a night when they needed no further assistance.
Attendance — 10,051 (414 QPR)
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