Although star man Bojan is out for the season, Stoke have already all but played themselves safe, and are still in the FA Cup, as Mark Hughes continues to rebuild his reputation after the QPR disaster.
If you’re in a public place, prepare for a bit of sick in your mouth. If you’re at home or work, start removing the sharp objects and shoe laces. Mark Hughes is doing a bloody decent job at Stoke.
This from our regular Potters’ correspondent John Mothershaw (@PottersJohn): "I think most Stoke fans have nothing but praise for Mark Hughes since he has arrived. He wasn't most fans’ first choice when he took over before last season and it perhaps took a little while to see exactly what he was trying to do but he has transformed the way that we play. He has done it gradually, but we now have the strong spine of the team we always had previously but now with added flair. The most remarkable thing about Hughes so far is how little he has spent yet still bought in quality players.”
That the same Mark Hughes who spent millions on transfer fees and wages saddling QPR with its highest paid squad of players in the history of the club. A squad that included global names of the sport such as Julio Cesar and Ji-Sung Park, Champions League winner Jose Bosingwa, Real Madrid’s Esteban Granero, French star Djibril Cisse and so on. The spirit of the team that had won promotion, the backbone of the side, cast aside only to later be called upon when it had all gone to shit. He failed to win a single away match in 11 months at Loftus Road, failed to win any of his first 13 matches of the 2012/13 season after the money had been spent, and appeared clueless and unable to explain exactly why it was all going so wrong.
That Mark Hughes is now spending sensibly, adding carefully here and there while being sure not to upset a settled, tight-knit squad of players. Stoke are tenth in the Premier League, well in touch with the four teams above them, with four away wins to their name after successes at Spurs and Man City. They’re in the fifth round of the FA Cup. What a hideous, hideous time to be alive. Here’s a picture of Mark Hughes looking smug as well, just to make it worse.
Now there are several possible explanations for why, with less money to spend, Mark Hughes is doing a vastly superior job at the Britannia Stadium to the wrecking ball operation he carried out at Loftus Road. Perhaps he’s actually not that good when he’s got lots of money to spend, and that was the problem at QPR. But, in reality, it’s probably a combination of these three things.
Firstly, perhaps he learnt from his mistakes. Hughes infamously walked away from Fulham — having guided them to eighth in his only season in charge, their highest ever Premier League finish — because they "couldn’t match his ambition”. The media said it was because he had designs on the Aston Villa job but in actual fact Hughes believed he may be a candidate to return to Chelsea, where he’d enjoyed a successful stint as a player. This was widely seen as supremely arrogant and despite getting neither job — Villa looked elsewhere when they saw the manner of his Craven Cottage departure — and spending the next six months out of work, it carried on into the job at QPR where Tony Fernandes admitted Hughes "interviewed us as much as us interviewing him”. At the end of his first half season in charge Rangers stayed up by the skin of their teeth after that memorable last second defeat at Man City on the final day courtesy of Bolton being unable to overcome Stoke, and some dodgy decisions from referee Chris Foy. Hughes, in the dressing room afterwards, boasted that Rangers would "never be in this position again while I’m here.” Oh Mark.
Perhaps he learnt that his "ambition” - which seemed to consist of Hughes, his self-appointed director of football Mike Rigg, and his omnipresent minister without portfolio Kia Joorabchian, collecting as many big name players as they could find and slinging them all together for shits and giggles - wasn’t such a recipe for success after all.
Secondly, it’s plain to see that the situation Hughes inherited at Stoke was far superior to the one he was plunged into at QPR. He joined in the summer, rather than the middle of a relegation battle; Stoke had been established in the Premier League for a number of years, while QPR had been there only six months; Stoke’s first team and squad was far better than the one he inherited in Shepherd’s Bush and needed less doing to it as a result; the scouting, youth set up and training facilities still so sadly lacking at Rangers had all been built carefully at Stoke by the chairman Peter Coates using the Premier League money from the previous seasons. As I wrote earlier this week, QPR has been a job for a fireman for the past five years, constantly in desperate need of achieving a short-term goal, whereas Stoke had the foundations in place and a solid team.
But let’s not pretend that Hughes has simply slipped craftily into Tony Pulis’ slipstream (awful image) and coasted along changing nothing, adding nothing, doing nothing and taking all the credit for the work done before he got there. When Stoke arrived at Loftus Road in April 2013, they needed the easily-achieved 2-0 win against already relegated Rangers to steer themselves away from the bottom three. Prior to that they’d won once in 25 games away from home, scored a league lowest 28 goals that season, won two of their previous 22 fixtures, won one from their previous 14 in the league and won none of their previous seven of which six had been lost. Pulis, who promoted and established Stoke and helped make it what it is today, was nevertheless moved aside that summer amid growing disharmony among the club’s supporters. This was not a tenth-placed team that Hughes inherited.
Stoke are still the physically intimidating, uncompromising, difficult to play against mob they always were, but Hughes has added ball-players and skilful trinkets around the trunk of the tree, and made potentially the signing of the season in former Barcelona youngster Bojan to spice up the attack. Stoke are horrible to play against — few who were at the corresponding fixture this season will forget Ryan Shawcross and Steve Sidwell cynically attempting to kick Niko Kranjcar out of the second half of the game, aided and abetted by simpering refereeing from Martin Atkinson — but they’re quicker and more threatening on the attack. They’ve won four away games already this season at Spurs, Man City, Sunderland and Everton. Hughes has improved Stoke’s style of play and results, there’s no two ways about it. This is now no longer a club seeking merely to survive each season.
Which leaves us, more worryingly, with thirdly… perhaps, as I suspect is the case with Harry Redknapp, Mark Hughes’ performance as manager of QPR was a symptom of an overall problem, rather than a problem in itself.
Hughes couldn’t have asked for any more backing from the chairman, couldn’t have bought any more players, couldn’t have spent any more money, and couldn’t have appointed any more backroom staff — Rigg, in particular, is held in high contempt by the people who worked in the youth set up and on the Warren Farm Training Ground plans during his time here. So ultimately he has to have fingers pointed at him. No QPR manager before, and chances are nobody ever again, will have been given as much money and leeway to build a team as he did and he built one of the worst, for results and attitude, anybody as seen in four generations at Loftus Road.
But it was as much the board’s desire for big headline grabbing signings as Hughes’ that brought plague and pestilence to W12 — who can forget the press conference in a central London sky-scraper to announce Ji-Sung Park’s arrival? And this theme of people coming into Loftus Road and performing worse than they did at previous clubs stretches much further than Hughes’ signings. Sparkless himself achieved top ten finishes with Blackburn, pre-monied Man City and Fulham and is now looking likely to do so with Stoke. He took Blackburn to a League Cup final and had a knack of finding players like Vincent Kompany, Chris Samba and Moussa Dembele relatively cheaply on the continent. Why did he fail so miserably at QPR? You can say that Park, Bobby Zamora, Andy Johnson and others who flopped were obviously physically shot when they arrived, but why did Esteban Granero play so badly? Why did Julio Cesar play so badly? Why did Jose Bosingwa, just three months after winning the Champions League, play so badly? Hughes didn’t know, despite assuring fans on a weekly basis that he was "meticulously preparing to win Premier League football matches”.
Pointing the finger at Hughes and Hughes alone lets Tony Fernandes, Phil Beard and the board off, and fans keen for a scapegoat, and finding Hughes impossible to warm to even in the rare good times, have been happy to go along with this idea that the vile Welshman "pulled down the pants” of the poor, naïve QPR board. But if that is indeed the case, why has this situation where players and managers who have previously done well elsewhere come to QPR and crash and burn not stopped two years after he left and took his Taffia with him?
QPR are currently trying to shift on Matt Phillips and Junior Hoilett, two players bought at good ages with decent fitness records, who’d played well in the top flight in struggling teams at Blackburn and Blackpool previously. Neither player has been able to perform to anything like that level at Loftus Road. Jordon Mutch, excellent in a poor Cardiff side last season, impressive at Watford and Birmingham before that, couldn’t do right for doing wrong at Loftus Road and has now been sold at a loss just six months after joining. Leroy Fer and Eduardo Vargas, admittedly out of position, nowhere near the levels they’ve achieved previously for club and country — those two were in two of the better World Cup teams last summer, but you’d never know it to look at them.
QPR are still doing this long after Hughes. Players and managers come in, and cannot perform to the levels they performed at elsewhere. Hughes was sacked in disgrace here, and yet has gone to Stoke and done exactly what he did at Blackburn and Fulham previously. While his brash arrogance, Chelsea and Man Utd connections, and the lasting negative effect of his signings make him intensely dislikeable to a QPR fan, and the 2012/13 season he inflicted on this club mean he’ll always — rightly — be considered one of Rangers’ worst ever managers, he’s clearly not a bad manager per se.
It’s why I’m slightly wary of jumping on the Harry out bandwagon, which is now more heavily laden with internet-based QPR fans than one of those ferries you hear about overturning in the night in the South China Sea. Perhaps, perhaps, Redknapp is actually doing a better job than most would do here. It looks like a club that finds players and managers out so for all Tim Sherwood’s boasts about his sodding win percentage during six months with an inherited Tottenham squad, do you not just fear another boastful, arrogant, manager — younger with less experience than Hughes — coming into that situation and what it might result in?
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