LoftforWords braved high winds, power cuts and stopping services to make it up to Wolves for QPR’s big 3-0 win at Molineux last week.
Well having read a lot of the coverage of this game afterwards, I’m not entirely sure I was in the right place. You see somewhere out there two teams looking a lot like QPR and Wolves kicked the last living breath out of each other culminating in ugly scenes at the final whistle where Joey Barton and Karl Henry got involved in a punch up in the centre circle. The game I was at however was a comprehensive footballing masterclass from the away side marred only very slightly by a needless and cynical late tackle by Henry on Barton which prompted much mickey taking and reminders of the scoreline from the QPR man.
Not since John Jensen scored his one and only goal for Arsenal (in a 3-1 QPR win) has there been such a comprehensive miss of the point in the coverage of the match. The Henry and Barton issue that took up an astonishing amount of post game column inches was a total non-event. Henry and Barton had flown into tackles when they met in a Wolves v Newcastle game last year sparking a small feud which the media built up pre-game. But for the majority of this match Henry couldn’t get near the QPR skipper who opened the scoring with a close range scuffed effort after eight minutes and then saw Ale Faurlin double the lead with a fine strike to cap one of hs best performances since moving to this country.
The boxing match between Joey Barton and Karl Henry is about to start. Who those other lads out there are God only knows. Maybe it’s the corner team?
The story the media wanted though wasn’t a new look QPR side demolishing Wolves comprehensively – DJ Campbell came off the bench and scored a third and the excellent Shaun Wright Phillips was unlucky not to open his account with a shot that rebounded off the base of the post – they wanted a Barton v Henry story and when one didn’t materialise in 90 minutes they focused on one incident in stoppage time.
With almost the last kick of the game Barton chased a ball down to the corner flag and then, as it was going over the deadball line, found himself crudely hacked down from behind by Karl Henry. If the tackle wasn’t designed to hurt the player then I’m a Chinaman. It was a cynical and nasty attempt to injure an opponent, right under the nose of the linesman, who ignored it and gave a goalkick. Barton responded to the jibes from behind the goal by holding the scoreline up on his fingers and then anagered Henry at the final whistle with further mocking. That really was it. But it was all anybody could talk about afterwards, and now I’m talking about it as well which is a shame because Rangers, with man of the match Armand Traore particularly impressive, were embarrassingly and thrillingly dominant for the rest of the game.
Scores >>> QPR performance 8/10 >>> Opposition performance 4/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10
I thought it was a sign of getting old when a player you remember seeing play for the youth team called it a day, but that's nothing compared to sitting in a ground you remember being redeveloped the first time being developed again. Christ I remember when Molineux was the shining beacon of new stadiums, turned from basically a very large hole in the ground into a brand spanking new arena between 1991 and 1993. And yet there we all were parked behind the goal, staring out at the stand at the far end that I still consider to be fairly new but now completely flattened and in the process of being rebuilt at twice the size.
It's no surprise really. I've seen Wolves officials quoted as saying that were they building Molineux from scratch these days the place would look very different to the design they came up with 20 years ago when Jack Hayward was throwing his money around. Despite its relative young age the ground does not have the hospitality, conferencing and concourse facilities that clubs see as so vital to not only their matchday income, but to making the most of monetary opportunities during the rest of the week.
The natives flock to abuse their own players.
It's also looked ripe for further expansion should it be required – with all four corners open, the stands set a long way back from the pitch, and very little in the immediate vicinity to hamper development. If only the circumstances were the same at Loftus Road . With Wolves now into a third consecutive Premiership season, and turning a profit miraculously, the time seems right so last weekend's game was played out to a backdrop of three old stands at Molineux and one that looked a bit like its roof had blown off in a high wind. The concrete skeleton of what will be a very imposing second tier was just starting to peep over the top of the newly installed lower seating area for our visit.
But is this really such a good idea? I mean I know QPR aren't much of a draw but for a Premiership home game at 3pm on a Saturday, with Wolves in good form and the capacity reduced because of the building work, there were still thousands of empty seats. Most of those were in the lower tier to our right where we have been positioned before and showered with spit. Here the blocks of unoccupied seats were interrupted only by two contenders for Kerry Katona’s Parent of the Year award who sat in dirty tracksuits and spent the entire game gesturing at the away end while their two small boys watched on and learnt.
Presumably when the likes of Man Utd and Aston Villa come to town the place is rammed, and many more tickets could be sold besides, but even allowing for that would you even want more Wolves fans in the ground if you were Mick McCarthy or one of the players? One thing Molineux has always been unique for is the outright hostility shown by the home fans towards their own players. In the past that's been sort of understandable, given the years of chronic underachievement on the field despite the millions being injected into the team from the boardroom, but even back then it was always counterproductive to give the home side such a hard time.
A new stand takes shape, so even more Wolves fans can come and abuse their own players.
Now not only is it counterproductive, it's absolutely bonkers as well. Under Mick McCarthy's management and Steve Morgan's chairmanship Wolves have ascended to a point where they are into a third consecutive Premiership season, in a soon to be expanded stadium, turning a big profit, and paying out sizeable transfer fees to improve their squad. They're in a dream position, one or two steps behind Stoke in the quest for Premiership consolidation and then further progress to cup competitions and European qualifications. Not only that but they've started this season well, with seven points from three league games and a defeat against a very talented Tottenham side the only blot on the landscape.
So why on earth were the home fans once again so keen to leap on their own side? Sure, they were poor against QPR who are a newly promoted side and are therefore seen as relatively easy meat. But still the heckling and booing of every misplaced pass, every mistake and, eventually, every time a player dared to do anything than lump the ball forward at the first opportunity, had to be heard to be believed. If you were on your first visit to this part of the world you'd have the Wolves fans down as spoilt brats, getting ahead of themselves after two seasons of survival and a good start to the third, but for veterans of matches on this ground it was just more of the same.
The QPR fans, selling out their allocation apart from a random block of seats behind us that was mysteriously fenced off for no apparent reason, were in understandably noisy mood and took to exaggerated booing of the Wolves players to mock the home lots’ performance. The goal celebrations harked back to the “let’s go mental” moments at the end of last season.
Scores >>> QPR support 8/10 >>> Home support 4/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 6/10 >>> Stadium 6/10 >>> Police and stewards 6/10
It's trendy these days to write everywhere in this country off as a "shithole." "This place is a shithole, I want to go home," is sung by away fans as a matter of routine now whether they're in Liverpool or Newcastle, Manchester or Southampton, Brighton or Norwich. They usually follow it up with the equally witty: "What a fucking shithole" which could be heard booming out of the away end at Loftus Road on Saturday, sung by 1,800 people who support a team from Aston in Birmingham.
But it's not just football supporters. Everybody in every walk of life seems to almost relish describing the place they live as a new addition to Dante's Circles of Hell. Be it the traffic, the noise, the roads, the lack of open space, the lack of things to do, the amount of Johnny Foreigners, the cost of things, the location, the weather – there's not a lot of civic pride out there in Britain anymore and most people, when pushed, will mostly describe they place they live as "a bit shit really."
I've seen QPR fans slating Sheffield before our trips there in recent years and let me assure you, after six years spent living there, it's one of the best places you could ever wish to spend time. Rolling countryside no more than ten minutes in any direction from wherever you are in the city, parkland, museums, an arena, a concert venue in the city centre, a fully integrated public transport system, historic architecture, tree lined streets, dozens of nice restaurants, hundreds of great pubs – the only downside is the sleet that blows into your face at a right angle for ten months every year but otherwise it's a fabulous place. Still, it never takes away fans long to trot out the "what a fucking shithole" chants once they've rolled through the turnstiles at Bramall Lane or Hillsborough – two proper old style football stadiums.
The twin that Jedward forgot puts in a welcome appearance.
There are, of course, parts of Sheffield that are somewhat dodgy, just as there are less than salubrious parts of every place in the world. Even the most peaceful and tranquil of rural villages will have some path or other where old Norm who lives above the kebab shop likes to go and flash at dog walkers. But let's be clear here – there are only two places in this country with absolutely no merit at all, nothing going for them whatsoever and not a single positive thing to say. They are Luton, and Stoke on Trent.
Wolverhampton is one of those borderline places like Hull and Scunthorpe – almost completely without merit but not quite. It's a place that used to be famous for coal and industry, and has more recently been known for football fans with a penchant for violence in the confined spaces of the city's subways and the manufacture of car tyres. It's a place beset with those buildings that were really modern and state of the art in the 1960s and 1970s but now look like they've been there three times as long as they actually have. It’s one of those towns that pretends to be a city, one of those places that calls its Polytechnic College a University.
If I wanted to take the lazy way out and write a piece on what a worthless hole in the ground Wolverhampton is and how it’s like going back to the dark ages then I was presented with the perfect opportunity to do so when we arrived and discovered that there was no electricity. We padded out of the train station into a strange atmosphere where the streets were almost deserted and the place completely silent. Faced with a lack of power the people of Wolverhampton had apparently just given up on life. Drinkers milled around outside closed pubs and the staff at the Sainsbury's in town sat on the pavement and smoked, grateful of an hour or two respite from the evil self service checkouts and their endless "unexpected item in the bagging area" warnings.
In the medium term this lack of electricity, caused either by a big power surge during the night or the local scallies on the copper thieve again depending on who you believed, put the whole match in jeopardy but in the short term it hindered the hunt for beer and Blackburn v Arsenal on the television. Luckily Colin Speller's leaf blowing business is headquartered in amongst the rolling forests of Wolverhampton and so we were able to send him on a first class, all expenses paid (not by us) trip to the area a day or two in advance so he could finally pick us a pub in Wolverhampton that would first let us in, second let us by a drink in a glass, third show us the lunchtime football and four maybe provide us with some lunch as well.
He didn't disappoint. We went in the Hog's Head, which was home fans only but thanks to the replica shirt ban, imposed on LFW travelling party members after an unpleasant afternoon where we were moved on from every pub in Colchester town centre, that didn't pose us too many problems. It was also open and serving unlike many of its rivals, the staff to their credit kept a check of the takings by hand on a sheet of paper while they waited for the tills to fire into life.
The bar staff said they'd been told the power wouldn't be back until 2.30pm so we started running through Colin's address book for a place outside the city centre that did have electricity. As we did so, the lights flickered back on, and literally within one second a local was up and shovelling money into the fruit machine. We wondered if he'd been stuck on two cherries with a nudge in hand since closing time the previous night and was just sitting there waiting – a theory with added weight when, within no more than a minute, he had the thing paying out like a cash point.
Andy cannot hide his delight as the power returns, but after missing out on first play of the fruit machine the tension on Jasmine’s face is there for all to see.
So we stayed and watched Blackburn and Arsenal play out a happy little farce for a couple of hours. It was cold, and crowded, but the service was quick and friendly and the drinks were cheap. We had a decent seat for the screen as well.
Some ordered food, although it looked like the sort of afterthought meal pubs that know they're not making enough money with beer comes up with rather than a genuine effort at decent grub. I remember an episode of Eastenders where the previously silent barmaid Tracey doubled her annual salary with a single spoken line suggesting the pub started doing food with themed curry nights which Peggy described as an "excellent idea" when what she should have been saying is "we don't have a catering kitchen you blithering idiot". This was the sort of food I'd expect to see from that arrangement had it gone any further.
But all in all the Hog's Head was a very decent venue indeed – far better than anything else we've ever found in this city. And so we thanked Colin, and he wished us well on our standard class journey home which was completed via the bar behind the station, with a beer garden situated where the tracks used to run into the old lower level railway station.
Scores >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 5/10 >>> Cost 7/10
Saving money on rail travel seems like such a victory for the common man when I’m sitting in the office booking it all months in advance at rock bottom prices. The problem is, to get the cheap fares these days you have to make sacrifices and when the day actually comes around and you’re forced to be at Euston before it’s fully light outside I often find myself wishing I’ just allowed them to extort the full fee from me for a proper train at a proper time.
When we booked the Chiltern Line was still being upgraded and tickets weren’t on sale, so rather than risk losing the cheap fares waiting for them to be released I booked a London Midland service up to New Street for the princely sum of £6 each. Like I say, this seemed like such a good idea at the time but turning a one hour direct trip into a two and a half hour trek with a change didn’t seem quite so clever when it was put into practice.
I actually thought journeys like this one went out when Dr Beeching got hold of the railway network. London Midland run trains that look very much like the London Overground commuter services over silly distances – Neil could not believe we were going all the way there in the three carriage unit I presented him with. To be fair to him it wasn’t that far removed from us heading up Birmingham on an old style American hand car.
£6 for a train ticket to Wolverhampton, but still unable to afford a decent haircut.
Anyway we went to Birmingham via Northampton stopping absolutely everywhere in between. Rugby, Coventry, Birmingham Airport, Long Cockby, Manor Farm, Mr and Mrs Webster’s House, Little Fuckleby the Johnston Residence – basically anywhere between London and Birmingham where a person had visited within the last thousand years, just in case they’d decided to drop by again and needed a train service.
The trains leave from a single platform in the centre of Euston station, surrounded by the faster more powerful Virgin services that all the other QPR fans got on direct to Wolverhampton. I’m not sure what took the piss more – the fact that the train left ten minutes late because the Damion Stewart lookalike whose job it was to wave the white board to say it was safe to go “completely forgot we were there” or getting to Birmingham and finding the station toilets charging 30p for a piss and not accepting 5p pieces.
Still, at £6, who’s arguing?
Safely, but slowly, back in London long after everybody else Neil, Andy and myself decamped to Mabel’s for the QPR goals and an evening of Steve McLaren impressions. Schteve shinks it is clean sheet I shay.
Scores >>> Journey 5/10 >>> Cost 9/10
Literally hundreds of exciting Tweets along similar pointless lines can be found @loftforwords