Another extraordinarily high turnover of players in January leaves Harry Redknapp with new options ahead of a crucial weekend clash with Norwich at Loftus Road.
Premier League >>> Saturday February 2, 2013 >>> Kick Off 12.45pm >>> Loftus Road, London, W12 >>> Live on Sky Sports 1
I think the last time a QPR manager broke the club’s transfer record, and then surpassed that again within weeks was when Trevor Francis spent £500,000 on Nigel Spackman and then £800,000 on Colin Clarke. Different times.
Just how long QPR can continue to behave as they are at the moment is certainly a topic that’s vexing the great and the good of the football punditry world – the Telegraph’s Paul Haywood has urged an emergency audit of the club’s books, TalkSport’s Stan Collymore has alleged financial irregularities.
People see Loftus Road and its 18,000 capacity with Harry Redknapp hanging out of a car window on South Africa Road and they automatically draw the Portsmouth comparison. Pompey, as we all know, are currently plummeting through the divisions after a similarly outlandish pursuit of players they couldn’t afford without the backing of a rich individual ended in a total financial collapse of the club when said backer pulled the plug. If QPR’s owners pull their backing in the same way Alexandre Gaydamak did at Fratton Park then the Super Hoops would very quickly follow the South Coast club down the sink hole.
But there is a certain degree of snobbery to all this. First and foremost Tony Fernandes, Lakshmi Mittal and Amit Bhatia are certainly not Gaydamak, or Peter Ridsdale whose similar pursuit of an impossible footballing dream lead to a disintegration that Leeds United are yet to fully recover from. They are far wealthier and, of equal importance, own very successful businesses in other fields for which QPR is an advertising vehicle. It may stick in the craw of died in the wool QPR fans to have their club described in that way, but the idea that Fernandes and Tune would not want the total obliteration of a homely little football club staining their public image could become almost as important a safeguard against oblivion as the money they provide.
Secondly, once you get beyond the super stadiums and colossal attendances at Arsenal, Man Utd, Newcastle and to some extent Man City the majority of income for Premier League clubs still comes from television money – of which QPR get just about as much as anybody else, and nobody seems to bat an eyelid when Sunderland spunk £12m on Stephen Fletcher or indeed Southampton on Gaston Ramirez.
And thirdly there’s a lot of supposition being quoted as fact. Chris Samba’s weekly wage of £100,000 is now appearing in newspapers totally un-sourced, reported as fact. How does anybody know for sure? I remember Gianni Paladini, in typically professional style, handing me Nick Ward’s contract while I was interviewing him to show me the deal he’d done for the Australian but I doubt Phillip Beard has been handing Samba’s deal around at Harlington this week so these reports can be based on second or third hand hearsay at best. As we know, there are some suspect journalistic practises that abound around transfer deadline day so why is this figure being taken as gospel? He’ll be on a lot, a lot more than QPR should ever be paying a player, but to just take a rumoured figure, report it as fact, and then use it to hammer the club with is poor form.
But that said, QPR’s strategy (and rarely has the word been used in such loose terms) remains wild, out of control and highly dangerous to the future of the club. Rangrs cannot possibly by solvent now, with its turnover and wage bill, without input from Fernandes and his consortium and that position will worsen considerably if it’s relegated to the Championship. If Fernandes is happy to continue bank rolling it in the division below, then fine. But if the club was to go down and not bounce straight back, what then? What if it’s still in the Championship in four years time when the parachute payments end, and the teams coming into the league out of the Premier League are arriving with the £70m basic the new TV deal that starts next season will give the team that finishes last? How long will they stick around? What are the contingency plans here?
Perhaps a more appropriate comparison to draw than Portsmouth is QPR themselves the last time they were relegated – a rich, successful businessman in charge, operating seemingly more like a supporter than a chairman and spending big money on big players before realising he’d over stretched and condemned the club to a decade of financial purgatory.
Even if you ignore all of that and focus on the footballing side of things, it’s a deeply concerning picture as well. Samba – now the club’s record buy at some £12.5m – is a superb addition if he can reproduce anything like the form he showed at Blackburn. His added pace and physicality could transform the QPR defence from one that has to sit deep and soak with a defensive midfielder for added protection, into one that can play higher up the field and dominate opposition strikers. But is Loic Remy any different to Djibril Cisse? Is Jermaine Jenas better than Ale Faurlin? Is Andros Townsend actually any good at all? I’ve seen little evidence to suggest so and once again it seems Rangers have become embroiled in a game of swapping several mediocre players in and out of the club at great expense and not actually getting a good deal better or worse. The club’s obsession with looking for a new signing to solve every problem, rather than assessing why somebody like Faurlin isn’t as good as he was 12 months ago and working with him to correct that, continues to frustrate.
It should be remembered that QPR have added at least half a dozen players to their squad in each of the last three transfer windows and got progressively worse for it. How long before these new shiny toys become the latest “only here for the money” brigade? Ji Sung Park, Jose Bosingwa, Bobby Zamora, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Anton Ferdinand – they were all exciting new signings when they arrived.
But you can’t knock Tony Fernandes’ enthusiasm or his willingness to back managers. He’s certainly got a more astute operator in the transfer market in Harry Redknapp than he had with Mark Hughes and they’ve decided to give it a go. I hope they’ve got it right this time, not only because I fear for the future of the club if they haven’t, but also because it would be nice to see Fernandes rewarded for backing QPR in a way nobody has ever done before, and to have the chance to ram one or two words down one or two throats.
It’s all on red again, and the latest, final, desperate spin of the wheel starts tomorrow at 12.45pm.
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Team News: QPR may give debuts to three new signings – Chris Samba will almost certainly start while the roles planned for Jermaine Jenas and Andros Townsend are less clear. Yun Suk-Young has also arrived but is unlikely to be thrown straight in immediately. Jamie Mackie is ill and a doubt but Junior Hoilett is apparently back to full fitness. Luke Young, Hogan Ephraim and Andy Johnson were all omitted from the 25 man squad named by Harry Redknapp this evening so cannot play again this season. Jose Bosingwa was included though. Bobby Zamora continues to feel his way back to full fitness, but is likely to start as a sub.
Norwich are likely to give their headline January acquisition Luciano Becchio a run out at some point, but another new signing Kei Kamara has not yet received international clearance.
Elsewhere: QPR go first this weekend thanks to Sky and it’s a fantastic opportunity put some pressure on the two teams directly above the R’s in the table. Aston Villa’s mid-season collapse shows no sign of abating just yet – they lost a big match with fellow strugglers Newcastle at home during the week and now go to high flying Everton. Wigan, level with Villa on 20 points, have Southampton at home. That’s a really tough one to call because Southampton are playing well despite the controversial departure of Nigel Adkins, but at the same time they’re not winning games – just two of the last 12. I do fancy an away win there though.
Reading are in great form – 11 points from the last 18 available – which means their home match with Sunderland look like a banker home but the Mackems are getting things together themselves after a poor start to the season and have won five and drawn one of the last nine. Newcastle, six new signings on board (Joey Barton must be vile, he moves to France and half the country emigrates to Newcastle), look set to pull away from trouble after that midweek win at Villa Park and may well fancy their chances at home to Chelsea given the spectacular job Rafael Benitez is doing at Stamford Bridge. I’d have a framed picture of Mr Tighter Deeper Narrower on my living room wall by now if he wasn’t insisting on gifting points to all the teams directly above Rangers in the league table – still, his one man demolition job of our friends down the road is amusing.
The Saturday 3pms are made up by Arsenal v Stoke and West Ham v Swansea (bring a good book) while Fulham v Man Utd is the evening ESPN match. West Brom v Spurs and Man City v Liverpool are the Sunday hangover fodder this week.
Referee: Jon Moss is back in town this weekend to referee the visit of Norwich to Loftus Road. He’s been kind to QPR on his last two visits – sending off Steven Pienaar in a 1-1 draw with Everton earlier this season and awarding two penalties to the R’s against Wigan last season. However he sent Matthew Connolly off at Carrow Road when the R’s lost 1-0 there in the Championship promotion campaign. His full QPR case file is available here.
QPR: QPR are unbeaten in four league games, keeping three clean sheets and taking six points in the process – no mean feat considering the opponents were Spurs and Man City at home, Chelsea and West Ham away. They have cut the gap to safety from eight points when Harry Redknapp arrived to four at the time of writing and that will reduce to one for a couple of hours at least if they win here. Rangers have only won once at home all season – against Fulham – which is not surprisingly the lowest total in the league, although Wigan have taken the same nine points from their games at the DW as the R’s have won at Loftus Road. In 2007/08 Fulham had only won two games by this point of the season and survived with six further successes, including one v Villa in the first game of February.
Norwich: QPR have faced Norwich more than any other opponent during their history, and have really struggled with the Canaries recently despite gaining promotion to the Premier League and surviving at the first time of asking – Norwich have won four and drawn two of the last six. Their form against other teams of late has been less impressive – a 5-0 walloping at Liverpool is the headline disaster in a run of seven league games without a win in which they’ve conceded 15 goals although they were very close to beating Spurs during the week and much improved by all accounts. Their away record is almost identical to our own abysmal one – just one win and five draws from 12 road games.
Betting: Professional odds compiler Owen Goulding lends us the benefit of his wisdom once again this week…
“A new look QPR take on a Norwich side reeling from being the first Premiership side knocked out of the FA Cup by a non-league side since its inception. The fact is Luton were well worthy of their victory.
“I won’t go into the merits or otherwise of the big gamble Mr Fernandes and Mr Redknapp have taken in the transfer market - there is enough debate on the message board to last a lifetime - but what I will say is Samba is a much needed addition. Finally we have a threat from set-pieces and considering the percentage of goals in the Premiership that are scored from these, and the fact the man can defend too, means that it can only be a good thing for Rangers on the pitch.
“In many people’s eyes, Norwich are the model of how a club should be run. A certain Mr Lambert must be wondering what he was thinking when making the decision to leave Carrow Road, but it has left Chris Hughton with an excellent set up to which he has in the whole, continued the good work. The unsung hero in the Norwich side is Wes Hoolahan. His ball retention and general work rate was sorely missed in the early part of the season, but when he returned to the side back in October, the results improved immediately and Norwich saw out October and November with a surge up the table. However it all started to go wrong again in December and in fact they haven’t won since mid December, taking only two points out of a possible 21. Their away record is particularly poor like ours with only one win away all season - and they are looking nervously over their shoulders as their recent form could see them dragged back into a relegation fight that looked impossible a month ago.
“Loftus Road should be rocking tomorrow and I am very surprised to see quotes of Evens still available on QPR. Rangers are unbeaten in the league this year having played three of the top four, and add Norwich's slide down table in recent weeks, it looks a bet to me. I worry about us conceding if Samba doesn’t start, but my bet of the weekend is still QPR to win at evens at Blue Square or Ladbrokes. Also I think Corals 11/2 for Remy to score first is worth a small interest. Enjoy the game.”
Prediction: Nathan McAllister is our reigning Prediction League champion and offers the following view of Saturday’s game… (we have got round to adding the latest clutch of signings to the Prediction League roster by the way, in case you fancy one of them for a goal)
“The six points gained in January from four extremely difficult fixtures were a massive boost to Rangers’ survival hopes, but those hard earned draws against Spurs, West Ham and Man City will only be of use come May if they now can find a way to win games against less heralded opposition, and they won’t be able to do that by defending deep and conceding 60-70% possession in every game between now and the end of the season. QPR under Harry Redknapp are a different proposition now than they were under Mark Hughes: hard-working, well-organized and difficult to break down. But if they are going to stay up they will also need to score a goal or two here and there. The question now is can Rangers start posing more of an attacking threat without losing their defensive solidity? There has been little evidence so far this season that they can. The one exception is probably the Fulham game but that was when Rangers had one Alejandro Faurlin playing alongside Stephane Mbia in midfield. Oh well, never mind. At least we have Jermaine Jenas now.
“Norwich have just two points from their last seven games, but they certainly didn’t look like a team chronically out of form on Wednesday night in their game with Tottenham where they were on course to win until a moment of individual brilliance from Gareth Bale. Their approach was in stark contrast to the one adopted by QPR when they played Spurs last month where the Rangers defence sat deep hoping to soak up Spurs’ pressure and hit them with the very occasional counter attack. Norwich (in the first half especially) pressed Spurs higher up the pitch allowing them very little space and time on the ball. They also showed a lot more attacking intent and took the lead with a typical Norwich goal: after working the ball out wide to Robert Snodgrass they had two players busting a gut to get into the box in support of Grant Holt so that when the big, awkward lump of a target man headed Snodgrass’s deep cross back into the danger zone, Antony Pilkington was on hand to play in Wes Hoolahan to score. I mention this because it is the type of goal that QPR rarely score but have conceded all too often this season.
“Now Rangers have done fantastically well over the last month defending against teams with technically very gifted players that try and pass their way through the opposition, but over the season as a whole they have struggled against the supposedly ‘weaker’ teams, many of whom, like Norwich, have a more direct approach. Grant Holt always seems to cause us problems, not least with his ability to con referees into awarding him free-kicks, and Robert Snodgrass looks to me another excellent example of how buying the best players in the league below can really pay off. I’d love to see Rangers try it some time.
“A win this weekend could reduce the gap to safety - eight points a month ago - to just a single point. That sounds too good to be true, and anyway Rangers generally show boundless munificence to teams on a bad run of form. Their record against Norwich over the last three seasons is also dreadful, so I’m afraid I don’t see a home win as the most likely outcome here. For the umpteenth time this season, here’s hoping I’m wrong.”
Prediction: QPR 1 Norwich 1
Scorer: Taarabt
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