Gareth Ainsworth is back, ending an 11-year stint at Wycombe to take control of Queens Park Rangers — a lazy tug on the nostalgia lever by an under-fire board, or exactly the sort of revitalising play that saw similarly big characters Ian Holloway and Neil Warnock turn torrid situations around here previously?
QPR gets you.
It gets you in the best of ways. We all remember and reminisce and tell tales of our first game, our first goal, our first awayday. We paint florid pictures of ascending a flight of concrete stairs and having the turf stretch out before us for the first time, shimmering green in the floodlights because the floodlights are always on in these stories and the grass is always green. It’s a club, a stadium, a part of the city, a kit, an underdog status, a collection of people and an atmosphere that just appeals to a certain sort of person and grabs them immediately. People who never felt they belonged anywhere else, can feel at home immediately in this corner of Shepherd’s Bush. If you’re here reading this now, chances are it’s grabbed you at some point. Fans, players and managers fall in love with the place, and they can come from West London like Kevin Gallen, Marc Bircham, Lee Cook, Martin Rowlands, or they can come from much further afield, like Andy Sinton the Geordie, or David Bardsley the Manc, or Ale Faurlin and Gino Padula from literally the other side of the world. This website is edited by a lad from Grimsby. The QPR podcast is hosted by a nutter from Belfast — though he never mentions it. Around our table in the Crown on any given Saturday people who journey in from Southampton, Birmingham, Chester, Norway… Sydney. It’s a club that can get under your skin.
It gets you in the worst of ways too. So desperate are you to see them do well, and so seldom do they fulfil that wish, that something supposed to be a hobby, to pass the time and add enjoyment to your weekend, can become a cycle of increasing despair. So incompetent, so accident prone, so badly run, so often, and for so long, it can feel like you gave up your career to have a family, and the kids turned out to be shit. Like having one particularly naughty son, who despite the best efforts of you, the police, the school, and the social services, just can’t help but set fire to one more parked car just because he can. You love him, but you hate him. You hope things will improve, and he lets you down.
QPR is a club that, because of its history through the 70s, 80s and 90s, is viewed either consciously or subconsciously by many of its supporters as a Premier League club under achieving in the Championship — we took 40,000 to Wembley, look at the potential, etc. In reality, the sport has moved on and left it behind. Numerous chances to board that ship were missed, by Richard Thompson and Chris Wright, and later our current owners, and now it has sailed. The stadium, average attendance, income, revenue is more League One than anything else — in many ways we’re over achieving just by being in the middle of the Championship. Watching managers, directors and chief execs wrestle with that can be painful. It may happen in a short period of time — Paul Hart — or it may take a few years, but it gets you in the end. The exasperation, the tired eyes, the grey faces, the resignation. By the end of last week Les Ferdinand, Lee Hoos and Neil Critchley all looked thoroughly QPR’d.
QPR got Gareth Ainsworth in the best of ways. Arriving in the summer of 2003, ostensibly to replace Richard Langley who was about to head the opposite way to Cardiff, the Rangers fans took to him immediately for his whole-hearted, high-octane wing play, spectacular goals and bravery. A famous double at Rushden and Diamonds, one full on the volley from 30 yards, and then another from even further out five minutes later, an obvious highlight, but later when times weren’t so good he leapt up during a crucial six pointer at home to Luton Town and attempted to run off and play on what turned out to be a "spiral fracture of the shin bone”. We like people like this at Loftus Road - it’s hard work here, people who chuck themselves at the task make friends quickly. Ainsworth had previously tortured us for Port Vale, completing a league double to nil against us in 1997/98, and was then part of a Wimbledon team that destroyed us 5-0 at Selhurst Park on our way to relegation in 2001 — they played the Steptoe and Son theme tune as we emerged for the second half. It was nice to have him doing that for us — we won 5-0 ourselves on his debut, against Blackpool, on a West London day hotter than the sun Lynn, and he scored twice. The more the crowd got on board with him, the better things got; the more air guitar celebrations we saw, the more we bought into the routine. At Cheltenham away advantage was taken of an elderly gentleman doing the public address announcements, and the away end cheered when "Gareth Aerosmith” was announced as our number 11 that evening. By the end of the first season Rangers had won a rare promotion in front of 8,000 fans at Hillsborough, and an emotional Ainsworth was declaring his undying love for us all in the post match interviews, then taking centre stage at Hammersmith Town Hall for the resulting parade.
We have all watched on with pride and joy as his 11-year stint in charge of Wycombe has gone from the very bottom of League Two, all the way up to an unlikely promotion into the Championship. Wycombe, probably somewhere between bottom end of the third tier and top of the fourth on all the boring financial metrics I mentioned earlier, consistently punch above their weight in a league that is full of fallen giants fannying about with many times their support and resource. They are, again, this year, threatening a promotion having won five games in a row, four of them with clean sheets, to climb to seventh. There have been multiple shared players — Josh Scowen and David Wheeler most recently finding the love and success they craved at Loftus Road. Ebere Eze was loaned there, and it proved the making of him. There’s no such thing as ‘second clubs’, and it would be horribly patronising to Wycombe to pat them on the head like that, but the connection between QPR and Gareth is strong, and when the R’s played there in a pre-season friendly a few years back, more than 2,000 of us travelled and raised the roof when he emerged from the tunnel at kick off.
His performance at Adams Park, on the budget he’s had to work with, has on odd occasions seen him linked with Championship jobs at Reading, Preston and Blackburn. Add in his connection with QPR and he is always going to figure somewhere in the reckoning when our job comes up — and it’s been pretty clear for sometime that it’s an opportunity he’d absolutely love to take, as has been proven today. But, aside from a lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about today to do with style of play, the biggest problem, objection, worry, call it what you like, I hear from QPR fans when the idea of making Ainsworth our manager for real is raised, is could you stand to see it go badly? Quite apart from absolutely everything else, Ainsworth is renowned throughout the game as just a fantastic, brilliant bloke. Plays in a band, still turns out for a Sunday league side, looks like a guy going through three mid-life crises at once, time for everybody, talk to anybody for hours, loves QPR — just one of life’s, and this sport’s genuine good guys.
If QPR gets him the other way, could you bear it? I’ve seen fans, only half joking, say they’d rather we appoint a worse manager, or somebody we hate, rather than risk it. At least if it’s Nathan Jones it either goes well, or we get to travel round the country for a few weeks calling Nathan Jones a cunt to his face. Can you imagine working ourselves into a situation where ‘Ainsworth out’ becomes a thing? He’ll obviously get way more time than most, because of who he is, but that will be finite, particularly with the vociferous and at times vile portion of our support that exists largely, and in several cases entirely, on social media who have already had no problem in ripping Ian Holloway and later Charlie Austin to pieces — several of them having harangued the club to sign Austin in the first place — and have previously driven honest pros like Joe Lumley, Josh Scowen and Jimmy Dunne to delete their accounts?
Would you be able to live through a QPR savaging of Gareth Ainsworth? The club’s predicament is now so desperate, they’ve decided they’ve got little choice but to find out.
Neil Critchley got thoroughly QPR’d. Having won his first game at Preston, with a pretty impressive first 45 minutes into the bargain, he set off on a run of 11 games without a win, which included three separate 3-0 defeats and a 3-1 at Boro at the weekend that, in the circumstance, actually counted as something of an improvement. The game was up last Tuesday night when Sunderland ran amok through his shambolic QPR side at Loftus Road, declaring at 3-0, and the club had to crank music out at full time to drown out the abuse from the two dozen people who’d bothered to stay to the end to have their say. He was gone from that moment, and knew as much heading to Middlesbrough on Saturday — a game we were obviously never going to win, that they elected to have him take on the chin before departing. Going through the motions of his Friday pre-match media round he wore the forlorn, fed-up, bleary-eyed look of a beaten man, life and hope sucked out of him by a whole three months trying to wrestle this team into some sort of shape. QPR gets you, it gets everybody eventually, and it got him really, really quickly.
Critchley did not look a bad appointment on paper. He fitted the model of ‘development coach’ the club has been keen to pursue with the Mark Warburton and Mick Beale appointments before him, bringing much needed continuity after years of flip flopping between characters and styles as radically divergent as Ian Holloway and Steve McClaren, Mark Hughes and Harry Redknapp, Harry Redknapp and Chris Ramsey. Had he been appointed when Beale was, leaving an entertaining Blackpool team he’d promoted from League One and kept in the Championship playing an aggressive, attacking style with youth, pace and the best of Premier League academy drop outs and loans at its heart, I dare say we’d have all been very happy with that. At that point, still employed at Bloomfield Road, he’d have cost £1.5m to buy, but having fallen victim to Steven Gerrard’s Aston Villa decline he was freely available and ready to start work just as QPR found themselves with an unexpected mid-season vacancy. He was sought after: Villa paid the release fee to Blackpool to get him as assistant, and he turned down the chance to go in with Gary O’Neil at Bournemouth in favour of waiting for a number one position.
He inherited a difficult situation — went to Mick Beale’s will reading and found out he’d been left the content of the ark of the covenant, as we put in a match report early in his tenure. The squad, destabilised by Beale’s prolonged flirtation with Wolves and subsequent flagrant lies about it, were already on a run of one point and one goal in five matches. Whatever QPR say to the contrary, several of the summer signings were made predominantly by and for Mick Beale, with players like Jake Clarke-Salter and Leon Balogun coming here to work with him. Having admitted publicly it would look terrible if he "sold them that dream and was then the first one to jump ship”, Beale did exactly that. The club’s crippling, extensive, terminal injury list has been heavily populated by all of the summer signings ever since — several of whom haven’t even attempted to particularly hide the fact they have no interest in playing for this club any more because daddy has deserted them. Critchley used his final post-match interview after Boro to say publicly several players currently "injured” would need to start putting their hands up to play more.
It wasn’t an impossible situation though. QPR had been top in October, so there is talent and ability in this team. They were ninth in the league when he took over, and climbed to sixth immediately with the surprise win at Preston. For that to develop into one win from 18 games, and a potential relegation battle, is extraordinary and made his position untenable. At Deepdale the impressive first half performance had three tight, central midfielders pressed high up the field in support of Lyndon Dykes at its heart. Field, Iroegbunam and Dozzell all could and should have scored in that game, and we rejoiced in what a nice change it was to see central midfielders crossing the halfway line and threatening the goal — something this team has been crying out for. To go from that to trying to crowbar a squad of players, built under successive managers who favoured 4-2-3-1 or a back three, into a 4-4-2 system, with 34-year-old Chris Martin asked to field long balls and bring the wingers we don’t have into play, is a staggering decline on where we were in September and October.
The players, with one or two notable exceptions, have behaved despicably. The crying off with non-descript muscle injuries, the decline in their performances, the challenges they were putting in at the end of the Sunderland game, the Saturday nights out on the town to celebrate the latest home defeat, the body language on the pitch, the refusal to make the effort, some of the goals they’ve conceded, the basics they’re neglecting... They should be ashamed. Several of them, in an ideal world, would never play for the club again. But in the modern game the players hold all the power, if you don’t take them with you, then you lose your job, because the players are assets and expensive to get rid of, and the manager is not and is not. Critchley simply didn't do that.
When stories start doing the rounds of players happy to bad mouth the manager to fans you know the game is up, but you didn’t need idle gossip to know that, you only had to look at QPR play. It was blatantly obvious they weren’t having him. Critchley’s comments after the embarrassment at Fleetwood, and again at Hull, questioning the players’ mentality, was music to the ears of a lot of fans who’ve travelled around the country for the last year watching this fragile, weak group collapse over and over again. At last, we thought, somebody saying what we all think. But if you’re going to do that publicly, you have to hope it gets the response you’re looking for. Here it just alienated an already tanking team completely. Just look at Rob Dickie’s performance, body language and behaviour on the pitch in that Sunderland game — rightly called out by Ian Holloway on BBC London this week — to know everything you need to know. Fans still saying things might have been different if Chair had scored his penalty, if we’d held on against Swansea or Sheff Utd, if this refereeing decision had gone for us, or that run of the ball, were/are absolutely kidding themselves. We’ve been miles off it, hundreds and hundreds of miles, for weeks, and it was difficult to really see us beating anybody playing this system, with these tactics, in this manner. For all the justified blame of this playing group, it is, at the end of the day, part of the manager’s job to motivate them and get the best from the team, and Critchley quickly worked himself into a position where he couldn’t do any of that.
QPR were careful to pointedly state in his departure announcement that they expect him to go and be a brilliant manager, as he was for Blackpool, somewhere else in the future — right man, wrong time vibes. That may well turn out to be right. It’s difficult to know who could get a tune out of this rabble at the moment. But if and when that opportunity comes I wonder if he’ll reflect on how he went about trying to get things going at QPR and steer well clear of the public admonishments next time.
When this QPR regime gets itself into trouble, it often reaches for the nostalgia lever. When the run of results is so egregiously poor, and has gone on for so unbelievably long, that it’s too much even for the people of Shepherd’s Bush to stand it anymore, there’s nothing like re-signing Jamie Mackie to lighten the mood. When things have rotted to the point we can no longer stand to be in the same stadium as them, when even Amit Bhatia is copping it on Twitter, how about a big thick dose of Ian Holloway to cure what ails you? When we look League One bound, and the general public are sick of manager, director of football and CEO in equal measure, it’s obviously time for Charlie Austin. Three incidents of QPR doing something no other team in the league would have done at that moment, purely because the people involved were popular at the club previously and would lift the crowd by returning, each working only for a very short period of time.
Gareth Ainsworth could easily be this again. It’s now one win in 18 games for Rangers, almost half a season, and the crowd that continues to go to games is increasingly restless. Online the mood is one of open revolt, with everybody from the owners down through the execs to the manager and the team in the crosshairs. Ainsworth is not an appointment other Championship teams would make at this point - despite his achievements at Wycombe he’s been there for 11 years and we’re a long way from the first second tier team to have a crisis in that time. A manager that’s taken a team from the bottom of League Two to the Championship, on a minute budget, should be in high demand, and yet bar the vague links with boyhood clubs Preston and Blackburn, and a brief suggestion he might go to Reading, none have taken the plunge. Others, Ryan Lowe for instance, started later at that lower level, and have been picked off sooner.
Ainsworth says his connection at Adams Park meant it would have to be something special to leave. The elephant in that room, however, is the perceptions around his style of play. Ainsworth’s Wycombe can be a brutal watch. They’re direct, they’re physical, they’re aggressive. They’re hard working, relentless, and attritional. They know every single dark art and are not afraid to reach for each of them in turn and run them on a loop. They are not at all popular among League One watchers — though, as Gareth points out, that might be because they’re often beating their teams.
In this respect it represents a significant departure for QPR from what they said they were trying to do recently, with the appointments of Warburton, Beale and Critchley. We've done that thing again where we sack a manager and then replace him with his polar opposite. Rangers wanted managers who played similar, attractive, progressive, modern football, on the floor, because of the perception that this is ‘the QPR way’ and what we should be aiming for, because this is how the likes of Brighton and Brentford have built their success, but also as part of the plan to develop players to sell. The working theory among Les Ferdinand, Lee Hoos and the brains trust in W12 was Premier League clubs would be more attracted to buying our players if they were playing in a formation, style and system akin to a forward-thinking, Premier League team, rather than chasing Ian Holloway’s channel balls. It was a huge feather in Warburton’s cap at the time that Leicester and Man Utd, albeit in a summer with Covid travel restrictions, approached QPR for pre-season friendly action rather than the other way around, because the way the team played at that point mirrored more closely what they’d face in the league than many other Championship opponents — we gave them all they wanted as well, winning 4-2 against United and drawing 3-3 with City. To go from that to Gareth Ainsworth feels on the surface like something between a departure and a complete abandonment of the "plan”.
The club will justify that by saying this is a very different job, at a very different point in the season, to the one Warburton, Beale and even Critchley took on. This is now a rescue mission. QPR need to start posting points, and wins, very soon, or we’re going to be going back to Wycombe for a league game next season, or heaven forbid even passing them on the way down. You know that Loftus Road is going to be absolutely buzzing on Saturday now, certainly compared to the morgue that would surely have greeted Neil Critchley and his beleaguered wasters had he still been in charge, and perhaps that will be enough to bounce us into the results we need. Relying on new manager bounce to get you out of the shit is risky at QPR — Critchley’s one win from 12 entirely in keeping with all his predecessors: Beale won one of his first six; Warbs two of seven; McClaren lost his first four games conceding 13 goals; Holloway won one then lost six in a row; JFH didn’t win at all until his ninth game; Chris Ramsey two from 12; Redknapp one from seven; Hughes two from ten — but desperate is what we surely are at this point. The players had downed tools on Critchley, something had to be tried or relegation was increasingly likely.
Ainsworth has also turned out tidy players Luke O’Nien, Fred Onyedimna and Anis Mehmeti for Championship clubs to buy at profit for Wanderers during his time there, as well as the giant Uche Ikpeazu who Boro bought from them. He was a key figure in the development of Ebere Eze, who speaks very highly of him. I think sometimes people can be a bit guilty of snobbery with him — the Sky graphic from his play-off final with Oxford showing Karl Robinson’s side top of all the trendy passing metrics and Wycombe 23rd for all of them has done the rounds again this week, but Wycombe won that final and Karl Robinson remains stuck in League One today. Ainsworth is very big on allowing players to express themselves. The results he’s achieved at Wycombe, on those resources, over that period of time, are remarkable. The 43 points he got in the Championship would have been enough to keep them up in three of the last five seasons, and should have been anyway had Derby’s points deduction been applied when it should have been as opposed to the cop out of the season after.
For a team that’s one win in 18, currently playing 4-4-2, with Sam Field right wing, and knocking long balls towards part-retired Chris Martin, talking about "the QPR way” is a sanctimonious delusion like few others. QPR have been mostly terrible for the best part of 25 years now, and while there have been little flurries, often around October time, where Mick Beale or Jim Magilton suddenly started getting the sort of tune out of the team we all enjoy, there’s been precious little of this so-called ‘QPR way’ to speak of. Again, it feels rather like people who started following QPR in the 70s, 80s and 90s, harking back to that as if it wasn’t a generation or two ago. We’ve got more pressing concerns right now than ‘the QPR way’. A bit of aggression, a bit of forward play, a bit of not being so chuffing easy to play against really wouldn’t go amiss at the moment. Of the two recent successes we have had, under Ian Holloway in the Second Division, and under Neil Warnock in 2010/11 at this level, the football was fast, attacking, exhilarating, and exciting, but it was pragmatic too. We all dine out now on Neil’s old tales about how he’d fine Kaspars Gorkss and Matt Connolly for passing the ball to Adel in our own half, while Holloway styled his team of wingers, big forwards and uncompromising centre backs as a "laundry”, pressing and rinsing the opposition.
Ainsworth’s longevity here will hinge on this. Does his Wycombe team play as it does because that’s the horse he has to pick for the course and those are the players he can afford, or because that’s how he likes to play football?
There’s a clip doing the rounds of him talking formations, saying he’d love to set up in the 4-4-2 people like him and Lee Cook thrived in when he played, but wingers are scarce in the modern game and therefore good ones are expensive and so he sets up more often than not in a 4-3-3, with an extra midfielder either in front of or behind depending on the circumstances. Given a more generous wage bill to play with at Loftus Road, will he go a little bit more purist? After a year of watching our two centre backs knock the ball ponderously between them, boring the tits off us and losing games, a little bit more direct, aggressive, forward play would probably be welcomed at Rangers. Both Warnock and Holloway’s teams got the crowd on the feet and excited them. If Ainsworth can replicate that, then he’ll be onto a good thing here. If he is going to come in and lump it up to a big man, sit back and try to shithouse every 1-0 lead he plunders, patience will wear thin quickly, regardless of his cult hero status.
He will, once again, be working on a limited transfer budget. This is another thing to consider when getting sniffy about him, his style of play, the "nostalgia lever", or anything else. Apart from their own salary one of the first things a manager is going to want to know when taking a job is how much money there is to spend on players and the answer to that at QPR currently is less than zero — you’re going to have to sell, and sell big, before we can think of buying again. That immediately limits what sort of manager you’re going to be able to afford to pay and buy out of a contract — the £1.5m picked up for Beale has now largely been eaten up by the £1m-ish it’s cost to dismiss Critchley and his coaches — and the sort of manager who would come here. I very much doubt somebody like Nathan Jones (whatever the Twitter ITKs would like you to believe) or Chris Wilder would be interested in it, even if QPR were interested in them which, in the latter case, after an off the record chat with the folk at Middlesbrough, I’m not sure they were any more. It’s all very well throwing names around, would they come here mid-season and work on this budget with this situation and team? It’s not an attractive sell. And could we afford them if they would?
Dean Holden at Charlton was probably second choice this time, and there was a brief flurry on TalkSport last night about a potential approach there when for one moment it looked like Ainsworth’s QPR-supporting assistant Richard Dobson may stay and take the Wycombe job on himself, casting the whole thing into some doubt, but they’ve ended up going for Matt Bloomfield from Colchester and today’s announcement was delayed to enable both clubs to go with the publicity blast at the same time.
And that’s all before we even get into our favourite theme on LFW, one for the preview on Friday perhaps, of changing the manager frequently for no obvious improvement in results — look at those manager bounce numbers above again — strongly suggesting the manager isn’t your main problem here. There are so many issues at QPR currently that debating the merits of one bloke picking the team over another is like having a discussion about which lager to put in a shandy. Let’s take the dollop of excitement Gareth will bring initially and enjoy it, because Christ alive knows we haven’t had much of anything to enjoy here for weeks now.
Lazy nostalgia play or revitalising masterstroke? We’ll start the journey together this Saturday, one way another it’s going to be a Wild ride.
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