What we wish for - Preview Friday, 17th Feb 2023 19:47 by Clive Whittingham QPR, one win in 17 games, have a jolly boys' outing to the form team in the country on Saturday as they make the short hop up to Middlesbrough. Boro (16-6-10 WLWWWW 3rd) v QPR (10-9-13 DDLDLL 17th)Lancashire and District Senior League >>> Saturday February 18, 2023 >>> Kick off 15.00 >>> Weather — Wet and windy >>> Riverside Stadium, Middlesbrough, Teesside I thought we might make it to Blackburn at home without things turning toxic, but such was the manner of the latest collapse from this group of players on Tuesday night we’re now there already. Plenty of justification for that. So much of the method of putting this site together each week is to pick out the micro that explains the macro - the tiny moment in each game that sums up the overall situation. There was a lot to choose from on Tuesday night but for me Rob Dickie, a guy who the last time we journeyed up to Middlesbrough was the in form centre back in this division, losing a 70/30 challenge on the edge of his own box to a midfielder through lack of commitment to the task, and then immediately after that giving up on his team mates and solving his latest problem by just deliberately walloping the ball into touch ten yards away and walking away with a face like a slapped arse, said an awful lot. That’s the attitude and approach of this team at the moment. But, let’s not piss about with storytelling techniques, there’s a tonne of macro here, you don’t have to try that hard or look very carefully. QPR have won one of 17 (SEVENTEEN) games; they’ve gone from top to seventeenth in the league; they’ve won none of eight home games going back to October; no wins from ten; one win from 11 under this manager; four goals at the Loft End all season; the same group of players dropping out injured game after game after game… A third 3-0 home defeat of the season, something the club has never done before in its history. I am staggered, nothing short of staggered, that I’m still hearing, seeing and reading people sticking up for them, saying it’s not that bad, talking about how we were unlucky against Millwall, would have been different if Chair had scored his penalty against Sunderland, could have all changed if we’d hung on against Sheff Utd. One win in 17 guys. One win in seventeen. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and everybody’s got their own choice for who’s more at fault. Neil Critchley has largely escaped any significant attention or criticism to this point on the understanding that he has inherited a mentally fragile squad, beset by injuries, low on confidence, midway through a season. This group collapsed with Mark Warburton in 2021/22, had already embarked on a run of one point and one goal from five games under Mick Beale, and there wasn’t the FFP headroom to do any significant surgery on it in January. Several of them had worked with Beale before, and come here specifically to play for him only to be abandoned — so he still takes the portion of ire for the manager, rather than his replacement. It was, undoubtedly, a tough inheritance. But Rangers were ninth when Critchley arrived, and climbed to sixth with a win in his first game away at Preston when we played well in the first half with three midfielders tight across the middle of the park and pushed up high in support of Lyndon Dykes to great effect — Tim Iroegbunam man of the match that day, and unlucky not to score. To have gone from that, to basically trying to crowbar this set of players into a 4-4-2 formation which suits nobody except the two he has been allowed to bring in (and Lowe and Martin hardly good enough to justify all the sacrifices elsewhere) through ten winless matches is quite something. It is the manager’s job to motivate and improve the players, at the end of the day. As much as I liked to hear him call out the mentality of the squad after the debacles at Fleetwood and Hull, it doesn’t seem to have done him much good with the players. They are just not responding to him at all. Tuesday was such a rank bad set up that there are already rumours circulating about Critchley’s future, and the possibility they’re just going to let him take what feels like an inevitable walloping at Boro tomorrow on the chin and then start again with yet another change on Monday — likely to cost us the best part of £1m in compensation for him and his coaches if that is to be the case. I never like to get too deep and meaningful on formations and tactics because I’m sure Neil Critchley could drink me under the table in coaching techniques, formations, strategies and so on, but I am reasonably confident that 4-4-2 with Sam Field right wing is not going to yield a great deal of success. Many more nonsenses like that, many more results like Tuesday, many more games without a win, he risks losing his hall pass, and his job. Taking much of the heat at the moment is Les Ferdinand, whose time I was grateful for in our interview last week, but whose answers I often found unconvincing — particularly those around the circumstances of last season’s collapse and Mark Warburton’s departure. There’ll be much more to say and write on our director of football in the coming weeks and months I’m sure — in a nutshell I think he did better than people give him credit for initially, inheriting an absolute mess, but there have undoubtedly been many mistakes. Much like Critchley, in that regard then, over a far longer period of time though of course. The most damning micro, for me, is eight years into his tenure - eight years of talking about pathways to the first team, eight years of talking about development - and we get ourselves into a position where one week after a transfer window closes we have to take a 34-year-old free agent from a team below us in the table because there isn’t a single other player in the building, at any level or age group, capable of coming in and covering one striker being ill for a dozen games or so. Not one. We’ve got an U18s, an U23s, a B Team, we’ve got an academy manager from Spurs, a director of coaching who used to be our first team manager, a literal international manager taking our reserves, and between them they don’t have one boy capable of playing ten Championship games while Lyndon Dykes recovers from pneumonia. That is some indictment. That Bristol City, operating without a loan player in their team, are able to release Martin to us because they’ve brought through two academy strikers to score goals in the league this year (Sam Bell, Tommy Conway), while selling a third for £10m to Bournemouth (Antoine Semenyo) makes it even worse, and rather neuters the defence of: “EPPP mate, whatchya gonna do?”. They’ll get £20m for Alex Scott too. CEO Lee Hoos, too, starting to cop significant grief for the first time. Like Les, somebody I’ve got a lot of time for, somebody I think did a very good job initially having inherited a bin fire from Phil Beard, but somebody who also now feels a lot closer to the end than the beginning of his time here. I think he’ll come to regret talking about the football more as he’s gone on — when he first arrived he would straight bat any questions on the team and play the ‘dumb American’ who knows nothing about the sport and is here to balance the books. As the years have passed, he’s been more willing to talk publicly about the football matters, and that now inevitably leads to him being in the crosshairs of angry supporters when the team does badly. His most recent appearance on the Open All R’s Podcast should have been rearranged. Credit to him, and the club, for wanting to front up to criticism as soon as possible in the wake of the January transfer window — criticism online of their “silence” stung, because they’re more open than most clubs — but going on that show while thick with Covid to be bombarded with questions and monologues for 45 minutes was never going to make him look great, and sure enough at one stage he let out an exasperated laugh at one of the presenters. Laughing in the face of the customer, when you’re serving them up what QPR are at the moment and expecting them to start renewing season tickets next month, is a dire look, and it’s snapped a lot of public patience with him. You only have to look around Loftus Road, at the state of the place, at the empty seats, to know it’s a club and a place that feels like it’s drifting now, rather than run with the sharpness and attention to detail Hoos specialised in when he first arrived. I actually feel for him a bit, he’s done his best, I’ve always rated him highly, but I’ve thought for a while he’ll return to the US at the end of this season and I think it a lot more now. All three men now look, and sound, sort of beaten. I didn’t hear a lot of fresh ideas from any of them in their various media rounds last week, nor a lot of willingness to hear new ideas from elsewhere. Les gave explanations, reasons, excuses and question dodges — but no real hope that things will get better, no real specifics around strategy for where we go from here. Hoos, like I say, outright laughed at one suggestion. Critchley, for all his talk of mentality and not accepting mediocrity, picks the same 12 or 13 players every week, however they play, and just shuffles them around into different positions in the same shape. QPR gets you. It may take a long time (eight years), or it may take a short time (ten games), but it gets you. All three look thoroughly QPR’d at the moment. It’ll get whoever replaces the three of them too. The fundamental problem they’re trying to solve is that the vast majority of our support base started following QPR in the 70s when we were the best team in the country, the 80s when we got to two cup finals and played European football, or the 90s when we finished fifth in the first Premier League. You always think of somebody being the age they were when you met, it blows my mind that my little brother is 32, and QPR fans by and large, consciously or subconsciously, think of us as a Premier League club under-achieving in the Championship — kept here by incompetence, of the players, of the manager, of Les, of Hoos, of whoever it may be, but certainly a division lower than our rightful place. In truth, the sport has moved on and left us behind. By most reasonable measures that dictate your place in the game these days — revenue, stadium, average attendance, support base, on field performance over more than 25 years — we’re actually a League One club punching above our weight. Our average gate at Loftus Road this year would be the eighth highest in the division below, lower than Plymouth. That doesn't change for sacking a load of people. Which brings me finally to the crux of the matter at QPR — the owners. I find it a bit bizarre that the Twittersphere’s handy little copy and paste bit of protest artwork cites “Tony and Amit” alongside Les and Lee. Tony Fernandes hasn’t been the majority shareholder here for many years now, that’s Ruben Gnanalingam whose name doesn’t feature (perhaps they couldn’t spell it?). Amit Bhatia could have bought this club at any point he liked since he first got involved, and hasn’t done so because he knows it’s an absolute bonfire for cash. His current chairmanship is a figurehead position only, done as a PR move because he was popular with the fans at the time and Fernandes was sick of his social media being besieged by angry fans. His stake in the business is infinitesimal. You may as well have Jude the Cat on your protest banner as Amit Bhatia, it’s mad. It’s the wrong shareholder, Gromit. It is, however, the owners that have caused the problem here — that’s why things don’t get better for us changing managers, and why they probably won’t get much better for swapping out Ferdinand and Hoos for somebody else. It’s the owners whose decision making blew our big chance at the Premier League top table, and the reprieve we got after the first relegation, messed up the Old Oak Common thing, have a dire relationship with Hammersmith and Fulham Council destroying our chances of the Linford Christie Stadium, have made multiple failed managerial hirings and firings. And this is a really awkward situation because they’re also all that stand between us now and a proper, existential-style oblivion. You look at their record and, as some people started on Tuesday night, you shout “sack the board”. But a board isn’t something that can be sacked, and we need to be very careful about what protests take place, how they take place, and who they’re directed at if that is indeed the path people are thinking of going down now. It's real 'can't live with them, can't live without them' stuff. These owners pay for their mistakes. They pay for it to the tune of £1.8m every single month — the amount of money the club still loses. They don't leverage that against the club as debt, which they could do, they just turn it into equity. So when people say "Tony out" "Ruben out" "sack the board" what I presume they actually mean is they want somebody else to own it, because if they literally did just walk away and dump us or “get sacked” then we'd no longer be a going concern as of the date of the next payroll. Everything about the club’s revenues is League One, and if we paid a wage bill commensurate with the money that came into the club we’d be paying around £8m p/a as opposed to the £20m+ we fork over now, which is somewhere around sort of Portsmouth/Oxford level and exactly where the team would likely go in that scenario. We can literally only support the salary bill we're currently paying because one rich bloke writes a cheque for £1.8m a month. If they walked away from it without replacement you'd see exactly what happened at Caterham - another well-meaning sporting venture that proved to be a money pit because they didn't know what they were doing. A buyer would have to take QPR on knowing the following things... 1 - You're on the hook for £1.8m a month, every month, starting this month in 11 days' time. Eight years of austerity under Hoos has only managed to wrestle it down that far. 2 - You're on the hook for the remaining five years of a £17m FFP fine, which we agreed to pay in ten yearly instalments. 3 - You're on the hook for whatever remains on a £20m+ training ground development — the bond raised an impressive £7m+, but that’s still a decent chunk of change to make up. 4 - You can't spend money to improve the team, because of the FFP rules of the league you play in. 5 - If you ignore the FFP line and try to financially dope it up a division anyway then you'd have to go up and stay up for a long period of time. Try to do it and fail to get promoted, it's another Derby and Sheff Wed with multiple points deductions and transfer bans to come. Succeed but come back, you're on the hook for another raft of fines and points deductions when you get back. This is how these owners got us here in the first place. 6 - The stadium that is expensive to run and is strangling your income needs extensive, expensive work doing to it, and you can't move out of it easily because there is no alternative, you're stuck here for at least ten years and that's if you identify a site and start the planning process now. You inherit a non-existent relationship with the local council who think the club is just a vehicle for foreign property speculators. That's an incredibly difficult situation. You'd literally have to be so rich that money didn't matter. With the monthly losses, the training ground, the fine, it would probably cost you north of £50m just to get the keys. In all honesty, who's going to buy that? Your best case scenario is a Newcastle or Man City situation attracted by the location. Your worst case is somebody who looks at Loftus Road, looks at Batman Close, looks at the all-weather pitch and looks at the army barracks and thinks 'you could put a hell of a high rise development on that if only you could be rid of the pesky football club'. Your most likely case is nobody at all, because, as I say, it's a money pit. Be careful what you wish for there, next time you’re adding random names on MS Paint. Links >>> Carrick flying — Interview >>> Ferdinand’s winner — History >>> Webb in charge — Referee >>> Middlesbrough Official Website >>> Teeside Gazette — Local Paper >>> FMTTM — Message Board >>> One Boro — Forum >>> Bonkers for Boro — Blog >>> Boropolis — Podcast Below the foldTeam News: On Reign’s Saturday night VIP list this week — Ethan Laird, Tyler Roberts, Chris Willock. On the side of the milk carton this week — Taylor Richards, Luke Amos (remember him?), and Jake Clarke-Salter. Making the most of an unseasonably warm February by getting an early cut in on Mick Beale’s lawn: Leon Balogun. Back on solids: Lyndon Dykes. Middlesbrough’s highly impressive 3-1 midweek win at Sheff Utd featured a debut from the bench for Villa loanee Aaron Ramsey, who had knee surgery in December following an unsuccessful stint with Norwich. Fellow January new arrival Dan Barlaser has also, so far, only featured from the bench in a 3-0 win against Blackpool. Fulham loanee Rodrigo Muniz is honing in on a return having not featured since December 17, but given the form of Chuba Akpom and Cameron Archer in attack will likely have to make do with a bench spot for the foreseeable. Centre back Matt Clarke has only played six times this season since switching from Brighton, the last coming in Chris Wilder’s last game in October, as he suffers with an ongoing back nerve problem. Darnell Fisher is an uber-long term knee injury victim — now 18 months on the sidelines. Elsewhere: I guess we’re now fully in Over The Shoulder Mode, so in that spirit let’s start at the bottom and work up to us in seventeenth on 39 points. Bottom of the table are Blackpool with 28. The bold decision to replace Michael Appleton with super old school Mick McCarthy has so far yielded several attempts at a 0-0 draw, and one success against Rotherham. Pool haven’t won a Championship match in 14 attempts and this weekend host Stoke, themselves two places and two points behind us on the league ladder. The Fifteenth Annual Neil Warnock Farewell Tour is underway at Huddersfield. He told Sky this week it would have had to be a club he loves to tempt him back - “Cardiff or QPR or somebody like that” eek — but Sharon loves Huddersfield so here we go. They’re second bottom, also on 28 points, two wins from 12 games and none from six, and play Birmingham at home on Saturday — Brum are one place and one point behind us in eighteenth. Third bottom, 30 points, nine back from us, Wigan are showing signs of life under Shaun Maloney with two draws away from home and a win on their own patch from three played so far. They’re at home to Norwich. Cardiff are fourth bottom on 32 points and finally got their first win in 13 league games at fellow strugglers Birmingham in the week, prior to tonight’s televised six pointer with Reading — whoever decided to put that on the television please see me in my office tomorrow morning first thing. Fifth bottom, Rotherham, 33 points, six back from QPR, snapped an unbeaten run of four (three draws) with a loss to Reading during the week and will hope to get back on the horse with consecutive home games against Coventry this weekend and then Sunderland. Worth saying at this point that QPR have imminent away trips to Rotherham, Wigan and Blackpool with an away match at Stoke looming large at the end of the campaign as well. Up at the other end of the table Champions Burnley are at fourth placed Lutown this weekend, which would probably be the game of the day were the Clarets not so home and hosed already. Instead it’s arguably the lunchtime clash between play-off chasing Millwall and Sheffield Red Stripe, who have a healthy seven-point lead in second but saw a chunk taken out of that gap by Boro in the week and won’t be wanting any further slips. The play-off picture is currently concluded by red hot Sunderland who flattened us in the week and now host Bristol City, and Watford who did at least hold Burnley to a draw in the week and are now the opposition for the weekly televised West Brom game on Monday night. Hull v Preston Knob End and Blackburn v Swanselona I haven’t bothered with, and neither should you. Referee: One win from ten games for QPR with frequently unkind Durham-based official David Webb, but we’ve got bigger problems at the moment than who the referee is. Details. FormBoro: This section is going to be…intimidating. While QPR topped the league in October and have dropped to seventeenth, Middlesbrough have gone exactly the other way. They were 21st when Chris Wilder was sacked on October 3, and are now third in the table. They have won 14 of their 21 league games since then, including all of the last four and eight of the last nine. They are unbeaten in seven at home, winning the last five. They have scored three goals in each of their last three games, and have scored 40 times in the 21 games since Wilder was dismissed — QPR have scored 33 all season and just 17 over that same 21 game period. In that period Boro have scored three goals in a game on six occasions, and four twice — both against Wigan. Twenty-seven-year-old Chuba Akpom, transfer listed at the start of the season, has gone from a career total of 36 goals for eight different clubs in 11 years to 18 goals in 23 starts and two sub appearances in 2022/23. Since Michael Carrick arrived he has 13 goals and an assist in 15 appearances and is now the division’s top scorer with 17 league goals, four ahead of next best Viktor Gyokeres on 13. Only Burnley, who are yet to lose at Turf Moor, have lost fewer home games this year than Boro’s two — Cardiff and Blackburn the two victors here, but nobody since October 15. QPR: Just keep adding one. One win in 17, one win in 11 under Neil Critchley, no wins in ten, no home wins in eight, one away win in ten (five of those lost). QPR have lost 3-0 on four different occasions in the last 12 games, including three at home for the first time in the history of the club. They have scored two goals in their last four games, failed to score in 13 of their 32 Championship games, and scored one goal or fewer in 16 of their last 17 games — the exception was a 2-2 draw at Reading. The R’s have taken nine of the last 51 points available to them. In that time Middlesbrough have taken 37, lifting them from 21 places and closing a 13-point gap on us. Rangers are actually unbeaten in seven against Boro, winning here 3-2 in this fixture last season at the height of their powers under Mark Warburton, and then repeating that dose in August at Loftus Road in Mick Beale’s first victory. Chris Willock has scored in each of the last three meetings. Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Last year’s champion Cheesy has called both the Huddersfield and Millwall games correctly, let’s brace for the impact of what he thinks tomorrow… “Due to work commitments I didn’t see the Sunderland debacle. I thought I would watch it the next day but to be honest I can’t be arsed. It’s not unusual for Rangers to pull off a result when we least expect it but I think we all can agree, we are in such a state that it’s not going to happen here. Boro are flying and we are sinking. I wrote many weeks ago that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I'm going for a big Boro win here, then we will hopefully have hit rock bottom.” Cheesy’s Prediction: Boro 4-0 QPR. No scorer. LFW’s Prediction: Boro 4-0 QPR. No scorer. If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. Pictures — Ian Randall Photography The Twitter @loftforwords Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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