As goalkeeper Radek Cerny beats an anonymous retreat from Queens Park Rangers, LFW looks back at his five year spell of keeping his head while all around W12 were losing theirs.
Radek Cerny’s start to life at QPR was akin to a businessman setting off for his first day at work in the city on the day of the London riots. All he wanted was a quiet day at the office but what he actually found was an angry group of chavs trying to burn down his local furniture store and loot Foot Locker.
The Czech arrived on a free transfer from Tottenham in the summer of 2008. It was a time of unbridled optimism around Loftus Road with Flavio Briatore and Bernie Ecclestone gearing up for their first full season as owners and QPR hotly tipped to spend their way out of the Championship. The whole club seemed upwardly mobile after several consecutive seasons scraping out of relegation trouble by the skin of their teeth and the turd polishing, sow’s ear stitching skills of John Gregory.
Cerny’s arrival followed previous stints between the sticks at Loftus Road by his countrymen Jan Stejskal and Ludek Miklosko – a quiz question waiting to happen – but, as with his previous club Spurs, he arrived to find a number one already in place ahead of him. Lee Camp had enjoyed two hugely successful loan spells with QPR – one ending in promotion from the Second Division in 2004, and the other that unlikely escape under Gregory in 2007. When he was subsequently signed on a permanent deal from Derby, despite QPR being on the brink of administration, it seemed like a real coup and was celebrated as such by the majority of QPR fans. A year on and Rangers had a new head coach, but Iain Dowie assured Camp personally that he would be the number one goalkeeper at Rangers until he gave him a reason to consider other options. Cerny would have to wait his turn.
That situation continued through the pre-season until a week before the start of the campaign when Italian side Chievo Verona played a friendly match at Loftus Road. Cerny played 80 minutes of that game before Camp was sent on for a token ten at the end during which he took two goal kicks. Dowie, who insisted he was the manager and had the final say on signings when in fact he was nothing of the sort and had little say in anything at all, had been told by Briatore in no uncertain terms that Cerny had not been brought in to sit on the bench. At the final whistle Camp looked up to his family in the A Block of the South Africa Road stand and shrugged his shoulders. His behaviour and attitude from that point on has lost him many friends around West London but at that time he was well liked and popular at QPR and the whole situation seemed terribly unfair.
A battle for supremacy between two goalkeepers need have been no more than a mere sideshow, had Briatore not spent the rest of the summer making enemies of friends. Voted the most popular chairman in London football in an Evening Standard pole in May he’d quickly rebranded the club with a hideous new badge sporting locks of his own mullet, and hiked season ticket prices from something in the region of Watford and Millwall to not far off Liverpool and Arsenal. He described the club as a “boutique” and said he didn’t care what “people who come once a week and pay £20” had to say. The fans didn’t exactly roll the red carpet out for Dowie either – pragmatic, direct, full of bluster in place of his predecessor Luigi De Canio who’d had QPR playing with attacking style and flair.
Many were priced out, and those that did fork out created an atmosphere at the first home game against Barnsley that reeked of “this better be worth it Flavio.”
It wasn’t. QPR were awful. They conceded a goal to Iain Hume and could easily have shipped two others in the first ten minutes. When Cerny emerged from his line for an understandably nervous flap at a corner he became the stick with which to beat Briatore and Dowie with. A quarter of an hour into Radek Cerny’s first ever appearance for Rangers, and the crowd started chanting the name of Lee Camp who was sitting on the bench. It was the cruellest thing I can ever remember a QPR crowd doing to anybody, and I’m rather ashamed to say that I remember joining in.
Camp’s presence had done Cerny few favours, but the former Derby man’s subsequent behaviour – or rather the stories about his alleged behaviour that were peddled around the message boards by Gianni Paladini’s gang of hangers on – actually created an opportunity for the Czech to win over a few people.
At Manchester United in a League Cup tie, shortly after Dowie had been sacked, he turned in a display of goalkeeping the likes of which I cannot recall seeing before or since. He could scarcely have done more to secure an upset that night had he been leant a flying broomstick for the evening and ultimately only the obligatory questionable award of a penalty at the Stretford End by everybody’s favourite fat bastard Phil Dowd won the game for the home team. Without that spot kick, I think we could still be playing now and deadlocked at 0-0.
Partly through his form but mainly, I sensed, through guilt at the way his relationship with the supporters had begun, Rangers fans started chanting his name. He would wave back apologetically. There were dodgy moments – a performance in monsoon like conditions in a home defeat by a soon to be relegated Norwich side was fairly horrifying – but overall he was a reliable, steady, understated goalkeeper who rarely let the team down. QPR have had some wonderful goalkeepers – Parkes, Seaman, Stejskal – and some big characters who have played in goal, but they’ve also persisted with some absolute tat over the years – Tony Roberts got a testimonial for goodness sake - so it made a change to have a steady seven out of ten keeper between the sticks every week.
At the end of the season Cerny found himself, as Camp had been before, replaced by a new arrival despite doing very little wrong. No stories circulated about Cerny’s behaviour, no transfer requests were made, and when Rangers needed a victory at Watford two games from the end of the following season to seal promotion and the Player of the Year elect Paddy Kenny had pulled up injured the day before Cerny stepped forward to produce a faultless display and clean sheet in a 2-0 success.
John Harbin, an eloquent and talkative Australian fitness coach brought to the club by Dowie, wrote in his excellent programme notes that people moaning about the behaviour of footballers do so because the newspapers focus on the lousy antics of a mindless minority. He mentioned Cerny - who arrived early for training every day, stayed afterwards helping the younger pros, and then returned home to his wife and two children - as a more typical example.
That summer he was bumped down to third choice by the arrival of Brian Murphy but a one in a million set of circumstances thrust him back into the limelight: Paddy Kenny injured himself in a win at Stoke, a day after Murphy had suffered a similar fate in training. From wondering if he’d ever play first team football again Cerny was suddenly back in the starting 11 for a Premier League side. The response? Magnificent. Battered at Liverpool, Cerny’s heroics kept the defeat to 1-0 and he was almost as good a week later against Man Utd as well – somehow denying Antonio Valencia from point blank range after Matt Connolly had seemingly only delayed the inevitable with a goal line clearance.
No sooner had he re-appeared, he was off again. Never selected once Mark Hughes was in charge and last season not even included in the 25 man squad. His release disappoints me, not because I think he’s still a viable playing option at his age and with a long standing back problem, but because when Harry Redknapp talks about having the “right sort” around the place I don’t think you’d ever find a much better example than Radek Cerny. Kevin Hitchcock is currently coaching the goalkeepers but judging by the performances of Robert Green throughout last season, and Julio Cesar in the later parts, one would love to have been a fly on the wall at his performance review. I liked the idea of Cerny staying on as a coach, although he’s more than likely angling after a return to his homeland where he can reflect on a career when he was rarely first choice at any club he played for, rarely noticed when he did play, but about as reliable and calm as goalkeepers come.
Five years and 87 appearances for QPR later, the lingering guilt about that Barnsley game lives on. Farewell Radek, thank you, and sorry.
Tweet @loftforwords
Pictures – Action Images