Tuesday night’s chastening defeat by Middlesbrough at Loftus Road seemingly killed off any hope of Homer’s airborne pig coming back to earth safely, and leaves a beleaguered and injury ravaged QPR facing a daunting trip to Elland Road on Saturday.
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The Middlesbrough game on Tuesday night felt like a place where hope went to die. Hope in this team and its new signings, hope in this manager and the miracle working tendencies that extracted Queens Park Rangers from a similar mess of their own making a year ago, hope that we’re only a few injured players returning away from salvation. Even the hope that I held right up to last Saturday that often you just win a game by accident and go from there. You don’t win any games playing as QPR did on Tuesday. Not at this level, and not at the one below.
Churning this rubbish out for 20 years has made my hobby my job. I’ve taken the thing I enjoy the most and turned it into work. The list of things I’d rather be doing than sitting here writing this now, after sitting through that, is considerable.
One of the biggest challenges is the awkward marriage between the journalism, which is my profession, and the fanatical love for QPR, which makes me inherently biased in their favour. One half of my brain constantly fights with the other. The day job side constantly screaming ‘that sounds like bullshit’ or ‘this is fucking doomed’, while the home and away nutter convinces itself it might just be our year and we’re making shrewd moves in the transfer market. I take the piss, constantly, out of the chicken children on socials with their incessant, insufferable #bring hashtags, but I get excited by new signings too. They bring fresh hope and excitement that lead me to say silly things like ‘Steven Caulker’s so failsafe even QPR can’t stuff this one up’.
That was exacerbated this summer by not knowing who any of the signings were. We hired an analyst to trawl the videos and give opinions, I set it in the context of what had gone before, and we hoped for the best. The best, in this instance, somewhere around the 13th that I predicted for QPR in the season preview, or the 16th Steve from @AnalyticsQPR went for in the same podcast. That was based largely on how Rangers finished last season, the difference Marti Cifuentes made and how good he looked as manager, an easier Championship, and how well the Lucas Andersen pick up had gone from January. This manager, more FFP headroom, no disastrous first three months of the season to hold us back, we’d surely be good enough for just steady, considered progress of five or six places up the table. Not even the top half. As I keep saying, finish 12th/13th this year you’ll be hailed as a soothsayer.
Even that now feels like a pipe dream. Our rather more accurate assessment of Christian Nourry upon his arrival as somebody with absolutely no experience in either of the roles he’d taken on, who’d found a club susceptible to smooth chat and PowerPoint presentations and wormed his way into an incredible job for a 26-year-old, sadly now looks rather more prescient than any excitement we expressed over Karamoko Dembele’s first couple of appearances – by all accounts we’re unlikely to see him again until well into 2025.
It's starting to feel like our recruitment this summer did little more than what we did at LFW. Take the same data and analytics available to every club, study the videos on WyScout, find a central midfielder who scored 13 times in 34 appearances in Belgium, or a striker with 15 goals in the Swiss league, and hit go. Courage? Physicality? Mentality? It’s the sort of surface level, selective analysis you could easily use to justify a family half term in Mogadishu – sunshine all year, great average temperatures, close to the seaside, cheap. Family holiday? Of course not. As you’d know, if you actually spent any time in the place rather than just going with the numbers.
Dave McIntyre frequently cops stick on social media, and Kevin Gallen is a surprisingly divisive figure for somebody who contributed 102 goals to our cause, but I’d urge you to listen to their podcast this week. It’s frank, fair, and alarming. Gallen has worked in European scouting in his retirement, McIntyre is a well-connected journalist. They say everybody had watched Madsen because of his stats but hadn’t touched him because he was "far too weak and far too slow” for the Championship. McIntyre makes the point that QPR’s head of recruitment Andy Belk is, more often than not, at our games, rather than watching players elsewhere. That the whole thing is number driven.
I do still maintain they’ve been unlucky. The players who got injured at the start of the season were exactly the players you wouldn’t want to be missing while trying to bed in signings of this profile – Clarke-Salter, Colback, Chair. Your absolute Championship stalwarts right down the spine of the team, your best defender, and your best overall player among them. The Plymouth and Hull home games could easily have gone another way, instilling confidence in the team, calming everybody down, buying the whole thing time (although Plymouth and Hull have done their best to make those results look even worse with every passing game). The injury list is now completely unmanageable. A club of QPR’s resource cannot go to Leeds tomorrow, a club with parachute payments and 40,000 fans in the ground every week who fetched in more than £100m of transfer fees over the summer, and compete with eight first teamers missing. Brick Top says he’s going down in the fourth, and I reckon that sounds optimistic.
But even these excuses are tinged with self-sabotage. Going into a season with only Michy Frey and Zan Celar as your only strikers was fraught with risk. West Ham’s Callum Marshall, three goals for Huddersfield so far but still a warm body, was offered on loan but he didn’t fit the analytics. Colback’s availability has been a problem since he got here, and yet the opportunity to bring in Isaac Hayden in his position was spurned in favour of adding Harrison Ashby, himself a panicky loan when they’d belatedly realised how far away Hevertton Santos was from this level presently. They spoke publicly about Kenneth Paal needing to leave because of his contract situation, spent most of the summer expecting him to go to Watford, and then wound up with him as their only left back having loaned out his understudy to Dundee. At a club that’s got so many people with "performance” in their title even Jake Humphrey would think it a bit much, these are truly world class basics. I’ll repeat this a few times – you go down to League One with a "head of methodology” on your staff and you’re going to look a right bunch of twats.
The injuries, too. To some extent, always a degree of luck with these things. I remember Mark Warburton purring about our slick medical and sport science operation, which apparently guided our squad through the Covid season in red hot form with barely a scratch on them, only for the following season to collapse amidst a bloodbath which eventually claimed five separate goalkeepers.
Last season the club were keen to extol the virtues of performance director Ben Williams - wheeling him out at the fan forum for an impressive ten-minute cameo (oh look, somebody with good chat again) - and pushed and pushed again the message that we had the best availability and injury record in the league. Even Jake Clarke-Salter graced us with 29 starts, a career best for which he was awarded a contract and a glowing reference as "an outstanding human being”. My word. He's now back on a part time rota.
Now things aren’t going so well, and like I say there’s a degree of luck to this, but Williams is no longer here. The Brooklyn Nets announced him as their performance director over the summer. Christian Nourry said after the fan forum Williams was splitting several roles which is "very common” in this field and we "weren’t pleased” with the Nets announcement. He also said Williams was mainly based in Dubai now for personal reasons. Hmmmm. Back at this end of the Zoom call, we’ve gone from the Championship’s best injury record to worst. A fit, fresh and firing squad which went through the second half of last season in play-off form is now trudging about the field like it’s had a Sunday roast and slab of cake for its pre-match meal. Williams was omnipresent last year. Involved in far more than anybody on the outside realises. Now his only presence seems to be on the club’s official website.
One thing I have been right about from the start is the new clandestine way the club is communicating with us was always going to cause them trouble. When the going is good, as it undoubtedly was in the summer, you make hay. You capitalise on that. You build credit with the fanbase which you’re going to need when the going gets tough and QPR go on one of their lengthy losing runs. You don’t spend that time pissing people off trying to hide contract lengths, access to your manager, attendance at pre-season games. That’s immediately getting people’s backs up, making them think there’s something up, making them suspicious of you, at a time when the support base was probably happier and more optimistic than it’s been in a decade. Even I’m surprised at how quickly it’s blown up on Nourry, but blow up it has, and blow up it was always going to do as I've told him repeatedly. The simple fact is he didn’t believe it would happen to QPR this season, and said as much.
All of which leaves us heading to Leeds, missing at least eight players who’d all otherwise be starting, and relying on several players who seemed to be deliberately hiding from the ball in that Middlesbrough game on Tuesday night. If you’re screaming "what about Cifuentes” at your screen then I don’t really blame you. Firstly, I clearly don’t think much of this is his fault and I think his non-club interviews of late have been very revealing as he publicly seeks to distance himself from what's going on above. Secondly, sadly, I’m expecting to have to write a big piece about him sooner rather than later now so I’ll just save it for that.
Any prospect of a footballing miracle tomorrow seems remote. Any QPR chance at all seems to hang on how long ten of our tackle-averse players can hold hands along the edge of our box without conceding a goal. On what is the division’s least enjoyable away day at the best of times, it is a bleak prospect. And yet 1,428 tickets have been sold.
These people have put up with an awful lot of awful, for an awfully long period of time. They have taken that in good humour, with minimal protest. They have, remarkably, ridiculously, sold out home and away games repeatedly despite it all. They have been treated with increasing levels of contempt. Tuesday was an outright afront to them. A central midfielder you’ve spent £REDACTEDm and handed a REDACTED contract to attempting zero tackles in a home game is an insult to them. To us.
You can hide as much as you like, on the pitch, or off it. But we see you. And we deserve better. We deserve a lot better.
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Team News:
Been around the world and I, I, I,
I can't find Dembele,
I don't know where Michy Frey is,
Why he's gone away,
And I don't know where Paal can be, or tattooed Ashby,
But I'm gonna find them.
We had a quarrel, and I let Armstrong go,
I said so many things, things he didn't know,
And we are, oh, oh, so bad,
I don't see Dykes coming back, mmmmmhmmmm
So open in midfield, Madsen did me wrong,
He was the one, the weakest one of all,
And now I'm, oh, oh, so sad,
I even miss Jack Colback, JACK COLBACK.
Chair did too much trying,
Sent his knee cap flying,
Now Clarke-Salter’s crying, I, I, I
Been around the world and I, I, I,
I can't find Dembele,
I don't know where Michy Frey is,
Why he's gone away,
And I don't know where Paal can be, or tattooed Ashby,
But I'm gonna find them.
Instrumental.
Ethan Ampadu is missing for Leeds.
Elsewhere: Having taken over a destitute, bankrupt, homeless club playing League Two football in various empty stadiums across most of the East Midlands, and established them as a Championship team with a hefty bank balance and promotable team via two Wembley finals, an FA Cup semi-final, and one missed penalty from the Premier League, Mark Robins has been rewarded with the sack. Coventry start their brave new era of sunlit uplands at Sunderland on Saturday afternoon.
They’ll be hoping it goes slightly better than Hull’s similarly dim-witted decision to ditch Liam Rosenior during the summer. New boss Tim Walter’s decision to criticise the locals for their reaction to last week’s draw at Pompey sparked a strong reaction and chants of "are we loud enough for you” as they lost 1-0 at Oxford during the week. Does he survive if Sunday’s homer with West Brom (on a sequence of six consecutive draws) doesn’t go well? Oxford, meanwhile, get the weekend underway tonight at Watford.
That Hull game is one of three on Sunday this week, just because, in a line-up that includes the Sheffield derby at Bramall Lane and Burnley (0-0, 2-0, 1-1, 0-0, 0-1, 0-0) at home to Swanselona as Scott Parker attempts to convince the locals a 0-0 draw at home to the second lowest scorers in the league is always a good result.
Three games at 12.30 on Saturday, just because. This includes Cardiff at home to Blackburn with just the first signs that Rovers’ surprisingly brilliant start is on the wane. They’ve lost five of their last seven, won only one of those, lost their last three, and haven’t scored in four. Middlesbrough at home to Luton and red hot Millwall, four straight 1-0 wins, away at Stoke are the other lunchtime unfortunates.
The remaining Saturday games see Plymouth, who win all their home games and lose all their away matches, travelling to Derby. Portsmouth go for their first home win against Preston. Norwich host Bristol City.
Referee: Matt Donohue from Manchester for this one, last in charge of QPR for the 2-1 home victory over Rotherham in March. Details.
Leeds: Daniel Farke’s side had been unbeaten in eight games prior to the midweek loss at Millwall. That loss perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise, not only because of Millwall’s recent hot streek but also because of Leeds’ weirdly bad record in London – 30 defeats from their last 38 visits to the capital. That sequence includes four consecutive defeats to QPR at Loftus Road. Not such a hot record at Elland Road, mind, where Rangers have lost their last four visits, three of them without scoring, and are winless in six back to August 2013. In all competitions, the home team has won the last eight meetings between Leeds and Queens Park Rangers since Leeds won 3-1 at Loftus Road in December 2017.
Last season the Whites contrived to turn a 16-match unbeaten run through the spring, of which they won 13, into one win from the last six which of course included that night at Loftus Road. They were then beaten in the play-off final by Southampton. It meant they won three of the last 11 games. They’ve recovered from that trauma well. Although they started the season with two draws and a cup defeat, they’ve since won seven, drawn three and lost two of 12. At home they’ve won five, drawn one and lost one. No team has won more home games, and no team has scored more goals at home than their 15. They have only conceded one goal in the last four games at Elland Road. They have won 21 of their last 27 games on this ground, losing only three.
Joel Piroe top scores here with five, Brenden Aaronson is next up with four. Must be nice. Daniel James has been involved in 16 goals in his last 17 home Championship starts for Leeds United (11 goals, five assists), scoring against Plymouth last time out at Elland Road. Leeds have created 31 so-called ‘big chances’ this season, five more than any other side in division. They’ve also had the most shots on target – 74. Gulp.
Nicolas Madsen has failed to register a single tackle in 4 of his last 5 #QPR appearances. https://t.co/uoj0n85Aoi— Jack Supple (@JTSupple) November 7, 2024
QPR: Rangers are in danger of freefalling. They’ve won none of their last 11 games in all comps, ten in the league. They’ve yet to win at home in ten games in all comps, eight in the league. They’ve only won one game anywhere all season, that at Luton in August. The 4-1 defeat to Middlesbrough on Tuesday was their fifth defeat in eight games. The R’s have kept two clean sheets in 17 games. It’s the first time in club’s history they have failed to win any of first eight League games at home and four points is their lowest ever tally at this stage at home.
Marti Cifuentes’ side haven’t scored more than one goal in a game in 11 attempts. They’ve failed to score at all in four of those. They’ve only scored more than one goal in a game twice all season – both in August at Sheff Utd and Luton. They haven’t scored more than two in a game since the home win against Leeds. They haven’t scored at all in their last three away games. The last time they went four away games without scoring was 14 years ago, in February 2010. Only Michael Frey (three) and Nicolas Madsen (two) have scored more than one goal. Only Swansea (11) have scored fewer goals than QPR, although they’re somehow ninth.
The powderpuff midfield that has been in plain evidence all season came to a brutal head against Boro on Tuesday. Nicolas Madsen has copped most of the grief for his appalling display which featured zero tackles won from zero tackles attempted – it’s the fourth game in the last five that Madsen has failed to register a single tackle. But QPR’s midfield collectively only attempted eight tackles (winning six) in a home game in which the away side had 55% of the possession.
Prediction: There’s still time to enter our Prediction League for 2024/25, where we’ll once again be handing out prizes for being top at Christmas and overall winner from The Art of Football - sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here. For the first time last year we had joint winners so this season you’ll be hearing from one or both WestonsuperR and SimplyNico in the match previews.
Nico’s Prediction: "The Boro game this week was the worst QPR performance I have seen (worse than: losing at home to Paul Warne’s non-winning Rotherham; any of the abject Harry Redknapp Premier League team (pick a fixture); or, being screwed away at Blackpool). Just terrible. With the injury crisis we have, and the genius player loan outs made at the start of the season by our child sports-minded CEO/DOF, the team is genuinely down to its bare bones (many of which seem to have osteoporosis). There are no goals in the team, and we appear to have just Nardi, Cook, Dunne, Field and Morgan who will be able to play at Leeds and who actually seem to care. Unless something drastic changes, and quickly, we are nailed on to go down. I do not see where the next goal is coming from and we going to get battered at Leeds (doubtless with some artless piece of Bamford cheating included just to rub it in).”
Weston’s Call "Very little to be said that hasn’t already about the sad state we find ourselves in, extremely worrying. Can’t see anything other than a defeat in this one especially considering our extensive injury list and that Leeds may see it as a chance for revenge after last season. Well done to the 1,300 attending fantastic loyal support.”
Nico’s Prediction: Leeds 4-0 QPR. No scorer.
WestonSuperR’s Prediction: Leeds 3-0 QPR. No scorer.
LFW’s Prediction: Leeds 4-0 QPR. No scorer.
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