Ian Elmer on the toughest end to the season imaginable, on and off the field.
My father passed away on Sunday March 4, 2012. It was the day after QPR held Everton to a creditable draw at Loftus Road.
For more than 20 years we had been season ticket holders at the club and had experienced just about everything that football could offer us -except perhaps a trophy or two. We had been through it all together, from the heady days of the old First Division to punching above our weight in the glamorous new Premier League to the depths of administration and relegation to League One, and on to ultimate redemption and a return to the top flight.
Up until Christmas he had been a sprightly seventy one year old that would regularly outpace me on the walk back to White City Station after a match. Then, just before Christmas Eve, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and in the space of three months was unable to walk more than a few paces and was suddenly lying in a bed in a local hospice. The day of the Everton match was the day he was moved there; I had no intention of going to the game but he persuaded me to go. He knew what was coming, but he also knew how strong the football bond and the love of our club was between us. When I said I wasn't going he looked at me as if I was mad and sent me on my way.
So I went to the match and was encouraged by a fighting performance by the team and the fact that my dad was in a safe place where he could receive the right kind of help. I generally felt better than I had done all year. The next day he was dead and the world collapsed around me.
On the day of our next home match, against Liverpool, some 18 days later, it goes without saying that my state of mind was not at its best. My father had not, in truth, attended a match for most of the year as his condition deteriorated but until he had died there was always some residual hope that he would be back at my side one day. Now as I walked from the tube station up South Africa Road to the ground, alone, I realised that it would always be this way and that a routine that had been with me for more than two decades had been ripped away in a ridiculously short space of time.
My mood was not improved by having to break the news to those people who knew him but who I did not have contact details to have told them previously, watch their faces crumple and reflect my own, and then sit and watch Rangers proceed to play like absolute dogs against a Liverpool side that we all now know were hardly pulling up any trees of their own.
By the time that Joey Barton had been substituted after putting in a performance that he would later admit was the worst he had ever managed, with the crowd baying for blood all around me, I had just about had enough and a lifelong relationship with my football club was wavering like a stricken boat at sea. I asked myself, why am I doing this? What is the point? I was angry. I hated the players that were shaming my beloved club. I hated the crowd that were venting their spleen whilst being oblivious to the personal tragedy I had gone through. They were all disgracing the memory of my dad and his true passion in life, his football. Why couldn't anyone see this?
Then, from nowhere, something strange happened. Despite the team being comprehensively outplayed for 75 minutes Shaun Derry, yes him, took it upon himself to score his first goal in about three centuries and we had one back. The crowd rose, I stayed put and applauded out of politeness. Liverpool, who had previously passed the ball around with a swagger and confidence, suddenly began to lose the plot. Less than ten minutes later Djibril Cisse headed a second and even I got out of my seat for that one. The dying embers of enthusiasm inside me began to flicker again. By the time Jamie Mackie had poached goal number three and I had been enthusiastically bear hugged by the person next to me I had been reduced to a stunned silence as I tried to comprehend what had happened.
We won the match, but even the most optimistic of supporters would have to admit we were lucky to do so. A complete fluke, I told my colleagues at work the following day, some of whom were Liverpool fans who looked almost as stunned as I was. There is no way we are staying up if we play like that I told them, a point that seemed to be backed up by a typical capitulation at Sunderland just a few days later coupled with yet another sending off.
Shortly after I wrote an obituary for inclusion in the QPR programme and to the club’s credit they got back to me straight away to offer their condolences and inform me that it would appear in the programme for the Swansea game. I was happy, the embers got stoked a little more, but the pragmatist in me was already writing off the season as a bad job in all sorts of ways.
But incredibly it seemed the team itself didn't agree with me. The rag tag collection of highly paid professionals that had previously played with each other with all the enthusiasm of strangers meeting at a work party started to gel. Individuals started to shine. Samba Diakite, a person with surely more than one screw loose in his cranium and who I had watched have easily the most inauspicious debut in a QPR shirt I have ever seen against Fulham in February, started to look like a classy, if not somewhat maverick, figure in our midfield.
The aforementioned Cisse, with enough mental problems of his own to be getting on with nevertheless became a vital source of goals in our bid to avoid the drop. Adel Taraabt found his shooting boots. Away form was dire but at home we became a real force, beating all comers not by fluke but by putting in solid, effective performances. The likes of Arsenal and Spurs were dispatched. The highly publicised nightmare run in to the end of our season was beginning to become more of a surreal dream. My dad's obituary was duly published and we brushed the Swans aside with ease. I still hated the walk to the stadium but left with a warm glow only dampened by the thought inside me that my father would have absolutely loved this.
By the time it came to the last game of the season -whilst I happily and very consciously made all efforts to downplay our chances of staying up to all who enquired - to be brutally honest I almost knew it would all work out ok. Something had inexorably changed on the night of the Liverpool match and had pulled both my team and I back from the brink of the abyss. On the day of the Man City match I played with my children and maintained radio silence until a quarter to five, only then consulting my mobile phone. When a quick browse of the BBC website informed me that we were 2-1 up and down to ten men I hardly gave it a second glance. A quick check of the Bolton score told me what I already knew was going to be the case. They had drawn; we had somehow managed to stay up. I was equally unsurprised when just minutes later we had lost our own game, and although I was happy for Manchester City I even allowed myself to feel just the tiniest tinge of disappointment that we hadn’t held out to full time.
A short time later I turned to my wife and told her that I couldn’t believe my dad wasn’t around to experience this. She told me that it may well have been him that had sorted it all out, divine intervention from above if you like. Well, I will be frank, I’m not a religious man. Nor am I a believer in life after death, or that my father is now sitting watching his football behind the pearly gates, let alone persuading the big man to help a small club in West London survive to mix it with the big boys in the Premiership next season. But I must admit it I like the idea of him dancing a little jig on some cloud somewhere as Jamie Mackie’s header hit the roof of the Manchester City net.
That’s not the point of all this really. I think what I am trying to say here is that there is nothing that QPR can throw at me that can ever match the love I felt for my father, or the sheer desperation and longing and hurt that I still feel now that he has been taken away from me. But because my father, my football team and I have been so closely linked throughout the years the fact that somehow Rangers managed to find a way of surviving, even if he couldn’t have, has at least given me some kind of feeling of redemption. I know without a shadow of a doubt that it would have given my father immense satisfaction in the way it all panned out.
He was simple man my dad. He loved his family, he liked a quiet drink and he was passionate about his football team. He could have chosen to follow a bigger club, all his brothers were Chelsea fans, but for some reason he chose to plump for the underdog in QPR and all the twists and turns and highs and lows that go with them. In doing so he inexorably tied my life in to that club as well and God help me (if you will pardon the religious quote just this once) I love him all the more for that. Thank you dad, and roll on next season…
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Pictures – Action Images