A QPR released list bearing the names of four strikers has LFW wondering how they could possibly all have failed so badly, and what Rangers can do to stop it happening again.
For QPR in recent times, putting a released list out at the end of the season has been like taking that dump you realised you needed ten stops away from home on the Northern Line – long overdue, and a blessed relief. How we all sighed when the ludicrous contracts handed to Patrick Agyemang and Fitz Hall mercifully came to an end. At most clubs fans get excited during the summer at the promise of new arrivals – at QPR the faithful look forward to the departures.
Since the Flavio Briatore takeover QPR's technique has been to hoard mediocre players on long contracts – swatting aside Preston’s offer, and Agyemang’s expectation, of a two year contract on £6k a week for a four year deal at £12k. Out of our way puny Championship underlings.
Of course, Rangers didn't set out to bring in distinctly average footballers, but they've found over the last five or six years that if you are trying to buy proven talent for big money, rather than searching lower down the ladder or into the nooks and crannies of European and youth football, the only kind of player who would come to a club like QPR is one with something a bit wrong with him. Michael Dawson, for instance, would have been wonderful but wouldn’t have his head turned by the riches on offer in W12 even though Andre Villas Boas was making it very clear he felt he had no future at Spurs. In the end Dawson stayed, fought and won his place back. Had he had a long term injury, or been genuinely concerned that he was no longer good enough to get that place back at Spurs, then he probably would have snapped QPR’s hand off – but then he wouldn’t have been quite so wonderful would he?
And once the word is out that there’s big money being thrown around by footballing novices, the men in shiny suits soon circle. Have you considered Gary Borrowdale for the left side of your defence at all?
"You're only here for the money," cried the Loftus Road faithful during a home annihilation by Southampton last season. Of course, what else would they be here for? A career move? A chance to train on a pitch at the end of the Heathrow runway that Rangers borrow from a college? The promise of trophies and medals?
So Rangers end up throwing the money at players well past their best like Ji-Sung Park, or with questionable attitudes like Jose Bosingwa, or with suspect fitness levels like Andy Johnson and Bobby Zamora. What they then find is getting rid of them, or at least recouping transfer fees on them, is rather difficult because the wages they're earning immediately rules out the teams at their level of ability from signing them. How many times since Flavio and co breezed into Loftus Road have we ended up with a senior player not even training with the first team squad, but not going anywhere because nobody would be able to offer him the same money? Rowan Vine, Luke Young, Rob Hulse, Gary Borrowdale, Alessandro Pellicori, Matteo Alberti and others have all sat on deals at QPR for prolonged periods of time while playing no football whatsoever bar the occasional unsuccessful loan spell. Mark Hughes' technique was to make them train on the naughty step after everybody else had gone home – to no positive effect whatsoever.
And then the day comes when we can finally flush them away, the day of the released list, and with slightly inappropriate glee and relish we metaphorically gather on the South Africa Road to wave that fucking Bentley with the P Agye number plate farewell for a final time, and then erect some concrete bollards up near White City tube to make sure he can't sneak back in with some suggestion that Gianni might have promised him a fifth year option.
This year's list, confirmed by the club at the weekend, was different though. Of the six senior names, four of them were strikers whose signings were heralded when made and looked like superb acquisitions only to fail miserably. Seeing players QPR had committed big money to, at seemingly exactly the right time, just released on a free after so little return is a sad affair.
Rob Hulse was a big, powerful, dangerous target man at Derby and had scored and starred in an opening day win for the Rams at Leeds just a fortnight before moving to QPR in the summer of 2010 – he looked a superb signing for a Championship side, one of the league’s most feared marksmen. Jay Bothroyd had bagged 20 goals in 42 appearances for Rangers' promotion rivals Cardiff City, won an England cap and was available on a free transfer when he arrived in 2011. He was quickly followed by DJ Campbell for what looked like a bargain fee of £1m after his 13 goal haul in the Premier League for a relegated Blackpool side. Worth saying that for all those – like me – who want QPR to scout harder, pick up the rough diamonds for smaller fees and give them their chance to prove themselves on a bigger stage that Bothroyd and Campbell were exactly that. And Djibril Cisse was a French international striker in his absolute prime age wise, available for £4m, who exploded onto the QPR scene with a fabulous goal and performance on his debut at Aston Villa.
There were some warning signs at the time. Hulse, for instance, arrived injured while Bothroyd, despite his goal haul and fabulous strike for the Bluebirds against QPR just two months previous, had always seemed to be utterly bone idle to me. Campbell may have scored freely for Blackpool, but given the way his manager Ian Holloway attempted to compensate for a defence built on footballing quicksand - Ian Evatt and Alex Baptiste - by throwing his entire team forward hoping to outscore opponents Kevin Keegan style, perhaps that wasn't a surprise. And Cisse, since leaving Liverpool for Marseille, had developed a habit of moving clubs at least once every 18 months, and falling out with people – a lucrative business in these days of colossal signing on fees. But these are not exactly unusual or insurmountable problems and as said, if the players had nothing wrong with them why would they be coming to QPR in the first place? We’re not talking about Kieron Dyer here where we needed a forklift truck to get his medical file into the physio room.
Nevertheless the combined stats for the four of them during their time at QPR are worse than anybody could ever have imagined. Eighteen goals in 99 appearances over a combined total of nine seasons. Take away Cisse's ten in 29 and it's an even sorrier tale – just eight goals to show for 70 appearances from three strikers. Danny Shittu would be disappointed with that return on his own.
There have been flashes: Hulse led the line magnificently in a crucial 2-1 win against Cardiff at Loftus Road during the promotion season; Bothroyd did likewise in a 3-2 defeat by eventual title winners Man City in 2011/12 and then against West Brom in the FA Cup last season; and DJ Campbell scored ten times in 17 appearances on loan at Ipswich last season. Cisse looked like one of the club’s best ever centre forwards at first but, as he always seems to do, fizzled out very quickly after an explosive start. By the time Rangers played at West Brom in that cup game last season - a match so pedestrian even Bothroyd looked useful - he could scarcely be bothered to run about.
What strikes me about all four signings, especially as they’ve come during a period when QPR have not been shy of throwing money at dreadful players, is they all looked like good options at reasonable prices at the time they arrived. Campbell and Hulse weren’t short of offers, Bothroyd had just had the best season of his career, and coming out of Villa Park after Cisse’s debut the locals were traipsing back to the station asking each other “whoi didn’t we sign Ceesaay?”
How can they all have failed to such an extent that, in the case of Bothroyd and Cisse, Rangers have found a way to release them for nothing before their contracts are even up? Redknapp and Joe Jordan have spent the last week driving players up into the woods at night and releasing them into the wild for goodness sake. Hulse in particular will struggle for a club at any kind of level again after a poor spell on loan at Millwall last season just like Vine and Agyemang before him and no doubt Luke Young still to come. You’d think with the amount of chum Rangers are throwing into the water every summer that one or two fish might circle, but often there’s not a single taker of any real note for any of these players. That really should be telling us something.
Is there an atmosphere and attitude infested in the place that guides players in the direction of not really caring about playing for the club, and being quite happy to sit and take the money for no return until the contract runs out – however unattractive that may make them to any other club who may want to take them on later in their career? Are QPR, as was clearly the case with Rowan Vine’s leg break, simply not treating their players correctly, rendering them damaged goods for the rest of their careers?
Perhaps a fairer assessment of these latest four strikers is that Rangers never really played to their strengths. Hulse replaced Heidar Helguson when he did play, totally different players with totally different games, and just didn’t have the same kind of hold-up-and-lay game that Rangers needed from him with the likes of Routledge and Taarabt waiting service tucked in behind him. Cisse was bought to play with Bobby Zamora in a 442 but during one of his many suspensions Rangers hit upon a more effective 433 set up with Zamora as the main man through the middle – Cisse found himself shoehorned into that, or used as a lone man himself thereafter. Campbell rarely had a chance owing to fitness, but suddenly freed of the shackles of QPR he quickly whopped in ten goals in 17 appearances for a poor Ipswich side – why couldn’t he do anything close to that for QPR? Jay Bothroyd’s baffling fascination with withdrawing deep to the right flank when he was supposed to be the centre forward made him difficult to fit in – but Cardiff managed it just fine.
My personal theory is too often QPR buy players by names and records, rather than by what use they think they’ll be to the team when they get here. Not since Neil Warnock added Jamie Mackie, Clint Hill, Shaun Derry, Paddy Kenny and Bradley Orr to his squad in the summer of 2010 has it felt like QPR were signing players with a starting 11 and a system in mind. Since then it’s been a case of adding players and deciding where they’ll all fit later. Rangers have to get back to that idea of having an ethos, style and system in mind and buying players who fit it, rather than buying players because we’ve heard of them and they’ve been brilliant elsewhere for teams who might play in totally different ways. If we do this effectively, we may actually find a lot of the potential answers to problems are already within the squad waiting to be coached and not need to sign a dozen players in every transfer window – but one step at a time maybe.
Whether it’s that or something else, this question of what exactly QPR are doing to these players – signed at a variety of ages, in different circumstances, under half a dozen managers, for varying fees, across two leagues, with almost entirely the same outcome – and why they’re failing so often has to be addressed and solved. Otherwise any new signings are simply more bodies being slung on the pile; potentially the next one left to train on his own at the club’s expense while we wait for the final 18 months of a deal to wind down to the joyous day when we allow somebody else we committed millions to for years to leave the club for nothing.
Tal Ben Haim >>> Free transfer >>> Five starts, one sub appearance, six months >>> No goals
Jay Bothroyd >>> Free transfer from Cardiff >>> 18 starts, 13 sub appearances, 24 months >>> Five goals
DJ Campbell >>> £1m from Blackpool >>> Five starts, nine sub appearances, 24 months >>> One goal
Radek Cerny >>> Free transfer from Tottenham >>> 87 starts, 60 months >>> No goals
Djibril Cisse >>> £4m from Lazio >>> 22 starts, eight sub appearances, 18 months >>> Ten goals
Rob Hulse >>> Approx £700k from Derby >>> 14 starts, ten sub appearances, 36 months >>> Two goals
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Pictures – Action Images