Alex Perry returns with his review of the previous month in Shepherd’s Bush, where the natives are starting to worry that Homer’s flying pig may not be “just a little airborne” after all.

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In 2004 Portland based Indie darlings Modest Mouse released the album Good News For People Who Love Bad News. It was a critically adored break into the mainstream for one of America’s most promising bands, whilst somehow also being a brilliant summation of what drives engagement to habitually mid-table championship football team blogs.

We love it because we know no other way, we love it because joy is in scarce supply, we love it because QPR seem to have a quite bewildering habit of doing good things badly and we love it because somehow all news is one week away from becoming bad news.
I want to assure you that I feel it to, the utter frustration that this inertia chrysalis of a club seems to encase anything promising into its death cycle. I am also back to the dread of checking scores or watching the team live, because the outcome is premediated. I am looking at Preston enviously again and it’s only taken two fucking months. I have no mouth, but I must scream. I would love to write 4000 words here around how supporting this club is an exercise in masochism that FromSoftware have managed to distil into an entire gaming genre.

I could do all these things, but I don’t need to exacerbate our plight. We all know the issues that plague this club and I’m sure you have your hopes crushed regularly enough, that you don’t need someone like me taking another swing at it with florid writing. This last month was rough, but it is still early days, and I am loathe to go all pessimism all the time, just yet.

So, come on in and return this site to its primary function – a support group. My name is Alex… and I am delusional footballing optimist.

Well Done, Eberechi. Alex is Crying Again

In the summer of 2021, I went through a breakup that only brings one word to mind – bodied. It was the kind of emotional trauma that basically leaves you not able to eat solids for a month. That November, Spotify’s miraculously well marketed yearly data exploitation event (Spotify Wrapped) came through and I, like everyone, couldn’t wait to see how my favourite band was still my favourite band. The quirk of that year’s Wrapped however, was that the omnipotent algorithm determined what your listening ‘aura’ was. Apparently, my breakup could be described in three words – melancholy and yearning. Turns out a well-timed body feint can evoke similar feelings.

Watching Eze come back to Loftus Road to play against QPR was the first time in the last decade we could watch someone with a sense of pride, encompassed with the paradoxical nature of football. Look at my beautiful boy… punch me in the face? There is a lot of cynicism around clubs deifying players, and it is mainly because Man Utd fans celebrated every Cristiano Ronaldo achievement like it still mattered to them, until he gracefully torched his legacy with all the nuance of a dictate. There is sound reasoning for this kind of lauding in the lower reaches of football though, where us economy flyers see the vast majority of our best prospects ushered into first class just to be flung back down to earth when it turns out megalomaniac billionaires don’t have cohesive pathways for youth development.

The reasoning comes from the scarcity of excitement in a pay to play sport when you’ve not got your hand in the till. Most EFL clubs spend years meandering through five-year plans that might result in a top 8 finish, or enduring abysmal ownership that leaves you circling the drain and quite literally questioning your clubs existence. That’s why it means something when you unearth an Eze or a Bellingham, because somehow you have managed to beat a game that, in its current guise, appears irrevocably rigged. You might have a component who can help you with an unlikely promotion push, some star quality to distance yourself from a relegation scrap and it will normally always result in a windfall that will help future proof your club from its own hubris (hello Stefan) or ineptitude (nice to see you again, Charlie). Suddenly in a sea of exploitation and inequality you hold a chip at the high rollers table that didn’t cost you a penny, and just for a few seasons you get to feel excitement again. There is no denying that the house always wins, that’s why we saw Eze in a Crystal Palace shirt in that game, but you got to dream for a second there.

To get to watch him run that game against us was a beautiful reminder of just how wonderfully talented he is, all guile and gravitational pulls with a weightlessness that makes you wonder how it is anatomically possible for a human to ever fall over. It was nice to sit back and marvel at a rare success story from our academy, a reminder that good things can happen to idiot scum like us.

The best advice my Mum ever gave me came during a breakup, she reassured me that I did not know I would meet that girl, and I didn’t know when I would meet the next. It was good to see you again Eberechi. I might have felt some melancholy and yearning, but I know the overriding emotion was joy.

We Are Not The Dentists

There’s a common quote you will hear if you ever watch one of Atalanta’s 30 Champions League game this season. Undoubtedly when they play English opposition, as they did against Arsenal, and somehow a Premier League side doesn’t just steamroll one of the continent’s most interesting and exciting teams you will hear the following: “Pep Guardiola once described playing against Gasperini’s Atalanta as like taking a trip to the dentist”. And scene. The point of this soundbite is that Gasperini plays football that makes the other team work hard, they don’t compromise on their principles and rarely, if ever, look like a team that’s happy to take a loss. If Atalanta are the dentists, then we are the Indian head massage.

Full disclosure, I originally wrote most of this copy on a 9-hour flight to Canada, at that point QPR were putting in a broadly fine display against Blackburn. I foolishly thought we were turning a corner mentality wise. You can weigh up the Sheffield Wednesday, Crystal Palace and Millwall games and deem them fine margins, games where we showed resolve and got points that we maybe didn’t deserve. The issue with this kind of highwire thought process is that you focus on the safety of the other side, whilst gleefully applying a don’t look down policy to all realistic available evidence. The subsequent games against Blackburn, Hull and Derby have very much left my optimism as pavement painting viscera.

There is just something so meek about this team, again. Three games in the past week and all of them with similar issues, a lack of progression through midfield on our side. Yet we’re leaving the world’s biggest fruit bowl in there for the opposition players to drop their keys in and fuck us on every transition possible. A lack of pace that has seen Paul Smyth subbed on around 60 minutes habitually. Having military grade wobbles every time something doesn’t go in our favour. It’s all old ground that doesn’t need repeating, and therein lies the issue. I don’t need a team of men or culture guardians to watch every week but what I would give for us to just have some players who hit the ground running, why can’t our random Japanese lad be on a five-game scoring streak or that obscure signing we made from the Swiss League is looking like a weapon in this league. It points to something chronic that this club just can’t shake, and it isn’t for the lack of footballing priests turning up in recent years attempting their own exorcisms. It’s not the house that’s haunted, it’s yourself.

I am a believer that underlying numbers do paint a picture of this team having some teething problems as opposed to anything terminal. However, you can analyse metrics, numbers and data points all you like but if you don’t win football matches and play like you’re turning the term ‘liquid football’ into a physical manifestation of your body language, heat maps just aren’t going to cut it.

*That* Goalmouth Scramble

Oh, how we laughed, oh, how long ago that feels now.

I mean what is there to really say about this? I could talk about how good it is to see a professional sport descend into playground rules and how it was pure undistilled nostalgia for many a football fan. This would be inappropriate though, for it was art.

This needs a deep dive on multiple levels. I am not the man to make this happen. I reckon I watched this goal upwards of 20 times, I have watched it more than Jimmy Dunne’s divine intervention against Birmingham last season. Why? Because every single frame of that clip offers something new. A facial expression, an action, a reaction, a noise. Every single time you will find something new, something inexplicable. It is the easiest visual representation of the philosophical chaos theory in action, every sequence forming an unlikely event that leads to the next. The phrase ‘hang it in the Louvre’ has been used on every blurry photo of ‘limbs’ to the point of tedium but I am not lying when I say every still of this clip has renaissance painting qualities.

To cap it off it resulted in a goal, for our very own Alfie Lloyd. I will not pretend to know anything about Alfie Lloyd beyond the fact he is handsome, has great running power and played football for Yeovil Town recently. If you want to find out more you can hear from the man himself on the QPR Podcast. For now, I have only seen a few cameos and I am quite enamoured with what I’ve seen. I don’t feel like it should be much of a surprise that a complete revamp of our training facilities and youth team staff has brought about some actual squad depth, but I saw Niko Hamalainen rack up 30 appearances so yeah, I am surprised.

Speaking of Alife Lloyd…

Alfie Lloyd’s First Goal Interview (Ever, I Assume)

Post match interviews are a tradition, they are just another one of those things in football that used to retain some sanctity. In a time when football has moved from enjoyable viewing spectacle to global content juggernaut, we have seen these interviews mutate into a bleak affair where a man with a provocative face like Geoff Shreeves, asks provocative questions around provocative topics they know their interviewee will be provoked by in search of a soundbite that they can use to provoke us insatiable masses. They are performed dutifully by an array of young men riding the waves of extreme emotions, in a sport that for the vast majority of its existence, has assumed a psychiatrist is something from Lord of the Rings. This is why they are media trained into a state of lobotomy.

Thus, when something resembling an actual human reaction stems from a post-match interview, it is noteworthy. Alife Lloyd’s felt to me like it punched through the swathes of nothingness. Obviously, there is a large amount of bias here and cliché’s aplenty when a youth player scores their first goal for your club in the 98th minute. I’m a big fan of the work in house club/team media do these days. A lot of people talk about the culture shift Gareth Southgate instilled into his England team, but I am adamant the arrival videos the England media team produced evaporated 20 years’ worth of public animosity. I’ve watched Declan Rice give his passport to a nice lady at the start of every international break and now I am ready to roar the boys home. There is no public wound for which sheepishly fist bumping a cameraman and saying hello cannot salve.

If you seek out this interview with Alfie Lloyd you will feel joy, guided by someone entirely onside you see Lloyd emit levels of enthusiasm that could power a small island nation. Does he say anything profound that speaks to the human condition, something about what this first milestone in his already long journey to first team football means to him that us mere mortals can’t comprehend? No, no he does not.

What he essentially does for about two and a half minutes is rub his head a lot, says oh my god on repeat and talks with the coherence of a man who’s achieved the kind of endorphin rush you haven’t felt since you took ecstasy at uni. That’s all I actually need to see and hear, just show me you feel something in the same way I feel something when you do something. Make me grin or make me grimace but just remind me you are human. Thank you, Alfie.

I Hear You’re a Brentfordlike Now, Father!

Your girlfriend’s favourite season of decay has begun as autumn rolls in and to stave off the inevitable seasonal depression we’ll all enjoy for the next six months, we all got some shiny toys in the shape of Dembele being made permanent, Jake Clarke-Salter signing a contract extension and a new long-term contract for Marti. Maybe some of you would’ve just preferred some vitamin D pills and a sun lamp but finally, a plan. Something coherent. Root and branch reviews. Blue sky thinking. World-class basics. Mini retirements. What is the plan? Well, it’s more like an idea. What’s the idea? Well, it’s more like a vibe. What’s the vibe? Well, it’s more like an impression. An impression of what? Well, watch Christian Nourry’s run on the Apprentice later this year and find out.

There is something very conflicting about this set of announcements, not least the performances and results since but also how in line this trend is for QPR. We love to switch managers and playstyles at least once a year, but within that always comes the rarer yet inevitable philosophical shift the club takes. In the last decade we have ranged from agent driven, to manager driven, to culture driven and now we’ve turned up in our skinny jeans and baseball jacket 10 years too late to the data driven trend.

Data driven is ultimately how all teams will operate in time, there are just too many success stories and a weight of ever advancing technology to make it go away. This shift for QPR is generally welcome, I would be surprised if our summer spree of obscure players from continental Europe didn’t excite the vast majority of our fanbase. There’s a catch though, isn’t there, because it’s QPR. That catch is that we operate with the subtlety of an ADHD addled web coder on MDMA. We are not doing an impression of Brentford as much as we’re arriving to the Championship convention in a cosplay of them, a lot of investment and time has gone into the look and feel of this thing, but it doesn’t give you superpowers.

We never, ever, do things incrementally. Boom or bust. I am a hat person now. Decaf has changed my life. Has anyone in football ever heard of tapering off? No, because that doesn’t generate excitement or good optics. That fans forum last week was one mood shift away from someone clubbing Jack Colback to death on the stage to quite literally hammer home the metaphor that this club has changed, and in his blood, we are all born anew.

As slapstick as it all is and with every drop of excitement for the new season having been rung out, there is still some optimism to be had. It would be parochial to dismiss this shift in philosophy or contract announcements as entirely bad things. For once, we have good intentions and the contracts for Marti and Jake Clarke-Salter do indicate we have a project that players and staff buy in to. There’s a crop of good players in that team as well, many Championship clubs will have been envious of our signings and retentions. As with all things in football, time will tell whether we have just embarked on a remarkable voyage or if we’ll be pulling matches to see who gets eaten next as we’re anchored in League 1.

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The Twitter @PlexAerry

Pictures - Reuters Connect

ozexile added 08:37 - Oct 11 Thank u
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GaryT added 11:15 - Oct 11 Greta write up. That Alfie interview seems so long ago now. I just watched the brawl again for the 20+ time and this time watched the ref when the ball goes in. Wednesday players are rolling around the floor or in a heated debate about wtf just happened whilst he points to the half way line with (I imagine) a look on his face that says "Anyone want to make a complaint? Anyone? You sure? No? OK then...I'll just walk awa...are you absolutely sure?, OK... a goal it is then". Not a single Wednesday player complains to the ref with just the goal keeper gesticulating like Monty Python character to "look at the bones!" but even he gives up when he realises he's on his own. Wonderful stuff. I wonder what I'll see next time. :-)

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GaryT added 11:16 - Oct 11 Greta? ffs, Great
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