 Tuesday, 26th Oct 2010 22:58 by Clive Whittingham QPR’s six point lead at the top of the Championship has been quickly eroded by in form Cardiff. How will the players, and equally as importantly the fans, cope with the pressure? Remain CalmRecent form has been fairly poor and has looked to be getting worse.
Recent goal scoring form is poor, no-one can argue with that, and that needs sorting.
We struck lucky with a couple of those draws, seriously, huge bits of luck. Bristol City in a false position? No. they are gash and we made them look reasonable.
All credit to Kenny but two missed penalties and not beating the rock bottom of the division who looked almost respectable against us.....
I fully expect Cardiff to finish at least ten points clear of us. They have more firepower than us and goals win matches.
I don't know about you guys but my neck is hurting like fuck with all this looking over my shoulder I'm doing at the moment.
Did you see how Cardiff destroyed Leeds? They want to try and win games. They are not just content with not losing. Please stop being too frightened of success. They don`t play kick and rush football. They play with proven goal scorers. One up front is no good any more.
For the millionth time and about the 50th time I have posted this thread in the past two years, we need a quality striker, otherwise forget about promotion. Once again this is not based on tonight’s performance alone but on the past five games where we have lacked up front in each game.
Don’t panic dear reader, you have not logged into a Middlesbrough fan’s site by mistake. I am not sitting here in a Sheffield United replica shirt or gazing out of my window at what was once fortress Elland Road and wondering why we never received a trophy for being champions of Europe. I’m still huddled up next to the gas fire in LoftforWords Towers and I’m still writing about Queens Park Rangers who are still, though you’d never believe it, top of the Championship and unbeaten after 13 games.
Unless I’m misunderstanding the concept, in which case please feel free to correct me at any point, unbeaten means we haven’t lost a game yet. We have taken to the field 13 times against 13 other teams and haven’t lost to one of them. We are, and again please get in touch if I’m missing a crucial point here, the best team in the league at this moment – The Football League has had the foresight to produce a table of teams charting their performance should a debate arise on this point.
Nevertheless, posted above is a genuine list of actual posts made by QPR fans on LoftforWords and We Are the Rangers Boys since Bristol City had the audacity to take a point from us on Friday.
I’d like to criticise the Chelsea fans for their appalling attitude to their own team when it “only” beat Wolves 2-0 at home on Saturday but it seems we’re heading down the same road. I’m starting to wonder whether it might have actually done us some good to lose a couple of games early on, to sit a few places lower, to keep expectations in check.
There have been message board calls to rest Hogan Ephraim and, unbelievably, Jamie Mackie. Calls for team changes, for formation changes, for Kyle Walker to be moved forward, for more signings to be made. People want Adel Taarabt (divisional player of the month for August) dropped because he was awful on Friday night, even though he was very good indeed at Swansea just three days earlier – watch the wonderful team spirit we currently have take a nosedive if we start dropping everybody that has one bad game. People lament the fact we didn’t sign Danny Shittu who will now apparently further enhance an excellent Millwall defence – this a defence that conceded two more goals in a game with Watford than we have shipped in the entire season.
We all seem to be getting a little bit hysterical - just imagine the outpouring of grief that will follow the inevitable defeat when it comes.
For the record I’d like to see Tommy Smith start instead of Hogan Ephraim this weekend – but if he doesn’t I’ll understand. I also don’t think we’ll finish top at the end of the season, and I’m not even sure we’ll finish second, and this thought doesn’t bother or worry or distress me greatly and I won’t cry and gnash and demand changes and action if we do lose a few and drop down to fifth or sixth because it’s much more than I thought we’d be able to manage. At the start of the season I didn’t even think we’d make the play offs so I have been absolutely delighted with everything I have seen so far. Bristol City is the first thing we’ve had that’s anything close to a bad result – the three other draws coming against the teams currently placed third, fourth and twelfth. Norwich and Swansea are flying at the moment and we came away from both unbeaten, without conceding. Fine results in my opinion, a loss of form according to others.
Here’s an absolute bombshell for you – we’re going to lose a game at some point, possibly as soon as this Saturday. We might, at some point, drop off the top spot in the table. Neither of these things are reasons for wholesale team changes, widespread panic, or mass hysteria – those are things that should be saved for runs like, say, one win in 15 games taking you from fourth in the table to 19th which, come to think of it, is exactly the position we were in 27 games (and just four defeats) ago when Neil Warnock took over. That’s worth remembering whenever the words “we could only draw with…” are about to pass your lips.
Adel Taarabt should not be dropped. If we dropped him every time he had a bad game there would be no point in having him – we’d be dropping him every four starts or so and he’d very quickly get the hump and stop performing altogether. I think he suffered last week with the fans because he played well on Tuesday when there were 400 of us there, then had a mare at Bristol City when three times as many travelled and many thousands more watched on the TV. If he’d been poor at Swansea and great at Bristol I doubt these calls for him to be shifted out would be being made. He didn’t, but they still shouldn’t be happening in my opinion. He was terrible on Friday, and he might be crap again this Saturday, or he might be brilliant. You cannot predict him and it’s that inconsistency that keeps him at QPR rather than elsewhere. Even when he’s awful he draws three or four opponents to him so he’ll always serve a purpose.
This idea that Taarabt, and the team as a whole, should be able to play like he, and they, did in August consistently for an entire season is completely unrealistic. Dips in form, if you can call one bad game from Taarabt and three draws in four games from the team a dip, should not be treated as a crisis regarding immediate changes. It’s the fact that we have a settled side that is at the heart of the success this season.
But why do I care? I can moderate the message board without really taking in what’s being said and just not respond to this crazy talk. People say things I don’t agree with and that’s their opinion and we’ll never agree so let’s just leave it at that.
Well, to some extent, fair enough. The problem I have though is we now have two very difficult home games against Burnley and Reading. They are important if we want to maintain our position at the top of the table but to win them both is going to take something quite special and, I would suggest, it’s unlikely. Four points would be a good return in my opinion.
To get four, or hopefully six, points from Burnley and Reading we are going to need to continue a run of unbeaten home matches that stretches back to May and includes an unblemished defensive record in six matches. At the start of that run we beat Barnsley 4-0 and I would describe the atmosphere at Loftus Road that day as relaxed and expectations as low. That atmosphere has slowly been corroded ever since and I worry that expectations are now so high and so unrealistic that we’re going to see a return to the dark days in W12 when some thought money in the boardroom automatically meant immediate success and roundly and routinely abused the QPR players unable to deliver weekly 3-0 victories. There was a real feeling around the ground against Norwich that people were just sitting on their hands and waiting for Rangers to sweep aside the Canaries – a very competent team in their own right – rather than creating an atmosphere that would help make it happen.
Cardiff have got Craig Bellamy, Jay Bothroyd, Michael Chopra and Andy Keogh to pick from in attack. Only Taarabt can hold a candle to any of those players. We’re not meant to finish above Cardiff this season – revel in the fact that we’re leading the way ahead of them at the moment, rather than panicking that it might not continue.
My big fear is that Burnley or Reading score first in the next couple of games, and that starts the moaning and groaning, which in turn contribute towards a defeat, which sours the atmosphere still further and it becomes a self perpetuating thing.
This is a very good QPR team. Not an exceptional one, or a brilliant one, just a very good one. It works hard, and it’s good to watch, it has different approaches it can take when games aren’t going to plan, it tries its best in every game and it’s top of the league table. It’s a QPR side to be proud of and one that deserves our support and even when it loses games and falls down the table a little that won’t change. It’s a team that is yet to see anything of Tommy Smith, Rob Hulse and Martin Rowlands so it’s a team that could still improve as well.
Let’s please not burden it with our expectations and, frankly, trivial complaints in the coming fortnight. We have a big part to play.
The League Cup is worth winningI would think even the lunatic who leaned over the front of the South Africa Road stand and screamed abuse at the players for the full 90 minutes of the League Cup defeat to Port Vale in August would admit that the early exit from that competition has been a help rather than a hindrance.
Shaun Derry, Clint Hill and Heidar Helguson have been three of our best players so far. Whether they’d have been nearly as effective or impressive to date if they’d been playing Saturday and Tuesday every week since the big kick off is debatable – I would suggest that Helguson and Derry in particular would have suffered badly. Port Vale drew Fulham in the next round and while that would certainly have been nice, and I’d definitely have fancied us, I think the rest between games certainly helped us to post points on the board early on.
That said, I certainly don’t want to see QPR making a habit of surrendering early in cup competitions. We haven’t won an FA Cup tie for ten years, the longest run in the country at any level, and I’d certainly like to see us bring an end to that in January.
At the start of the 1990/91 season video Jim Rosenthal on the voiceover states that QPR are “setting out to win the First Division championship.” That is no longer realistic. Three teams at best set out to win the Premiership this season, a further four maybe fancied themselves for a European place, and the rest just want to get to 40 points and survive as quickly as possible. For a host of teams basically from Aston Villa down the best thing they can ever hope to achieve, if they try for the next 100 years, is winning one of the cups.
Which makes the abandon with which they calmly throw away their places in these competitions away mystifying to me. I can, perhaps, understand the position of a side like ourselves, or Blackpool, not wanting to stretch a slim squad with other targets on its mind. But teams like Villa, Birmingham, Blackburn and others aren’t going to get relegated, or trouble the championship spot, so why not go for one of the cups? Villa are one of the most ridiculous examples – playing reserve teams and losing to the likes of us so cup runs don’t hinder their quest for a European place. Then when they do qualify for Europe they immediately surrender that place too, for fear of it hindering their qualification for it next year.
Football is still about medals and cups. Or, at least, it should be. Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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