QPR will play Championship football after all in 2023/24, after securing the win they needed in the penultimate game away at Stoke City.
It ended, as it so often seems to do for Queens Park Rangers at the moment, in Stoke.
Walk along the canal and under the incinerator to the stadium high on the hill, designed and built with the corners open and the main stand set three quarters of a mile back from the pitch - apparently by somebody who’d never been to a football game before. The Bet 365 Stadium, a wind tunnel every day of the year more use as an Airbus testing facility than a sporting venue, this place used to frighten the life out of the great and the good in what Richard Keys might call "the best league in the world” (in the moments he hasn’t got a gobful of his daughter’s best mate). Arsene Wenger, dressed in a giant sleeping bag, would bring literally one of the best teams that has ever existed in the sport here and flap his arms around as they crumbled under a physical barrage. Look at the long throws mummy, can you see the long throws?
QPR, weirdly for a team that could get travel sick on a pedalo on Cleethorpes Boating Lake, have never had much of a problem here. They’ve now won seven of 14 visits, with a draw chucked in for good measure. See the angle of the cross from Armand Traore, watch the arced trajectory of the ball as it passes your field of vision, sense Heidar Helguson’s coal-fired arrival at the back post, feel the thick connection of the perfect header, watch it scorch into the top corner and lose yourself in a crowd of your delirious friends — close your eyes and you’re back there, with Neil Warnock, and Clint Hill. A 50% win ratio, I mean Christ if they could manage anything approaching that even at their own stadium back in West London Rangers wouldn’t have a problem would they? Perhaps we can solve the perennial problem of ‘what to do with Loftus Road?’ by simply dividing our games between here and St Andrew’s in Birmingham instead — we win a lot more there than we do on our own patch, and the beer is cheaper.
These days, everybody wins at Stoke. Since relegation back to this level in 2018 they are yet to finish in the top half of the Championship table, and have spent and lost many hundreds of millions of pounds achieving that. Currently sixteenth, no team in the division has lost as many as their 12 home games and if bottom-of-the-table Wigan win on the final day against Rotherham then they will finish with the overall worst home record. They have lost even more times on their own ground than our club-record-equalling 11 defeats in W12, including the last three matches here against the might of Bristol City, West Brom and Wigan. They change managers at a steady pace, rotate through players wildly (there are seven loanees here currently, the league rules only permit five in a matchday squad), and it makes not a jot of difference — Stoke, these days, are steadfastly, consistently, dire. I’ve seen bigger crowds in Tooting Post Office than the one that stayed behind for their team’s "lap of honour” at the end of this game.
An ideal opponent, therefore, for QPR in their quest to secure another trip here next season. Having belatedly woken up at the wheel of a car speeding down a hill two wins in 28 games deep, the remarkable 2-1 win at champions Burnley last weekend gave Rangers a puncher’s chance of survival few thought possible the week before. Match or better one of Reading’s final two results and the job would be done, with the added bonus of finally pushing the division’s worst awayday down a league and making it somebody else’s problem.
And so it proved. Three minutes after half time Jamal Lowe’s ball down the line got Ilias Chair into some space from where he was able to cut the ball back to Lowe on the corner of the penalty box and then onto Tim Iroegbunam. With space for a shot at a premium, the Villa youngster shifted it onto the tirelessly effective Lyndon Dykes who widened the angle enough to search out the bottom corner. Jack Bonham’s save was decent enough, but when your luck’s out it’s out and the ball flew straight to Albert Adomah. Stoke appealed for a flag that never came while Adomah, who seemed startled by the whole thing and did his best to miss the gilt-edged chance, returned the ball past the goalkeeper and just about into the net off the base of the far post. Behind the goal a couple of thousand people, who’d been in full throaty voice all afternoon, turned it up to 11.
After a first half devoid of life and quality, it was no shock the first team to successfully string five progressive passes together were rewarded with a goal — though, with only 20% possession on the day, it’s perhaps surprising QPR were eventually the ones to do it. Sam Field and Tim Iroegbunam, our two starting central midfielders, completed 14 passes, between them, all afternoon. Bar Jamal Lowe’s low shot straight at Bonham, and Ilias Chair’s poor decision to cut a ball back having dribbled all the way along the deadball line when there was a queue at the far post waiting for a chipped cross, there had been minimal threat from the visitors. At the other end Josh Tymon’s low drive towards the bottom corner on the end of a huge overlap from left wing-back was cleared behind by Rob Dickie, and centre back Connor Taylor headed a corner off the top of the bar but had to barge Jimmy Dunne in the back to do so and was therefore penalised by referee Leigh Doughty who could have done this game in his sleep.
Some tales from my first half notes, just to paint the picture of what sort of a game this was. After three minutes QPR botch a free kick opportunity so badly it ends up with Stoke countering back in the opposite direction, which would have caused a problem had Rob Dickie not intervened and then launched a wild pass-back to Dieng of the sort Karl Ready made a ten-year career out of, which would have caused a problem had Seny Dieng not intervened but then in turn hacked a horrid clearance off the outside of his boot and into the stand. Stoke’s first corner, worked short, was eventually cut back low through a crowded penalty area, right past Albert Adomah who was… kneeling down. I’m starting to wonder how many takes those Instagram videos require. 12 — Dieng flaps at a corner. 22 — Ethan Laird (back in the good books this week) a daft tackle but quite a harsh yellow card. 38 — Chair’s cross too high for Adomah. Chair would later try to get on the end of a similar ball himself, collapse to the ground, and plead for a penalty which the referee, rightly, showed little interest in.
QPR could, should, have scored more goals. Lowe might have got a volley away sooner given his time over again on 63 minutes, instead of trying to turn back inside and hitting the deck for a meek penalty appeal. He was a good deal closer soon after that, stretching to reach the ball ahead of Bonham as sub Chris Martin redirected a cross towards the goal. They might have been pegged back on 73 minutes when an enormous goalmouth scramble saw the ball hit Seny Dieng and stay out without him even knowing it had happened not once, but twice. That huge Tymon overlap, on all day but seldom played by Alex Neil’s side, should have resulted in a goal three minutes from time but Dieng made a fine fingertip save and was incorrectly awarded a goal kick as well just to really put the tin hat on things. Sub Lewis Baker skied a presentable late chance high over the top.
A grim watch then. Rob Dickie four pass completions all day, Jimmy Dunne two — very much let’s get out of here. The only player on the pitch who seemed to have a vague idea what he was doing was Stoke’s Southampton loanee Will Smallbone, and, hey, if all your hair falls out by the time you’re 23 and you have to go through a British secondary school education with that surname then I suppose you best make sure you’re fucking good at football. Ben Pearson was alongside him, knocking it this way and that quite nicely, but there was none of that angry, shithouse, goblin intensity that we came to associate with him and loathe during his Preston days. Have you ever been to a game Ben Pearson played in where you could describe his influence as anonymous? Welcome to it. Not for the first time an opposition tried to target Kenneth Paal’s lack of height with one sweeping crossfield ball after another, and not for the first time they found him in full Paal Parker mode, coping with the whole thing admirably — nice to see him back to his early season form in defence at least. Up front, Dwight Gayle departed the scene early — his regular summer availability, on wages almost certainly in the region of £40,000 a week, sends QPR’s CBeebies Twitter fraternity into a frenzy, and for that money Stoke have received… three goals in 31 starts and five sub appearances, two of those in the same match at Sunderland. He wouldn’t have scored in this game if it was a five-day test match. Sign a fucking striker, indeed.
Why do I keep coming back to Stoke? Why is this match report about them more than it is us? Why this angle, this tone, this mood? You probably came here for the typical LFW, over-the-top, 4,000 words of flowery prose, tales of relatives been and gone, moments frozen in time in an away end chock full of the people we choose to spend our lives with, a team bouncing back off the canvass after taking a full count, lyrics from Electric Dreams. Typical QPR eh, just as you’re out they pull you back in, what are they like hey, hey? Come here and give me a cuddle. Well, that was last week, and if it is what you’re in the mood for then you can re-read it here.
I’m genuinely sorry if you don’t feel the same way, and you came here today looking for celebratory prose, but this, for me, was a very, very bittersweet experience indeed. Not only because Stoke were so unutterably dreadful and we made such heavy weather of dispatching them - clinging on for dear life through nine minutes of stoppage time, wholly justified by the amount of times we’d used football’s ridiculous tangle of half arsed panics about brain injuries to stop the game with one faked head knock after another - but also because it never, ever, ever should have come to this. From top of the league in October, to packing an away end out at Stoke singing "the R’s are staying up” while our team wrestles grimly with a team picking Morgan Fox at centre back next to 52-year-old Phil Jagielka, looking every inch (and there are plenty of those these days) the dad who insists on kitting up and taking part in his son’s U11s football training. Slipping and sliding about, pelting that old classic diag straight into touch, it’s time now Phil, come on mate, silly old goat.
Playing Stoke in our final away match for three seasons running, as we weirdly have now, and the Potters being so consistently crap throughout, provides an interesting comparison study. Rangers have now won two and lost one of those games, and generally got carried away with what each of those results told them. In 2020/21 they won here well, convincingly, during the lockdown. Charlie Austin strode confidently onto a ball 20 yards from goal and fizzed it into the bottom corner like he was 24-years-old again, Sefan Johansen pulled strings so mesmerically in midfield that even Ozzi Kakay was able to stride onto an immaculate assist and find the far bottom corner. This, we told ourselves, was a team with the potential to go places, and money should be spent, gambles placed, risks taken and banks broken to try and get it there — Austin and Johansen were among those getting handsome permanent deals. A year later, when the promotion push they’d tried to induce had collapsed into four wins from the final 20 matches, the final play-off hope was extinguished with a retched 1-0 loss here that left Jimmy Dunne and others in tears at full time — manager Mark Warburton was dismissed, a decision which still divides opinion a year on but is, at the very least given what’s transpired, highly questionable. And now here we are, dancing around on the pitch at full time, after the scrappiest of 1-0 wins against a shit side with nothing to play for, to keep us in a division we were leading just five months ago.
Frantically scrabbling around for angles back in February, I burned another one of these bastard match reports off by telling you the story of the Air Transat flight from Toronto to Lisbon which the pilots accidentally bled out of every last drop of petrol midway over the Atlantic because they disbelieved their computer when it told them they were suffering a major fuel leak. They managed to glide the thing without power for the best part of 80 miles into the Azores, blew out six tires on landing, and saved everybody on board. This feat of flying was lauded and celebrated, they were given a specially commissioned award for the longest glide ever accomplished in a widebody passenger airliner. But this was not a success story. This was a story of dangerous incompetence, fundamental flaws, failure points in systems, arrogance and hubris. It was, at best, a very, very lucky escape. Everybody obviously delighted that a disaster which felt so inevitable for so long had been averted. But it was nothing to celebrate.
This latest win at Stoke changes nothing, and we should absolutely not be tricked by it, or the belated uptick in recent results, into thinking this can be patched up with elastic bands and chewing gum and sent out again next season. This group, these players, have shown you who they are and what they are very consistently indeed over the last 18 months now. A disparate collection of mostly disastrous loans will now, thankfully, go back home. A clutch of out-of-contract players will be released, and frankly if you renew any of the expiring deals at all you are just leaving yourself open to more of all of this all over again. Will the director of football stay? The CEO? Will this manager stay? Will we double down on this style? Will we try and recover from the damage done by backing Mick Beale last summer and letting him bring in his own players, by backing Gareth Ainsworth this summer and letting him do the same? There are a million questions, enormous change coming, and all of it has to be in place three months from now and constructed and completed on a vastly reduced budget as we attempt to cover the over-expenditure of 2021/22. It’s going to be a monumentally difficult task, and it needs to start right now. There should literally have been a board meeting this morning. Right, how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again?
At full time it was all eyes on Gareth Ainsworth. I’m delighted for him. He loves this place and this club, he’s bought into it and what we’re about from the moment he walked through the door back in 2003. It’s been blatantly obvious for many years that he’s coveted this job and to see him standing there in front of a packed away end while the QPR fans sang his name, his blue army, his victory, was wonderful for him.
I also watched Albert Adomah. Another man with QPR reasonably close to his heart, and somebody who is also partial to the odd over-celebration given half the chance — remember him turning a penalty shoot-out win in the first round of the League Cup at Orient into something akin to Argentina’s homecoming after this winter’s World Cup. On this occasion he’d been the one to score the goal, the winning goal at that, in front of the travelling fans, to seal the crucial victory which keeps us up. I was expecting dance moves, shirt give-aways, away end incursions, drinks flowing. Instead he came over and, while clearly delighted with the win, simply applauded the travelling fans, shook hands and shared congratulations with his team mates, and was then one of the first away down the tunnel. With all the experience of his 20+ years in the game, I reckon his train of thought is stopping at similar stations to mine. There’s a proper sort out required here, otherwise a potential fourth final away game of the season in a row at Stoke this time next year won’t have an ending even as happy as this one. This has the potential to get a lot, lot worse without some really quick, clear-headed, decisive action, almost immediately.
Saturday was the easy bit, the real hard work starts now.
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Stoke: Bonham 5; Sterling 5, Taylor 5 (Hoever 61, 5), Jagielka 4, Fox 4, Tymon 5; Smallbone 6 (Baker 71, 6), Pearson 5, Laurent 5; Gayle 3 (Powell 61, 5), Campbell 6
Subs not used; Thompson, Macari, Fielding, Howard-Wilkinson
Bookings: Campbell 75 (foul)
QPR: Dieng 6; Laird 6, Dickie 6, Dunne 7, Paal 7; Adomah 6 (Martin 78, 7), Field 6, Iroegbunam 5 (Amos 64, 6), Chair 6 (Willock 90, -); Dykes 7, Lowe 6
Subs not used: Clarke-Salter, Johansen, Archer, Drewe
Goals: Adomah 48 (unassisted)
Bookings: Laird 20 (foul), Field 53 (foul), Amos 90+7 (foul)
QPR Star Man — Lyndon Dykes 7 Jimmy Dunne won every header, Kenneth Paal stood up to what was thrown at him really well, but given what he had to go on I thought Dykes’ tireless line-leading made a huge difference, and it was his well struck shot that led to the goal.
Referee — Leigh Doughty (Blackpool) 7 I think this guy is excellent. Few challenges late in this game let away without a yellow card on both sides which raised a few eyebrows, but could basically have refereed this game in his lounge suit. Clearly on the fast track to the Premier League and, at this point, difficult to argue with that.
Attendance — 22,486 (2,046 QPR) Usual jobsworth stewarding of the away end pre-game - refusing to allow people to escape what was becoming a quite serious crush up any gangway other than the one on their ticket - was everything I’ve come to expect from the way we’re policed and dealt with at this ground and they’re fortunate it didn’t escalate into a serious situation. Once upstairs, the support for this team from this group of fans, as it has been all season long despite what they’ve put us through, was little short of remarkable. The best atmosphere of any away end all season, never stopped once. Superb.
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Pictures — Ian Randall Photography
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