QPR have confirmed Burton Albion’s promising up and coming manager Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink as Chris Ramsey’s successor. Can he succeed where so many others have failed?
Let’s get the, almost completely irrelevant, Chelsea stuff out the way first. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, now 43-years-old, moved to Stamford Bridge in 2000 and left in 2004. He made 177 appearances and scored 88 goals.
Chelsea were just one of ten professional clubs Hasselbaink plied his trade at in four different countries — Holland, Portugal, Spain and the UK. In this country he scored 42 goals in 87 appearances for Leeds between 1997 and 1999 before signing for Atletico Madrid for £12m — a £10m profit for the Yorkshire club.
He scored 33 goals in 87 appearances for Middlesbrough after leaving Chelsea and subsequently wound down his career with an unsuccessful stint at struggling Charlton — four goals in 29 appearances, 15 of which came as a substitute — and something of an Indian summer at Cardiff in the Championship where he bagged nine goals in 44 appearances.
After retiring he worked as a television pundit while attaining his coaching badges. He had a stint at Woking, and in the Nike academy working with unsigned players, before joining the coaching staff at Nottingham Forest in this division for a time having been brought to the club by Steve McClaren during his brief stint as manager He has UEFA A and B coaching licences.
After 18 months at the City Ground he took his first managerial job at Royal Antwerp in Belgium, leading them to a seventh-placed finish before resigning to seek employment in the UK.
Hasselbaink’s first managerial job in the UK presented him with a tough act to follow. Taking over from Gary Rowett, who’d transformed Burton Albion from a team battling at the bottom of League Two into one capable of competing for promotion, was a difficult ask but Burton had lost the play-off final under Rowett and had lost seven of their previous ten matches after a bright start when Rowett left for Birmingham. Hasselbaink, arriving in November, wasted little time in making an impact and led the Brewers to the League Two title last season, top scoring in the division with 69.
This year, their first ever in the third tier of English football, has been an amazing success. He leaves Burton top of League One following a midweek win against Millwall. That success has been built on a sound defence — just 14 conceded — and they top the table despite only scoring 20 goals in 20 games.
Hasselbaink has, perhaps a little oddly, signed a rolling contract at QPR.
He brings with him David Oldfield as assistant. A veteran of more than 600 appearances with the likes of Luton and Leicester, he has established his reputation as a coach first at Peterborough as reserve team manager and then in West Brom’s Category A academy senior professional development coach. He was subsequently head of the academy at MK Dons before joining Hasselbaink at Burton.
"It was not an easy decision to leave Burton, but when you get the opportunity to come somewhere like QPR, with the club where it is and the squad we have at our disposal, it was something I couldn’t turn down. I feel that this is a club on the up — it has an exciting feeling about it. And I want to keep that feeling going by taking more positive strides forward. I am happy to get the opportunity here at QPR, to lead the QPR family, be at the front of it all, put my stamp on things and take the club forward. This is an incredibly proud moment for me and I will give my all to represent the badge of the club.” - Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
"We went through a very meticulous recruitment process that generated a lot of excellent candidates. We gave ourselves a real selection headache with the high level of candidates we spoke to, but Jimmy was the best of the best, without any doubt. We have been hugely impressed by his work at Burton. Having won League Two, he leaves them at the top of League One, which is an incredible achievement. He has that fire in the belly that you look for in all Managers, but not only that, he is also a strong, authoritative leader who commands the respect of all those he works with. He leaves no stone unturned in his work on the training ground and prepares his teams meticulously. He is a young manager who has a great knowledge of the game.”- Les Ferdinand
"It has been an amazing 12 months for Burton Albion but we always knew that Jimmy was ambitious and that this was a stepping stone on his managerial career. We are obviously disappointed to lose him at what is a very exciting time for the players and supporters at Burton Albion, having gone back to the top of League One on Tuesday, but we thank Jimmy and David for the brilliant job they have done over the last year. Jimmy’s man management skills and talent as a manager has resulted in a very successful 12 months for Burton Albion and he has remained focussed on the job throughout the recent speculation. We know that he will go on to have a long and successful career in football management.” -Burton chairman Ben Robinson
"He’s been absolutely excellent. He’s certainly taken us to a different level since he came, using much the same style as his predecessor Gary Rowett who’d also been successful here. The players work hard and run through walls for him. He has a restricted budget for players so we are overachieving with the lot we have, top of League One presently, which is mainly down to him and his tactics. We actually play a little bit more football than we did under Rowett. I think he will organise you better and make you hard to beat and you have Austin up front to nick goals in a 4-2-3-1 formation. Don't expect Dutch-type flowing football immediately as he seems more interesting in keeping it tight and goals out. He is going from a small, well-run club where he has a great relationship with the chairman to a bigger club with some well-documented problems to address so it will be a challenge.” - Burton fan Steve Eyley
Burnley manager Sean Dyche uses the word ‘competitive’ with such monotonous regularity in his interviews, programme columns and team talks that they’ll probably end up carving it on his tombstone. It’s completely deliberate.
Burnley is a club that knows what it is, what it wants to be and has an idea for how it can get there. That’s because when Lee Hoos was there as CEO they sat down collectively — board members and supporters, over a period of time, and Hoos asked them what they wanted their club to be. ‘Competitive’, ‘hard working’, ‘honest’ were the key themes to come from it. And so they set out to make Burnley exactly that. A club capable of punching above its weight, not only in the Championship where more than half the division has a bigger average gate and budget, but also in the Premier League where literally everybody does. Punching above its weight by working harder than any other team, running further than any other team, being fitter than any other team, coaching its players harder than any other team… Competitive.
Words like ‘ethos’ and ‘culture’ can seem like trendy, buzzy nonsense but you only have to look at Burnley, what they have achieved despite their limitations, and what they’ll go onto achieve yet to see the perfect example of it. Knowing what you are, and having a clear idea of what you want to be, makes signing players, and appointing managers so much less risky. Dyche, George Boyd, Andre Gray… they all fit like a glove with that club despite, in two of those three cases, not being wanted elsewhere. When Dyche is presented with a potential signing by a scout or one of his coaches his first question is usually "can he run like fuck?” George Boyd is allowed to dress and look like a scabby drag act because "anybody who does 15k a match can wear what he wants”.
QPR, on the other hand, have had absolutely no idea they are or what they want to be for some time now. They used to — Ian Holloway tells a story about getting Paul Furlong to tell the new summer recruits what sort of a team we were and being met with puzzled expressions when Furs said "we’re a laundry gaffer”. We squeeze and press. QPR had no money, but they were competitive in this division anyway because they accepted the limitations, worked within them and had a strong sense of what they were about.
More recently we have behaved like a mini-Manchester City: throwing money around, buying big names, making big promises. There has been no real idea beyond "well we’ll just buy good players, and if they don’t work we’ll just buy more good players”. That’s why Harry Redknapp was absolutely perfect for the club — he’s got no idea what to do with a team that’s underperforming other than spending some more of somebody else’s money on it either.
Joey Barton is an ideal microcosm. At QPR, Barton was handed a ridiculously enormous contract and basically allowed to do what he wanted. And he wanted a lot. He wanted to be the big man on campus, running the dressing room, captaining the team, telling everybody what to do in training, speaking out publicly against team mates he wasn’t keen on. On the pitch he wanted to be the play maker, the goal scoring midfielder, the hard man, the enforcer, the free kick taker, the corner taker, the David Beckham figure. And off the field he wanted to be the media personality, the shock jock, the Question Time panellist, the philosopher, the rent-a-gob Newsnight guest. QPR let him do it all, however good or bad he was at it, however much damage it did to the club, however much it harmed or benefitted the team.
At QPR, Joey Barton’s performances were wild. The distance between his best displays, and his worst, was vast. One week running the show, the next week handing Everton two first half goals on a silver platter. One week producing a captain’s knock, the next getting sent off in an important game for punching somebody in the testicles.
At Burnley, this season, Barton has been consistently one of their best players, and we’ll see why when he comes to Loftus Road next week. At Burnley his role is very clearly defined, in a team where everybody knows their job and position right down to the blade of grass they should be standing on or running over at any given time. Barton’s role at Burnley is to break up the play, get around the midfield using the engine he undoubtedly possesses, win the ball back quickly for Burnley and then pass it simply to somebody else whose job it is to score the goals or produce the crosses. There is no budget-Beckham routine, there is no Hollywood. He "runs like fuck” and plays to his strengths.
That Lee Hoos has been involved in the process of appointing the new QPR manager should give us some hope that Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink will not go the way of the dozen others who’ve tried and failed since the money arrived at the club back in 2007.
Since the American CEO arrived at QPR in the summer he has engaged with the fan base like nobody at board level I can remember in my time supporting the club. He has assembled a consultation panel made up of fans from every stand, every season ticket bracket, the membership database, the hospitality suites, the supporters groups, the websites and the coach travellers. He has attended the regular meetings the media team hold with the websites and fanzines. He has wandered around at home games meeting supporters. He essentially held the fans forum, for 90 minutes, by himself and on several occasions, as time ticked on and heavy hints were dropped that it might be time to wrap up, insisted that he would stay as long as people had questions to ask. He never leaves a meeting if somebody still has a question to ask and he acts quickly on the points raised — not always the answer the supporter wants to hear, but an answer all the same and quickly. He has already changed the way tickets are distributed for the fans forum, so he’s not hearing from the "same old faces”.
What he asks of people, repeatedly on the few occasions I’ve been in the room with him so far, is what sort of club QPR would like to be. What he hears quite a lot, again based on the meetings I’ve been in with him, is that people don’t like QPR’s Bertie Big Potato routine and don’t think it’s working for them. They like the idea of QPR giving people a chance again, scouting for players, developing players, coaching players, bringing players up from the youth team, bringing in lower league players and improving them for sale at a profit, supplementing that with some quality and moving forward honestly, sustainably. He hears that as long as the team gives its best, tries to play in an attractive style, and tries to win the game — nobody really minds, within reason, if it comes up short and loses.
Les Ferdinand has been undermined as director of football in the eyes of some, judging by social media and message boards, because of the "failure” of "his mate” Chris Ramsey as head coach. But Ferdinand has QPR’s interests at heart and while he may lack experience, may have made mistakes, may turn out not to be up to the job, he wants QPR to be what a lot of us want QPR to be. He wants QPR to be everything it used to be when it was truly successful. He, and Hoos, look and feel like our best hope to me.
And lo, the first managerial appointment made by the pair of them together is not only a promising, young, up and coming manager who we’re giving a big chance to at this level for the first time. But also a big name, a strong personality, somebody with a very clear idea of where he wants to go and how he’s going to get there. Somebody who has very deliberately managed in Europe, and the lower leagues in England, to learn and make himself a better manager.
It could, potentially, go wrong again. In fact, it’s quite likely it will. QPR feels like a club that’s been on the slide for sometime, with a situation that will take a truly exceptional manager to come in and turn around. All the problems with infrastructure, absentee board members, naïve chairmen, training facilities, lack of youth programme that made it impossible for much more experienced managers than Hasselbaink to succeed here still exist now. Hasselbaink comes from a well-run club, with a new stadium, one of the best training grounds in the country, where expectations are low and were already being well exceded when he got there. He’s done a wonderful job at Burton, but the whole set up there assists a manager in every way possible. At QPR it does the opposite.
But even the very notion that we held an interview process is a step in the right direction, rather than appointing a new man based on his agent or the Twittersphere getting in Tony Fernandes’ ear.
What he needs to give him the best chance of succeeding — and whether you like him or not, want him here or not, rate him or not we surely as QPR fans all desperately want him to turn out to be the next Alex Ferguson and still be here after 20 unbelievably successful years — is obviously time and patience.
But what he needs much more than that is for the aims and goals to stay exactly where they are right now. Whatever ethos it is that Hoos and Ferdinand have settled on for QPR, and interviewed by, must be stuck to. Whatever targets he’s been set must not change. It should not matter if Charlie Austin signs a new four year contract or leaves in January; it should not matter if we pull five great signings out of the bag one transfer window, or lose our five best players; it must not matter whatever a board member decides would be helpful to put out on Twitter or Instagram... Whatever it is we’re saying we want to be by making this appointment, whatever our version of "compete and run like fuck” is, that has to be it now.
Take your hands off the goalposts and walk slowly away. Leave the bloody things exactly where they are now, let our new man get on with it, and pray.
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures — Action Images