Wolves midfielder Karl Henry is the latest new arrival at Loftus Road as Harry Redknapp continues to try and reshape his QPR team ahead of the new season.
Karl Henry, now 30 years of age, could have signed for QPR back in 2006. Then a Stoke City player, Henry had played well against Rangers in a match at Loftus Road which was one of two key performance indicators, along with the presence of a friendly agent, that QPR and their chairman of the time Gianni Paladini looked for in a potential signing.
Henry had come through the ranks at the Britannia Stadium, making his debut in 2001 and becoming a semi-regular during the 2001/02 promotion season in the Second Division. Although he made 28 appearances that campaign and 22 in the First Division the year after, he was loaned out to League Two side Cheltenham for the second half of 2003/04. He returned to Stoke for another 36 outings in 2004/05 but in 136 appearances for Stoke and nine for Cheltenham the midfielder had scored just twice and with his contract winding down it became clear his future lay elsewhere.
QPR made a move – or at least made it clear through the press that they’d like to do so – in 2005/06 but Henry elected to allow his deal to run dead and join his hometown club Wolves at the end of the campaign with compensation eventually set at £100,000.
Several unremarkable seasons followed. He made 38 appearances, mostly at right back, in 2006/07 but his season was ended early by a nasty spleen injury depriving him of a chance to play in the end of season play offs where Wolves lost to bitter rivals West Brom over two legs in the semi. There were 44 appearances and three goals from midfield the season after and he then captained the club to Championship promotion in 2008/09 – sealed with a 1-0 victory against the R’s at Molineux.
Henry missed just four matches in the Premier League in 2009/10 as Wolves stayed up by the skin of their teeth on the final day despite a home defeat by Blackburn. They weren’t so lucky in 2010/11 when a series of big money buys back fired and a run of one win (at QPR) from the last 25 games of the season cost manager Mick McCarthy his job and the club its Premier League status.
Things turned sour for Henry that season as well. New signing Roger Johnson was given the captaincy, depriving Henry of the armband, and his form dipped with the rest of the team. QPR’s Joey Barton and Fulham’s Danny Murphy both spoke out publicly about Wolves’ rough house tactics, and Henry came under particular scrutiny after a series of robust challenges against Barton in his Newcastle days, and an ugly clash with Bobby Zamora that left the striker nursing a broken leg. Henry was also sent off for a wild lunge on Wigan’s Jordi Gomez.
He didn’t find many friends back at home either, with sections of the Wolves support booing his touches and cheering when McCarthy eventually substituted him during a home match with Newcastle.
Henry remained in the Wolves team for the Championship season following relegation but it proved disastrous as the club plummeted straight through the second tier and into the third with consecutive relegations. New manager Kenny Jackett transfer listed Henry and four of his team mates almost as soon as he’d walked into the club this summer, just a year after Henry signed a new four year deal at Molineux.
Henry said: "I have not asked for any of this, it's not my decision and I would not have asked to go on the transfer list. It's a shame that it's come to this and I'm gutted, but I've been in football long enough to know that this is what happens. If other clubs come in for me, I will be sad to leave but, if not, I will be delighted to fight for my place here."
But after being completely ostracised from the first team picture in the Midlands and forced to train with the under 21 squad at Wolves, Henry has now decided to leave and join Queens Park Rangers on a two year deal. The fee is undisclosed, which is a real shame because therein lies the value of the deal. If QPR have picked Henry up for nothing then he might not be a bad purchase, but some outlets are reporting that the R’s have paid up to £1m for a limited player who Wolves are desperate to be rid of which would be a poor deal whichever way you look at it.
It’s ludicrous enough that, in an age where clubs are forced to disclose how much they have paid to agents involved in contract negotiations, they don’t have to actually admit how much of a transfer fee is to be paid for the player himself, but in this case it’s even more irritating as both clubs could benefit from admitting that no money was involved in the deal – Wolves are shifting an underperforming high earner, QPR are taking on a midfielder with Premier League experience on a free. Of course if Rangers are laying out some money on this transfer then it’s understandable that they would wish to keep that private because anything more than a monkey for Henry, given his form and situation, will attract justified criticism.
“He’s a good character and a winner, the type of lad I like. I think he will come in and do a great job for us. We’re trying to change the club around a bit and Karl’s another piece of the jigsaw that can hopefully help us build a team that can challenge for promotion. He’s a combative midfielder and you know what you’re going to get from him week in, week out. He’ll be ready for the Saturday, Tuesday slogs and you know you can rely on him. Like Danny Simpson and Richard Dunne, he’s been promoted to the Premier League before so he knows what’s needed.” - Harry Redknapp
“Harry Redknapp being manager was a massive pull and a big attraction. I spoke to him and hearing where he wants to be I jumped at the chance of joining the club. I have been promoted to the Premier League before and played for a few years in the top-flight, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The Championship is a tough league and it sounds like Harry wants to bring in the kind of players that will get this club out of the division which is fantastic. I always want to win, whether it’s a game of football or a game of monopoly. Hopefully that mentality can help the team.” - Karl Henry
Wolves regular Tom Johnston, who helped write the LFW match previews for our recent meetings with them, kindly contributed the following…
“I think the general consensus is that Wolves fans are pleased to see him go and are a little bit surprised that QPR want to sign him. He was one of the four transfer listed players that Wolves publicly announced and Kenny Jackett explicitly said that they were not in his plans for the season - they were not given squad numbers and were made to train with the under 21s.
“He has been a very committed player for Wolves - which you would expect being a Wolves fan who was born and brought up in the area - so a lot of fans felt strongly for him throughout his time at the club. However, in the last two years, he has been seen as a big part in our demise. He has lost his form and been dropped the odd time. Fans are mostly critical of his (limited) style of play: slow, sideways passes, no creativity and no possibility of goals.
“While that’s a pretty glum assessment, in a new club he might get his form back - he was good when we got promoted. His defensive midfield job is under-rated and we missed his leadership and stability when he was out of the team. Personally, I think it would have been good to keep him for League One because I think he would have done well but Jackett obviously sees him as past his best and a cause of friction amongst the squad.”
Two years ago Karl Henry was the villain of the piece at QPR. Comprehensively outplayed by Ale Faurlin and Joey Barton in a 3-0 win for Rangers at Molineux, the Wolves midfielder deliberately hacked through the back of Barton with two feet as the Rangers player shepherded a ball out for a goal kick in the dying embers of the game. Barton’s behaviour pretty much since that moment means most in W12 will now count that whole incident in Henry’s favour and buy him a drink given the chance.
But that moment rather summed Henry up as a Premier League player. Mick McCarthy had spent big money on the likes of Jamie O’Hara to provide the creative side of the game but with the attack misfiring ahead of the midfield, and big money buy Roger Johnson a walking disaster zone in defence, it all left Henry rather exposed as the limited player he always had been. Wolves fans started to question exactly what he did, and levelled accusations of favouritism at player and manager. To the untrained eye Henry didn’t pass the ball particularly well, score many goals, dominate the midfield or influence games – he just sort of ran about kicking people and getting booked a lot (seven yellows and a red in 2011/12, eight and a red the previous season).
McCarthy fell on his sword after a 5-1 home defeat against bitter rivals West Brom. The media, with hindsight, liked to paint Wolves as a foolish club for dispensing with the experienced manager who’d got them to the Premier League in the first place and replacing him, eventually, with his assistant Terry Connor who presided over a run of nine defeats and four draws from his 13 matches in charge. But in reality Wolves would have been relegated regardless of whether McCarthy stayed or not. The only game they won at all in their last 25 fixtures that season was 2-1 at QPR - we’re good like that – and Connor was only responsible for the last dozen matches in that run.
Wolves spoke with Steve Bruce and Alan Curbishley and took a pragmatic view that it would be throwing good money after bad to cave in to either of their demands and try to spend their way out of a situation that was only ever going to end one way. The key was to make the right appointment at the end of the season to enable them to bounce back. They went for Ståle Solbakken, a former Norwegian international largely unknown in this country who’d won the Danish league five times with Copenhagen but failed in Germany with Köln where disastrous form in the second half of the 2011/12 campaign was coupled with poor player behaviour off the field and eventually saw him fired. Wolves are a notoriously difficult club to manage, but Solbakken once again adopted his favoured softly, softly approach, attempting to empower the players – a method that quickly lost him control of a dressing room full of mediocre, egotistical, big gobs earning massive money while turning in poor performances and blaming everybody else but themselves. Henry, admittedly a born and bred Wolves fan, must be counted in that group.
And here’s where the debate about Karl Henry seems to centre.
QPR have made a very big PR push this summer around the idea of getting “the right sort” of player to the club after their own trauma with a runaway dressing room last season. Henry, on the one hand, could be seen as exactly that: an experienced, honest, professional player who has led Wolves as captain and knows what it takes to win promotion from this league. At Molineux he has played in front of one of this country’s most notoriously fickle and vocal home supports - rarely do you find a group of supporters as willing to leap on their own players so quickly and for so little as the Wolves faithful and it takes strong characters to succeed there. A no nonsense sort of a player who doesn’t suffer fools and doesn’t labour under any misapprehension or delusion of grandeur around his own ability – comes to work, works hard, sticks to what he’s good at, goes home.
But on the other, it could easily be argued that while trying to shift out their own problem children this summer Rangers have accidentally picked up another that Wolves were equally keen to shed. Former R’s coach Kenny Jackett is the new man in the hot seat at Molineux and he has wasted no time in moving Henry, O’Hara, Johnson and Stephen Ward off to the Under 21 squad away from the first team. All four were left at home while the senior players endured pre-season training in Scotland last week and while their respective wage packets certainly have something to do with that Jackett did take Kevin Doyle and Bakary Sako – both on tidy sums themselves and widely tipped to be leaving the club this summer – on the trip regardless.
All this is because Wolves contrived to crash straight through the Championship last season and suffer a second successive relegation. Henry, despite being at what would be considered his natural level, played poorly again. Reams and reams of comments from Wolves fans followed the local Express and Star interview with Jackett where he made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that Henry and the other three players would not be involved in the Wolves first team again. While there was some support for the player, it’s clear there is more to this than simply his wage. Talk of a disruptive influence, undermining managers and mouthing off to the local papers abounds. Few tears are being shed at his departure.
And whether he is or isn’t “the right sort”, from a footballing point of view do QPR need another central midfielder who isn’t going to score any goals or set any chances up? Harry Redknapp’s squad is already chock full of those. Since joining from Stoke in 2006 Henry has amassed 272 appearances for Wolves and just seven goals from midfield – that’s an average of one goal per ice age.
If he is coming in here as a younger Shaun Derry, to steadily take the veteran defensive midfielder’s place as his career winds down, then it could be a shrewd move – doing the dirty work and creating space for Ale Faurlin to pull the strings as Derry did so successfully when Rangers won this league at a canter three seasons ago. Potentially he’s an experienced player, talented in his role, who has been poorly treated at his previous club and will therefore come to QPR with a point to prove. That ‘point to prove’ aspect was sadly lacking from almost all of the signings Rangers made during their time in the Premier League.
But there is, as yet, no indication that Redknapp is even considering Ale Faurlin as a regular this season having loaned him out to Palermo for the second half of the last campaign and Karl Henry in the middle of a midfield four in either a 4-4-2 or a 4-4-1-1 – which Redknapp seems to be leaning towards so far this summer – paired with one of Ji-Sung Park, Stephane Mbia, Jermaine Jenas, Esteban Granero or Shaun Derry is going to be creative desert. Rangers have struggled to create chances without Adel Taarabt in the side for some time and given that the Moroccan’s time is now almost certainly up at Loftus Road the fact that the first team has managed two goals in open play in ten matches (including friendlies against Exeter, Peterborough, Besiktas and Udinese) since Loic Remy scored against Wigan in April is fairly frightening, and not about to be improved greatly by Henry’s arrival.
To finish on a positive – wrung from a very dry cloth - I’ve stopped myself a couple of times from referring to Henry as the “anti-footballer” and the last time I used that term in a new signing article it was when Derry arrived in the first place and he turned out to be one of the best value signings QPR have made in recent times.
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Pictures – Action Images