QPR’s recent trip to Manchester City was preceded by an afternoon of transfer window fun and light ales – which turned out to be a fairly dreadful idea.
My hatred of the transfer window was born long before the bloody thing even existed.
Back in the early 1990s, when I had hair and dreams, a key part of the morning routine would be wheeling round to Dillons Newsagent in Hampton to pick up any of the morning papers with QPR stories in for my dad to read when he got to work. I'd have a leaf through them myself in the front seat of his car on the way to school.
QPR were good back then, the top club in London in the early days of the exciting new Premier League and the supposedly bigger clubs, who didn't have teams as good or managers as talented as Gerry Francis, didn't like this very much. As a result those newspapers were often full of talk of QPR's better players heading off to pastures new. Rarely a week went by without David Bardsley, Les Ferdinand, Trevor Sinclair, Andy Impey, Andy Sinton and others being linked with a move elsewhere. Tottenham and Arsenal were the favourite destinations according to The Sun and other rags and while, sure enough, those players did all eventually leave none of them went directly from Loftus Road to White Hart Lane or Highbury.
As a naïve junior school pupil I found this hard to comprehend. Why would it be in the newspaper if it wasn't true? And so began a more cynical outlook on life perpetuated by my father's explanation that if George Graham wanted to sign David Bardsley but didn't want to pay £4m for him, he'd tell The Sun about it, they'd publish a story, and if David Bardsley wanted to go to Arsenal he'd become unsettled and his price would drop. Similarly, agents seeking improved contracts for their client may put it about that Tottenham were interested and try and force QPR's hand.
Fast forward to the latest deadline day, at about five to two, and Sky Sports News reporter Gary Cotterill is standing outside the Tottenham Hotspur training ground. Behind him we see a flash car containing Jermaine Jenas leaving after a day's training. "We understand," Gary told millions of viewers," that Jermaine Jenas is now on his way to sign for Sunderland ." And off sped Jenas into the distance, a gathering of jobless chavs in Spurs replica tops waving him goodbye as he went.
So far, so believable; Jenas isn't in the Tottenham team because he's not very good, but some perceived achievements in his career past apparently make him attractive to the likes of Aston Villa and Sunderland.
Anyway, Sky went for a break, came back and read out the headlines, then at ten past two – no more than 15 minutes after our last visit to Gary at Tottenham – we were back at the Spurs Lodge for another update. "The Jermaine Jenas to Sunderland deal has collapsed," Gary informed us.
Collapsed?
As they might say in Aaron Sorkin's sap infested Newsroom: let's piece together what we know. Gary Cotterill would apparently have us believe that Jermaine Jenas travelled to Spurs Lodge as normal on Friday morning and trained while people who were actually leaving – Rafael Van Der Vaart for example – jumped straight back in their cars and rushed off to sign deals elsewhere. A move to Sunderland – at the other end of the country– apparently materialised at about half one and Jenas left to complete that deal – medical and all – in Sunderland just before two in the afternoon. And Gary then invites you to believe that the whole thing was called off 15 minutes later.
Sorry Gary , I'm not buying. Or, for that matter, punting on the associated Sky Bet “where will Jermaine Jenas go?” betting market.
Why exactly is this ok? Because it's football? Because it's just a sport, just a game? That didn't work for my ex-girlfriend and it's not working here. Why, because we're talking about a sport, is it ok to air stories that so rarely come true? Is it acceptable for the company pedalling these stories to also run associated betting markets alongside them that they can directly influence with their output on screen?
I merely leave these questions out there for consideration.
So yes, I hate the fucking transfer window, and deadline day, and all the rest of it and I very much look forward to the day that the European Union realises that it's a restriction of employment and trade and has the whole bloody thing abolished.
***
However…. Sky's king of hyperbole and bullshit Jim White – who has somehow made this wretched day his own through being more ludicrous than all his colleagues – introduced his "presentation" of last January's deadline day by saying: "Some people don't like transfer deadline day, but then some people just don't like excitement in their lives." And that got the LFW Brains Trust thinking.
What if everybody else is right and we're wrong? What if transfer deadline day is actually a spectacle of magnificence? What if we just allow ourselves, for an afternoon, to suspend the cynicism and knowledge that this is essentially a journalist standing in the middle of a field near Stoke making things up and affecting associated betting markets as he goes and embrace it? What if we took the day off, piled round to LFW betting columnist (unsalaried) Andy Hillman's gaff in Earlsfield, barbecued an obscene amount of meat, invented some sort of drinking game to liven up the proceedings and covered it live for LoftforWords? What if we joined the happy, optimistic people for a day? What if we produced the sort of transfer deadline day blog that we would want to read?
Well, I had Andy at "drinking game" and so at 12.30 on transfer deadline day he returned to his well appointed two bedroom property in leafy south London to find me asleep/resting my eyes in his front garden already nursing the first beer of the day. Things didn't improve greatly from that point onwards.
Now I've done these blogs where you sit in front of the television all day trying to remain coherent while slowly getting wasted before – there was a memorable 17-hour live football marathon I covered for Goalfood in just such a way. But those were in my younger days, and ten hours in front of Sky Sports News turned out to be a big ask, even though Andy prepared the mother of all barbecues to break the afternoon up. The full results can be read here but I can tell you that things went downhill rapidly after 8pm, and Andy's long suffering better half Jas returned home from work to find the atmosphere thick with alcohol fumes and my brother lounged across her sofa making obscene comments about Laura Robson. Unsurprisingly we were kicked out at one minute past 11, left to stumble our way back to Barnet unsupervised. ***
And then it was Saturday. Cruel, noisy, well lit Saturday.
I woke with a start at about twenty to eight. Both the alarm on my phone and radio were blaring loudly, the bedside lamp and the main bedroom light were on, the curtains were drawn and both bedroom windows were wide open. A summer breeze/gale was whipping in off the Barnet greenway blowing pages of Man City scouting reports around the room. All signs suggested that the room had been like this all night.
I was dressed in the jumper and t-shirt I’d had on the day before, and the shoes and socks too, but bizarrely no trousers or pants which meant at some point the previous evening I’d started to get undressed, then put my shoes and socks back on, and then got into bed. I say “got into”; I was actually laid on top of the covers, with my head resting on the rail at the foot of the bed and my feet up on the pillows. Andy’s trademark salted pork chops had spent the evening absorbing every drop of moisture from my digestive system and my mouth now felt like a bucket of sand. When I moved for the first time my back, shoulder, neck, hip and right knee made simultaneous cracking noises so loud that my brother shouted through from the next room to ask what I’d broken. And broken was definitely the word, I was in pieces.
I did that strange walk to the bathroom you only do when you’re very drunk or very hungover: shuffling, head bowed, muttering swear words while breathing out heavily. I’ll spare you the details of what happened next but my ear holes were the only orifice not expelling content at maximum capacity for the next ten minutes or so.
The 09.00 to Manchester was a quiet affair. The excellent Blue Parrot breakfast didn’t help as it should have done, the pints of diet coke in the Lass O’Gowrie didn’t help, and a series of encounters with people who want to talk a lot and meet your “please leave me alone to die quietly” requests with “ohhhhhhhh come on, you’re young, you can take it,” followed by more talking. Even Neil wasn’t entirely with it – just after 1pm he panicked when he couldn’t remember what the early evening kick off was before being reminded that it was the game we’d travelled to Manchester to watch.
The blog clocked up 120,000 page impressions in ten hours. Less encouraging was the sentiment from half a dozen people along the lines of “already looking forward to the next one in January”. Let me be really, really clear: we’re never doing anything like that again.
***
The game itself was a predictable affair that pretty much followed the path of our previous visit to Eastlands – without the dramatic consequences or Martin Tyler screaming.
QPR were not overly negative with their team selection and picked two strikers from the start, but they struggled to get out of their own half in the first period and were fortunate to only be a goal down at the break. There was more optimism in the second half when the R's started to service Esteban Granero properly and were rewarded with more considered possession of the ball. Bobby Zamora's equaliser was by no means against the run of play. Conceding immediately after it was outrageously stupid but Ryan Nelsen had two decent late chances to force a draw before Carlos Tevez put the game beyond doubt in injury time.
There were two key bones of contention afterwards: one on the field and one off it. The first was whether Rangers had been positive enough in their approach to the game. I believe they did what they could against a far superior team, and were unfortunate not to take a draw from the game. It transpired through the match report comments that others saw the first half in particular as a meek surrender from a team that accepted defeat before it even took to the field. Amazing how two people can watch one match and see such different things.
For me the counter argument merely highlights once again the stupidly high expectations being placed on a QPR team that while impressive on paper is still getting to know each other and even when it does won't even be close to being as good as Manchester City. Rangers do have the ability about them this season to take the game to lesser teams on the road though, and a run of 14 away games without victory is unacceptable and cannot continue.
The second was in the away end, where the QPR following was pretty miniscule and exactly the sort of size some Rangers fans have mocked Fulham for in recent years. Here there were extenuating circumstances, but the excuses about kick off times and TV coverage are exactly the things people have mocked the Cottagers for.
Despite the swathes of empty seats in the upper tier our group sat apart – Neil, Colin et al in their designated seats at the front, Jas and me in the middle somewhere, and Andy babysitting Paul at the back after he'd topped up his Deadline Day excesses with a rush of vodka, lime and lemonade monstrosities in the Lass for reasons best known to himself. Later he invited random people from the train back to LFW Towers for pizza and then, when they refused, announced to the carriage that he'd just have to go home alone and "masturbate furiously" instead.
Let me be clear, I'm not praising or criticising fans who turned up or didn't, I'm saying that perhaps those who indulge in the Fulham bashing should lay off a bit. Pride before a fall and all that? I mean shouldn’t football fans – casual attenders, die hards or armchair fans – have some solidarity with each other? Why do Fulham only take a handful of fans to games in the north west ? Well because they've been in the league for ten years and seen all the grounds, they rarely win, the tickets cost £45 and the train up to twice as much. Where's the selling point there? People cannot afford football.
Why did QPR only take a few hundred to Manchester ? Well it was a game they were almost certain to lose and it was on the TV at 5.30pm which meant not only could you watch it from home but if you did go there was only one train back which Virgin – who want you to sign a petition asking for them to keep the franchise despite their policy of jacking up Saturday night ticket prices when they know there's a Manchester match on – charged the thick end of £70 to get on.
The father and son model that got me into the game and I know countless others besides is being completely undermined by this sort of thing. For a father to do what mine used to do and take his lad up to Manchester City on the train to watch QPR would have cost the best part of £150 before he'd even set off in train and match tickets alone for a game that could be watched on the TV anyway.
I've written more (yes, I know) about this for the next issue of A Kick Up The R's but what football is doing is taking away its hardcore safety net that will always be there should times ever get hard again. At the moment the everyday football fan is very much third in line behind people who watch matches on television, and people who pay passing attention to them from the hospitality lounge while ordering a second salmon starter. The common or garden fans are just a nice bonus on top – it's why people who ask how QPR can afford all these players with an 18,000 capacity ground miss the point slightly. QPR brought in £43m in television money alone last season, and the new deal in place next year will double that. So if ESPN want to show Man City v QPR on a Saturday night they will do and tough shit to anybody who wants to actually go to the match.
Rather than mocking Fulham for their piffly away support we should be empathising - we haven't even sold out our home match with Chelsea this weekend yet.
On the pitch >>> QPR performance 6/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10 >>> Match 5/10
Off the pitch >>> QPR support 4/10 >>> Home support 7/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 6/10 >>>> Stadium 8/10 >>>> Police and stewards 8/10
In the pub >>> Pubs 8/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 8/10 >>>> Cost 7/10
On the train >>> Journey 6/10 >>> Cost 4/10
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Pictures – Neil Dejyothin, Action Images