The second part of LFW’s annual Hindsight Guide to the Galaxy focuses on the various waifs and strays that have made up QPR’s back four during 2012/13. Friends and family of Anton Ferdinand and Jose Bosingwa look away now.
Traore, like so many QPR players this season, frustrates because we’ve seen better from him. Watching him show the ball to his man, push it past him, skin him on the outside and then wrap his left foot around it an inch from the byline to produce a world class cross for Heidar Helguson to emphatically thump home with his head at Stoke last season was a real highlight of QPR’s stay in the Premier League. To show it was no fluke, he repeated the feat with Jamie Mackie the beneficiary at Manchester City on the final day.
There’s real potential for Traore to be a useful, speedy, overlapping full back. This season, admittedly playing in a lousy team, we’ve seen little of anything positive from him. Defensively he takes risks and shortcuts – big risks usually, for little gain even if they do come off. In defensive situations he’s often dumb and lazy. And he’s terribly, terribly fragile. Every game now, much as we used to do with Fitz Hall, the regulars at the front of F Block sit and wait for the hand in the air, the limp and if it’s really sore the early departure to be replaced by a hurried substitute. The cynical amongst us have started running sweepstakes. I think of Traore when I see the YouTube video of the tiny line of ducklings being blown off their feet by a gust of wind. He’s like a papier-mâché hat in a hurricane or a valuable porcelain doll in the midst of a child’s birthday party. It’s like he’s made of tissue paper.
If he is to be any use to QPR – and the potential is certainly there for him to be a potent weapon in the Championship – then manning up slightly would be job one. Every twinge, every niggle, every slight amount of discomfort doth not necessarily a four week absence make – particularly in the hurly burly of a 48 game season that lies in store for Rangers in 2013/14.
Stats:
25 starts and three sub appearances, W3, D10, L15
Out of Ten – 6,6,5,6,7,5,5,2,7,7,5,5,7,5,3,6,3,8,6,3,6,6,4,6,6,5,6 = 5.41
Interactive Match Ratings – 5.84
0 goals, 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – 0
Cards – Three yellows (foul, foul, foul)
Another fairly mystifying case. Bernard Manning's "nig nog" jokes are forward thinking by the standards of Russian football and by choosing to move there when there was plenty of interest elsewhere Chris Samba showed that money is his prime motivation. Now, of course, you can trot out the hackneyed comparisons between earning a living as a footballer and earning a living any other way and ask who wouldn't move from their current job to Russia if they were offered £100,000 a week to do so, even if it did mean being racially abused and having bits of fruit lobbed at you? You could also point out that, after his abject display in a 3-2 defeat at Fulham, Samba received racist abuse from the UK's own unique brand of lobotomised knuckle draggers through the ever-detestable medium of Twitter so let's not get too high on our horse about Russian attitudes here and start smashing windows in our glass house. However, essentially, choosing to move to Anzhi Makhachkala at the time in his career he did, and for the money he did, marked Samba out as exactly the kind of mercenary QPR had lumbered themselves with too often already. So why, when it was obvious that this policy had beset the squad with problems, did Rangers go and sign him anyway in January and break the bank to do so?
Well, Ryan Nelsen was about to leave and the need for a centre back was critical even before the New Zealand international had made that decision and in theory you could find few better players than Samba for that position. His aerial prowess is well known but in his Blackburn days he'd been quick across the ground as well which allowed QPR to defend higher up the field than was safe when Nelsen and Hill were being partnered together in the centre of the backline. I thought Samba was exactly what we needed and started well – excellent in a home draw with Norwich and an away win at Southampton. In that key game at Aston Villa, in which so many Rangers players (Cesar, Bosingwa, Hill, Remy) seem to have had seminal moments he was really unfortunate not to open the scoring with a header and was playing like a man possessed to begin with.
But his form tailed off in that match, and in general, and by the end of the season he was absent from the team altogether. Harry Redknapp told the media the player was injured, Samba told visitors to the training ground he was fit but not being selected. Possibly to save face all parties started talking about the 'lack of a pre-season" because the Russian league runs through the summer but Samba had been playing European football for Anzhi during the winter and didn't look unfit to me when he first turned out for the R's.
At £12m and who knows what in weekly wage it seems odd that Tony Fernandes believes he will stay and have a team built around him in the Championship – and if that is to be the case then it's even stranger that he wasn't picked for the remaining matches. Potentially a monster at Championship level if Fernandes is happy to bankroll it and he's happy to stay and put a shift in – and even if he’s not he’s likely to have put a few potential buyers off with his form towards the end of the season. A really peculiar situation all round really.
Stats:
Ten starts, no sub appearances, W2 D2 L6
Out of Ten – 7,3,5,7,7,7,2,6,5,4 = 5.30
Interactive Match Rating – 5.45
0 goals, 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – One (Norwich H)
Cards – Two yellows (foul, foul)
If the name John Sitton sounds familiar then chances are you’ve seen some or all of the infamous Orient: Club for a Fiver documentary that aired during the 1990s charting Leyton Orient’s near brush with extinction. Sitton was the long-serving player turned manager who became the unwitting star of the show as his mind slowly unravelled under the increasing pressure of successive defeats. Ultimately, he’s best known for a scene when he puts one player on a fortnight’s notice during a half time team talk and offers two others a “right sort out” outside for which they can bring help and “their dinner” because “when I’ve finished with you, you’re going to fucking need it.”
Sitton has spoken more recently about how the documentary ruined his football career, and how he believed it robbed the game of what he had to offer as a coach. A similar story was told by Steve Bleasdale, who was heading for the play offs as caretaker manager of Peterborough in 2006 before the Sky cameras moved in for a reality series that pitched Big Ron Atkinson as some kind of all-knowing football fixer. When Peterborough subsequently went to the dogs the programme made Bleasdale out as the culprit and he’s struggled for work ever since, but QPR fans watching who saw Atkinson try to overrule one of the manager’s signings because he thought Rangers’ resident paper bag chaser in chief Stefan Moore would be a better option would have seen straight through that. There’s a moral of the story about selling out to television in all of this.
Sitton uses Anton Ferdinand as an example of a player he could coach to be better given the opportunity. Ferdinand, he says, “wouldn’t sense danger if you let a flame under his foot” in his current form. Prior to QPR signing him from Sunderland at the start of the 2011/12 season you’d have been hard pushed to find a regular at Loftus Road who disagreed with that. The epitome of a player getting further than his ability should ever allow simply because of his surname and pedigree, the fact that Sunderland paid £8m for Ferdinand only serves to further highlight how laughable it is that Roy Keane now earns his living telling other managers what they should be doing.
Ferdinand started life at QPR reasonably well. In fact, a poll on this website’s message board after a 3-2 away win at Stoke had lifted the R’s to eighth in the Premier League marked him down as an early contender for Player of the Year. Things rather tailed off for him after that, but he was forgiven by many with the working theory being that he’d been affected by the John Terry scandal he’d unwittingly become engulfed in. The truth is, Ferdinand had merely regressed back to the accident-prone form he’d displayed throughout his career after an early spike in form caused by new surroundings and an appreciative fan base who remembered his cousin. Truth is, if his surname was Smith he’d struggle to get in the Barnet team.
In 2012/13 he plumbed new depths. He started as first choice alongside Clint Hill, and was in fact rushed back from an injury so he could start an away match at West Brom where he subsequently turned in a display of park standard in a 3-2 defeat. In his defence his confidence will have been rocked by an alleged pre-season exchange with Mark Hughes where Ferdinand inquired about the captaincy only to be told he would be replaced if they could get Michael Dawson in. Still, during the first half of the season only Liverpool’s Luis Suarez posed as much threat to QPR in their own penalty box as Anton Ferdinand. The word liability just doesn’t cover it.
Harry Redknapp had little time for him, recalling him briefly as a full back for an away defeat at Newcastle when his sole contribution was a booking for kicking the ball away after miscontrolling it out for a throw in with the score at 0-0 – concerned that the hosts may not allow him the three minutes it would take him to drag his now substantial frame back into position before they chucked the ball back into play. For fans who relatively recently watched David Bardsley and Clive Wilson as their full backs, travelling 300 miles to see Anton Ferdinand selected there was tough to take. A subsequent performance in a 4-2 home defeat by MK Dons in the FA Cup was akin to that of a man who’d won his place in the team that day in a raffle.
And so God bless Turkey – a country roughly the same size as Ferdinand’s arse – which has now overtaken Greece and is fast catching up with Russia as the premier dumping ground for the overpaid dregs of the English league. Ferdinand, to be fair to him, said he wanted to stay and help QPR fight relegation but in truth he did more for the cause by leaving than he ever could in W12. Rangers may find use for him in the Championship, a league closer to his true level but not quite there yet, and they may have to because unless Bursaspor can be tricked into committing to a longer deal then he falls into a swollen category of current QPR squad members who are earning far more than any realistic potential new home would ever be willing to commit to and are therefore unsellable without Rangers agreeing to subsidise the move.
Stats:
13 starts, three sub appearances, W3 D4 L9,
Out of Ten – 3,5,5,5,8,3,-,4,6,2,4,-,4,5,6,2 = 4.43
Interactive Match Ratings – 4.30
0 goals, 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – 0
Cards – Two yellows (kicking ball away, foul)
Clint Hill was named the official club Player of the Year for the second season running, and once you’d discounted the already-departed Ryan Nelsen from the running it was hard to see how you could give it to anybody else. Hill said he was embarrassed to receive it, partly because it had obviously turned into a quest to find the squad member who was less of a prick than all the others rather than who had played the best, but mainly because Hill hadn’t played that well across the course of the season. He was essentially given the award for displaying attributes you should expect of any paid employee whether they have footballing ability or not – pride in his work, passion for the company, honesty and commitment.
He started slowly, unable to reach the level of performance he’d managed at the end of 2011/12 when he thoroughly deserved to pick up the award, and was pulled apart by Norwich City’s hulking forward Grant Holt on the second weekend to follow up a 5-0 opening day reverse to Swansea. To be fair Holt has troubled Hill and QPR for years and he improved thereafter but was still prone to humbling experiences at the hands of Premier League forwards. You could forgive him his New Year annihilation by Luis Suarez as the Uruguayan has made fools of more illustrious names than Clint Hill, but a wild performance when a win was there for the taking in a key game at Aston Villa was a real shame. He got caught chasing the ball rather than the man for one goal at Villa Park but to be fair to Hill after a season surrounded by the likes of Stephane Mbia, Jose Bosingwa, Armand Traore and others you could perhaps understand his desire to try and do everything by himself.
In the main he was strong in the air, as consistently decent as anybody else in the squad and performed admirably given the circumstances. Let’s not forget that this is a player who has spent almost his entire career scraping around lower divisions with Palace, Stoke, Oldham and Tranmere who was signed three years ago on a free transfer as a one-season option for the Championship. Even after he’d played so wonderfully in the promotion season, on an ankle that’s more like a cement mixer than a joint in the body, he was then loaned out to Nottingham Forest – his work seen as done. To still be playing, at the heart of the defence as captain, in a Premier League team as bad as QPR to such a high personal standard three years later is remarkable and would be worthy of praise even if his performances weren’t as good as they are.
There has been some concern expressed recently on our message board that Hill’s constant public lambasting of the dressing room cliques he doesn’t belong to may have exacerbated the situation at Rangers this season. Only people in and around that dressing room on a day to day basis will know if Hill, Derry, Mackie et al have helped to split the camp further with their comments and attitude to the over-paid, underworked newcomers who have earned far more to relegate QPR than the existing players did to promote it. Hill, as captain, perhaps could have held his tongue and worked harder to bring the group together – so his critics say. Frankly I’ve appreciated his honesty, his commitment and his passion for the club and think we need more like him.
Potentially another year left in him yet, although another 34 starts may be asking a lot.
Stats:
34 starts, 0 sub appearances, W5, D11, L17
Out of Ten: 3,4,7,7,4,3,7,7,7,6,7,6,6,3,8,6,7,7,7,8,6,3,6,7,7,5,2,6,5,3,6,6,6,6= 5.70
Interactive Match Ratings - 6.03
0 goals, 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – 0
Cards – Eight yellows (foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, repetitive fouling)
Onuoha seemed, on the face of it, to be exactly the sort of player QPR should be trying to sign when he arrived at the club from Manchester City 18 months ago. Young but with a decent number of top flight games already under his belt, intelligent and with an exemplary attitude to his work, well-schooled by a quality academy and with plenty to prove after being frozen out at Manchester City. It can’t have been easy for him to leave Manchester while his mother was seriously ill, and sadly she subsequently passed away after he’d completed the move, so that should be taken into account. And he never seemed comfortable at right back – although he had previously played there, and to a decent standard, for Sunderland so let’s not try and pretend Rangers stuck a pair of gloves on him and asked him to keep goal. In the opening day massacre against Swansea he had a hand in one goal simply by passing the ball straight to the visitors from the right back slot deep inside his own half. He could scarcely believe he’d done it himself.
But during a turgid end to the season, with Rangers long since relegated, he made one of the centre back positions his own and played well with little support from those in front of him. With long time suitor David Moyes leaving Everton this summer Rangers may just be able to hang onto him and he’s one of the few I would like to see back next season. As a regularly selected centre half, he should be a real asset in the second tier.
Stats:
17 starts, nine sub appearances, W3 D10 L13
Out of Ten – 3,6,6,6,7,5,4,6,6,-,7,6,7,6,7,8,6,8,3,5,6,6,7,6,6,7 = 6.00
Interactive Match Ratings – 5.92
0 goals, 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – 2 (Reading A, Liverpool H)
0 cards
Ryan Nelsen was the least heralded of last summer's signings, and easily the most successful, which gives further indication of how skewed the policy Mark Hughes and the club had in place. It also shows just how wrong those of us who were so optimistic about this season were – crowing about the arrivals of Granero, Cesar and Park while questioning whether a 35-year-old centre back with no knees left to speak of would really be much use to us. Hughes deserves credit for recognising the value of Nelsen to Rangers and signing him for the second time in his career, but it's worth remembering that he started the season behind Anton Ferdinand in the pecking order and only came into the team regularly when things had started to go spectacularly wrong.
Nelsen won the hearts of the QPR fans with dogged, committed and consistent display while the team melted around him. In the 3-1 defeat against Southampton at Loftus Road that finally cost Hughes his job he kept the score down, and the crowd sang "he plays on his own" and at that point he certainly did. He was a leader, and still a fine centre back, and had he been brought in just to add that extra bit of nous to the defence along with three or four of the best the Championship had to offer and possibly another Hughes target Michael Dawson as well then who knows what the 2011/12 QPR side could have grown into?
He had his limitations, almost all due to his advancing years and decaying joints. He was prone to dropping incredibly deep, fearing of being burned by pace, and he cost the R's the only goal of the game at Newcastle by playing Shola Ameobi onside. But he won the R's far more points than he lost and was a tower of strength in most games – even winning Man of the Match that day at St James’ Park.
He left in January having been offered a managerial position in the MLS at Toronto and the QPR players gave him a guard of honour as he left the field for the final time having played tremendously in a 0-0 draw against title chasing Man City. His departure split opinion among the support base – some happy to wave him on his way and thank him for his efforts while recognising it was an opportunity he couldn't afford to turn down, others disappointed that he was abandoning the team midway through a campaign. Nelsen himself said "if QPR are relying on me to save them then they are in trouble" but then we knew that already.
Personally I thought he was fantastic for QPR, certainly my Player of the Year, but allowing him to leave was absolutely the right thing to do. Loyalty in football is a strange thing. Had Nelsen fulfilled the role he'd originally been brought in to do – a substitute, cover centre back – then the news that he was off to Canada in January would barely have registered. Had he played and played poorly then there would have been a fair few "good riddance" and "get his wages off the books" type posts on the various QPR message boards. But because he'd ended up playing every week, and playing well, suddenly people want to talk about loyalty and his obligations to QPR. Not holding him to the remaining six months of his deal in a doomed season and forcing him to reject a good opportunity to further his career in the long term is one of the few classy things QPR have done of late. A real shame the Toronto job doesn't seem to be working out well for him.
Stats:
23 starts, one sub appearance, W3 D10 L11
Out of Ten – 6,7,8,7,5,5,6,6,8,8,6,8,7,7,7,7,7,7,5,7,6,7,7,8 = 6.75
Interactive Match Ratings – 7.28
One goal (Wigan A), 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – 4 (Newcastle A, Southampton H, Reading H, Chelsea H)
Cards – 0
Oh my days.
Jose Bosingwa has come to symbolise, and will forever be remembered as, everything that was wrong with QPR in 2012/13. A player signed from a bigger club where he'd won a clutch of medals in Europe's biggest competitions, placed on a weekly wage that totally eclipsed that being paid to most of his team mates or anything that QPR could reasonably afford, who found the task of scrapping for every last ball and spare point to stay in the league somewhat different to winning every game every week while surrounded by world class talent.
But that can be said of half a dozen first team players at Rangers at the moment, and yet it's only really Bosingwa who has copped serious and sustained abuse from the QPR fans. So why is that? Well first and foremost he's not actually that good: even when he had the likes of John Terry, Ricardho Carvalho, Gary Cahill and David Luiz playing to his left he was regularly caught out defensively. At Loftus Road last season he was made to look foolish by Shaun Wright-Phillips and subsequently sent off for fouling him which should have told us all we need to know. Shaun Wright-Phillips regularly manages to tackle himself by tripping over the football so actually marking the hapless winger should not be as difficult as Bosingwa made it look.
Secondly, he goes about his work in a lethargic manner. Some players are like that – Dimitar Berbatov is so laid back he's almost horizontal – but it marks you out as an early target for supporters when things aren't going well. Even when they're playing badly the likes of Shaun Derry and Jamie Mackie have months of good will in hand with the supporters for their attitude and work rate whereas Bosingwa's style means he's behind on aggregate before things have even started to go wrong and the second they do he's likely to be the scapegoat whether it's his fault or not.
So that's not a great combination to begin with: high salary, defensive frailties that were exposed even when playing for a team that won the European Cup and a lethargic style. Throw in the fact that he's coming in from Rangers' bitter rivals Chelsea and the potential for disaster was always there. Mark Hughes' "meticulous preparation" had failed him once again.
At Wigan in December Bosingwa was dreadful, even by his standards, but even at that point the supporters hadn't really turned on him any more than anybody else. By the end of the season, against Newcastle at Loftus Road, the abuse was so fearsome that Harry Redknapp had to remove the player at half time because, he said, it would have been impossible to let him play the second period. Redknapp seemed fairly tetchy about that, annoyed that the home crowd had got onto one of their own players and forced his hand, but let's look at what happened after that Wigan game shall we?
First of all, Bosingwa was justifiably dropped to the bench for the next home match with Fulham. Upon hearing this news he refused to sit with the other substitutes and in fact packed his kit bag and left the ground. A week later, in a press conference at Newcastle where Rangers had just been beaten with Anton Ferdinand playing out of position at full back, Redknapp chose to not only make Bosingwa’s behaviour public, but also state that the player had been fined £120,000 which was just two weeks wages and, he said, more than any of his Spurs players had been on the previous season. Now whether Bosingwa had a Chelsea background or a lethargic playing style or not, that was always going to kill is QPR playing career stone dead. Redknapp uses the media better than most other managers, and rarely says anything without a reason, so perhaps he was hoping to make an example of Bosingwa and bring the other players into line. Whatever the logic behind the outburst, Redknapp should have known that from that point on Bosingwa could never play for the club again. He'd completely hung him out to dry, and given that he'd just watched big Anton lumber around hopelessly for 90 minutes he did so knowing that Rangers weren't exactly sleeping on a bed of spare right full backs every night.
I was shocked therefore that Redknapp decided to recall the Portuguese full back later on in the season and rather less surprised at what followed. Bosingwa continued much as he had before Fulham with the occasional steady performance interspersed with several awful ones and a sloth-like work rate. He takes a nice free kick in attacking positions and had his 25-yard barnburner at Villa Park flown in the top corner to make it 2-0 when Rangers were well on top in that crucial game, instead of hitting the inside of the post, then three points could well have been theirs and a Paul Furlong-like turnaround for Bosingwa may have been on. Typically he then lazily conceded possession on the stroke of half time and an equaliser followed. Mbr>Having lost there, and at Fulham, QPR were relegated at Reading and immediately after the final whistle Bosingwa – removed by Redknapp during the second half after his worst performance of the season so far – was caught by the Sky cameras laughing as he went down the tunnel. Redknapp said there was nothing in that but, frankly, I don't care if Jack Dee is refereeing and Bill Bailey is working the public address system you shouldn't be daft enough to be laughing in that situation. An easy, lazy, typical football supporter thing to say but it's hard to imagine Marc Bircham, Lee Cook or Kevin Gallen chuckling away after that Reading match.
Things came to a head for the player for the second time in the campaign in, ironically, the reverse fixture with Newcastle. Booed from the start an initially promising performance fell away into farce as he first conceded a foolish penalty for taking a fist of one of the luminous yellow away shirts as it ran past him in the box in full view of referee Lee Probert, then took on a poor pass from Robert Green and laid an equally abject one back to him resulting in a second goal. He was hounded out of the game by the weary Loftus Road faithful thereafter.
But the question surely had to be why he was being picked at this stage at all? Bosingwa had been very poor all season and was only getting worse, the results were awful and he clearly wasn't contributing towards improvements, he's surely not going to be here next season and there was nothing at stake in the games. Harry Redknapp said he wasn't picking his team with an eye on next season but given that Rangers were already down you couldn't help but wonder why on earth not? What exactly did Redknapp or QPR gain by selecting Bosingwa after the Reading game, or indeed during the second half of the season at all? He wasn't exactly putting himself in the shop window was he? I've seen more tempting offers in Lidl's window. Why would you go public with such specific criticism of a player in the manner Redknapp did after Newcastle away, and then play him and defend him in the face of lousy performances? Michael Harriman's excellent display at right back in the final game at Liverpool only deepened the mystery of why Bosingwa wasn't sidelined much, much earlier.
A poor player with a dreadful attitude that the club should never have signed, and should certainly not allow anywhere near the first team ever, ever again. But for me, there are just as many question marks about Redknapp in this situation as there are the player.
Stats:
23 starts and one sub appearance. W3 D9 L12
Out of Ten – 6,6,6,7,-,3,6,6,4,4,2,6,6,5,5,6,7,5,6,6,4,5,4,3 = 5.13
Interactive Match Rating – 5.03
One goal (Walsall H), one assist (Reading H)
Man of the Match Awards – 0
Cards – Two yellows (foul, deliberate handball)
The question with Fabio now remains the same as it was last summer – what exactly was the point of that? QPR already had Armand Traore, and in Taye Taiwo seemed to have found a more defensive left back to compliment him. Taiwo grew into a loan spell at the end of 2011/12, overcoming a poor start to play reasonably well during a run of results that kept QPR in the top flight. He had an eye for a free kick, and once tried to tackle Danny Graham with his face. That, and his rather comical insistence on emptying every last drop of a litre bottle of cold water over Joey Barton’s head after a home win with a giant grin on his face, suggested he might just be mad enough to stay at Loftus Road. Rangers turned down the chance to sign him, despite him being available relatively cheaply when compared to some of their other signings, and loaned in Fabio from Man Utd instead. Even if the season had gone well, for Rangers and the Da Silva twin, we’d still be sitting here now in need of a new left back. It just didn’t make any sense.
Fabio turned in some decent performances – notably in the win at Chelsea – but was in and out of the team all season without ever really accomplishing much. LFW columnist Colin Speller developed a theory that United were simply sending whichever one of the Da Silva boys was most injured or out of form each week and when the one who was supposed to be Rafael turned out for United wearing a pair of boots with Fabio’s name stitched into the side the conspiracy theories grew. In the end he was half decent on the odd occasion, reasonably inoffensive, and ultimately completely pointless. The rationale for the signing remains lost on me.
Stats:
15 starts, eight sub appearances, W5 D8 L10
Out of Ten – 3,6,6,6,7,5,-,-,5,5,-,8,7,7,6,6,6,-,6,5,5,-,6 = 5.833
Interactive Match Ratings – 5.69
1 goal (MK Dons H), 0 assists
Man of the Match Awards – 1 (MK Dons H)
Cards – Four yellows (foul, foul, foul, foul)
One of those Harry Redknapp signings that makes you wonder whether Rosie the Dog may have taken a cut of the signing on fee. The mystery of why, two months into the impossible job, the new QPR manager concluded that what Rangers were really short of was Tal Ben Haim only deepened when he was selected out of position at full back (when he was selected at all) and then loaned out to Toronto for the final month of the campaign just after he’d turned in probably his best performance for Rangers against Arsenal. None of it seemed to make any sense.
To his credit, the Israeli international acquitted himself reasonably well when called upon but in truth he’s been on the slide for years now with the mobility of an old oak tree, the acceleration of coastal erosion and the turning circle of a South American mountain range. A signing for the sake of making a signing is what it seemed at the time – and so it proved. Still, at least we found a use for Anton Ferdinand’s wide-bottomed shorts after he’d been loaned out.
Stats:
Five starts and one sub appearance – W1 D2 L3
Out of Ten – 6,7,5,6,6,6 = 6
Interactive Match Ratings – 5.35
0 goals, 1 assist (West Brom H FAC)
Man of the Match Awards - 0
Cards – 1 yellow (foul)
Others >>> Michael Harriman made more of his loan spell with Wycombe than young QPR players usually do when packed off to the lower divisions and showed on his first ever full league start for the first team at Liverpool on the final day that he should have been rewarded for that with a call up to the senior side much, much earlier. That Jose Bosingwa was continually selected for the meaningless end of season games ahead of Harriman was nothing short of a disgrace. No such outing for Max Ehmer who collects mediocre references from short loan spells almost as quickly as he does ridiculous tattoos. No sign whatsoever of Luke Young who one would hope we’re checking for a pulse every now and again, or Yun Suk Young who will need to work hard when given the chance to shake off a growing suspicion that he’s here merely as shirt seller and tourist pleaser in chief when Ji-Sung Park finally does the decent thing.
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Pictures – Action Images