Join us on our voyage of discovery through Watford, Cardiff, Middlesbrough and the sex shops of the A1 as the Awaydays make what is already being described as an “unwise” and “unwelcome” return for 2023/24.
I was fired from both my summer jobs as a teenager.
My first big gig was delivery boy for Brigg’s prestigious, multi-Michelin Star winning establishment Bella Pizza. They paid me £2.50 an hour and 10% of everything I delivered. This meant a short run of 12 pizzas to somewhere in the town would keep me in QPR replica shirts for another season, and one medium garlic bread out to Barnetby-le-Wold would run at such a loss I had to consider selling the car that took me there.
I’m not going to go all Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential on you here, but you see and hear things in those places that will affect menu choices for the rest of your life. Sent up to the storeroom/disused upstairs bedroom one evening to "boy, get me some more ham” by the shop’s tyrannical Muslim owner Gharib, I returned empty handed because, as one might suspect given the family’s heritage, there was no dead pig to be found. Chastised, and beaten back up the stairs with a tea towel, I eventually returned with real, authentic, "Turkey Rash”. These were the size, shape and weight of house bricks, implausibly pink, and delivered to the shop on a pallet of several dozen which apparently didn’t require refrigeration to be stored for many months at a time. It was all the bits of a turkey they don’t send you in your Christmas hamper, ground up, padded out with breadcrumbs, packed with preservatives and fluorescent colouring, shaped into a brick, and then diced to order and scattered across pizzas as "ham” for drunken fuckwits whose RE lessons had presumably been even more primitive than the ones inflicted at my often-ablaze secondary school
Like Bourdain’s "never order the fish on Tuesday” let me tell you, in these provincial towns, if they have to put a new doner on the grill on a Monday, that same piece of meat is still there twirling away come Friday, cooked on the outside, raw on the inside, and varying degrees of both in between. At the end of each shift they would take it off, stand it upright in the kitchen loosely wrapped in the sort of blue plastic you often find concealing medical waste, and leave it there overnight to drip fat onto the floor. My first job of an evening was to scrape that up with a large, flat trowel-like pan and put it in drums out the back and from there… who knows? My second job was to deliver a regular order of four doner pizzas, two large and two small, to a Scottish family on the estate behind the football ground - dad on oxygen because breathing had become a bit of a chore, mum of a size and shape you could rent out for kids parties, children morbidly obese by eight, collective weight of the household about the same as a small boat – by half past five every single day of the week.
That was heartbreaking and demoralising. As were the late night £120 orders to a park somewhere, which Gharib insisted I do in case they were genuine, and then booted off with me for not defending myself more when they inevitably stole my money bag on arrival. But then there were the lonely housewives keen to provide more than a tip to the twitchy teen with the abs and floppy blond hair while the useless old man was down on night shift at the steel works. And you could do a nice side line in lads who’d stranded themselves drunk in a village pub somewhere and clocked that ordering one margherita and bunging the delivery driver a score would be quicker than waiting for a cab. Double if you puke and no we’re not listening to Radio fucking One.
Anyway, one week Sky shifted a QPR home match with Sheff Wed to a Friday night and I bunked off to go. The back four was Marcus Bignot, Danny Shittu, Matthew Rose and Mauro Milanese. The midfield was Gareth Ainsworth, Marc Bircham, Tommy The Strangler and Adam Miller. Sheff Wed had a man sent off 15 minutes from time. We drew 0-0 and were lucky to get it. I went back to work the following Monday night to find there was no work waiting for me. Mother was unamused.
My next attempt was selling duty free goods to holiday makers at Humberside Airport. Now, they call it this because nobody would want to fly to or from it if you called it Hull Airport, Grimsby Airport or Scunthorpe Airport, but it sits equidistant between the three and that’s exactly what it is. It’s a little escape hatch for the locals lucky enough to have saved up enough for a week in Ibiza. It killed Blackpool stone dead the moment it opened. Now we were going abroad as kids, instead of across the M62 waiting patiently to see the little farmhouse in the middle of the motorway. Suddenly dad was teeing off on the Links/council pay-and-play of Roquetas del Mar like he was Seve Ballesteros.
You worked single (four hour) or double (eight) shifts assigned to flights, so if you got the 06.00 to Torremolinos you’d be there from 02.00 and guide the passengers through their "airport shopping experience” i.e. hanging around the back of the shop in a suit and asking Gaz from Scunny if he fancies some new sunnies. The second worst shift you could get was a Thursday morning run where they had one plinky plonk FlyBe going to Guernsey, and one grown up plane going to Majorca. This meant two groups of passengers in one small boutique with two different sets of rules and restrictions on what they could and couldn’t buy. On that day it was the job to ask as many passengers as we could which destination was theirs, and advise them whether they could buy 20 cigarettes or 2,500 accordingly. At which point, almost universally, they would take the piss out of the way the "soft southern twat” pronounced Majorca and tell me to "fuck off” before loading the cart up with more Marlboro Gold than Dot Cotton consumed in 30 years of Eastenders. They then sat themselves down, very satisfied and ready to smoke their lungs away, while I pocketed a nice wedge on the side from security by having a walk through the departure lounge tipping the nod at which cases to open in the following Thursday’s "random searches” when they all flew back in.
And if you think that makes me sound like a horrible, smarmy, jumped up, grassing little bastard then fine. But let me tell you the first worst shift you could get was the following day when Thomson sent a 737 here of a Friday morning (the locals would come out to look up as it flew over) offering 200 package holiday seats to Dalaman for the cost of a return train ticket to Leeds. Once you’d dealt with those four hours of utter carnage you quickly lost sympathy, empathy and feeling for anybody willing to tell you to "fuck off” to your face simply because you don’t think there’s Spanish holiday island pronounced "Mayurrrrrrrrka”.
Anyway, second summer rolled round, the boss who liked me had left, and the new timetable showed seven holiday flights on a Saturday. It was never going to work. It’s not you, it’s me. Mother was unamused, again.
People who spend their Saturdays queueing to get into B&Q, or working at regional airports for that matter, are never going to get this but August was a glorious time when there was all the QPR and none of the school/college. Just a solid month there, four league games and two League Cup ties (shut up) interspersed with long, lazy summer days away from the hellscape of Britain’s education system. I’m only going to work in the first place to pay for the trips to QPR, so the idea I’d be peddling duty free whiskey to some old soak trying to get to Rhodes in an Air Helios jet that may or may not pressurise at 20,000ft, while QPR are kicking off a league campaign with a 1-1 home draw with Rotherham, or a 0-0 at Hull, was just laughable to me. In fact I did laugh at them for suggesting it. Absolutely incredulous at the idea. Of course not, silly. Probably why I lost the job(s).
If you’d told that hopelessly awkward little waif that one day he’d be living back in London, writing about QPR, with an opening day fixture barely 12 miles from his house, and he’d be dreading it – absolutely dreading it – I think it would have taken some explaining.
Watford, back in those days, was a theatre of great torment. A place where Vinny Jones turned up late, and drunk, demanding to play, bullying Paul Murray and Nigel Quashie in the changing room, nearly killing a guy on the pitch, and contributing to a shambolic defeat. A place where we made Danny Webber look like the original Ronaldo. A place where Lloyd Doyley scored his first ever goal on his 269th appearance and Jim Magilton headbutted our best player in the dressing room after the game. Still, we’ll always have that Simod Cup victory won’t we? You’ll never sing that etc.
More recently QPR’s Vicarage Road record has been good – three wins and a draw from four visits – but somewhat bittersweet.
Adel Taarabt and Tommy Smith scored here in 2011 to mathematically seal the Championship title, and given we rescued a deflated paddling pool from the glassy remains of a pub riot on the way back to the station clearly, for some, the celebrations were underway. For us, an FA hearing into Ale Faurlin’s transfer cast a long shadow and, when you read the transcripts of the hearing, it should have done a good deal more than that. Almost certainly a points deduction had the QPR side not buried the league in paper to deliberately beat the hearing back into the last week of the regular season and paint them into a nice, tight corner.
In 2021 Albert Adomah scored his first goal for his local side, beautifully taken, in the final minute of the match, live on Sky, to win Mark Warburton’s team the game 2-1 and further propel the momentum and optimism that had us all believing in a promotion push once more. Again, though, beset with sadness that the stand behind the goal was empty, and we could only take in the moment through the medium of Nick London and Andy Sinton screaming through our television at home where we’d been locked away by the government. The joy of the win not so much tempered as totally extinguished by the sense of lost time and experience in our lives while we were still relatively young. I mean, we’d only have spent that time and experience getting smashed up in Mabel’s until closing, but still.
Thankfully in 2022 Adomah repeated the dose in front of a full house – almost exactly the same goal, from the same blade of grass in front of the away end, for the same dramatic and beautifully satisfying result. QPR escaped a last minute disallowed goal that day and won 3-2, but were magnificent. That, in itself, became problematic, as the manager walked away and the players downed tools. A run of two wins in 28 games, one win in 15 at home, FA Cup defeat to Fleetwood, disgusting displays against Rotherham, Sunderland, Coventry and the like. Tyler Roberts and Leon Balogun sitting out the best part of a year collectively with "a bit of a calf problem”. Ethan Laird’s perennially tight hamstring. The players coating managers off in front of QPR fans in pubs. The regular Saturday night table at Reign. The flashing of Rolex watches and large diamond necklaces around Sumosan while acting the goat. I could hardly bear to look at that shameless rabble by the end of 2022/23, and I certainly couldn’t watch highlights of that Watford win because it hammered home exactly what they were all actually capable of when they weren’t being complete tossers.
This year was predictably awful. I'd been dreading it since May, watching it fast approaching, begging it to stay away, putting off all the previewing until the last possible moment I could logistically get it done. Please, no more QPR. No more. Please. All the excited Tweets, Facebook posts, articles, podcasts and videos from fans of other clubs salivating over the opening day of the new campaign - exactly like I used to - posted and scrolled through while I’m rumbling around the Euston Marks & Spencer at a little past ten in the morning. Will I get through two large bottles of Peroni between here and Watford Junction? "Just wait mate, we’ll be in the pub by 11.” "I want Andre Dozzell to look nice and hazy by the time we start.” At Watford's White Lion, with it's lovely QPR-supporting landlord, literally everybody we speak to is of exactly the same mind. Even QPR managing to take the kick off and then concede possession, a free kick and a goal within 30 seconds, was not surprising at all to anybody who followed the team last year, or had done the pre-season friendlies. Jimmy Dunne said the previous week’s 5-0 shellacking at League One Oxford was "not a fair reflection of where we are” and I marked him dead wrong – it’s exactly, exactly where we are. Four nil by half time and that flattered us. If they hadn't called the dogs off it would have gone to double figures. Lionel Hutz was paid $8 for his 32 hours of babysitting, he was glad to get it.
It was Marc Bircham who said "you don’t support QPR for the good times, you support QPR because it’s QPR not because it’s going to win trophies. It’s a mix of brainwashing at an early age and a hereditary disease passed down from generation to generations.” And that’s fine, and true. For the most part the losing and the bad times only make the good times sweeter, and the whole self-deprecation, taking the piss out of ourselves, typical bloody Rangers, QPR ‘shit but local’ is all part of the attraction. There’s also that Andre Aciman quote of the superstitious and pessimistic: "seeing if a willingness to accept the very worst might induce fate to soften its blow.” Maybe if I say we’re going to lose in the preview it won’t happen precisely because I’ve said it will and therefore it won’t. But, losing literally every game, every week. Getting our arse handed to us by Luton, Coventry, Preston, Blackburn at home. Travailing a broken country on an extortionate and barely functioning rail network to watch us get beaten over and over and over again, 500 of us marooned in a corner surrounded by 25,000 baying gibbons. It stopped being funny around the time of Fleetwood away.
A pact was made over the summer that if we’re going to go through this again, and it is going to look like the Watford game most weeks, let’s at least try and get some life experience out of it. Let’s do the Pullman dining car down to Cardiff on the Friday night. Let’s go to the Purple Poppadom after the game: an upstairs curry house we happened upon once after a midweeker here expecting the usual rat biryani and bat jalfrezi offerings only to find an establishment heartily endorsed by Jay Rayner (with good reason too, it's exceptional, you should go). Let’s spend Saturday morning having a nice run around Cardiff Bay, admiring all the new flats they’ve built there that nobody lives in, and watching that steamer we’d curled into the S-Bend at the Premier Inn the night before float its way through the Cardiff International White Water Course and out to sea. On the way round the QPR shirt gets a loud ‘booo’ from three locals heading into town early. "Don’t worry lads, absolute gimme for you this afternoon”. How we laughed together (wonder how their day went?). Every stop he makes, he makes a new friend. Right up to the point we got picked up to go to the ground in a VW Sharan (I said to Sharan I reckon I've got one more trip left in me) I didn't want to bother.
And then QPR won. In a week they’d ditched the whole style, shape, selection, ethos, mentality, outlook and approach from the pre-season (bet Ruben’s glad he paid for them all to go to Go Ape Vienna for the week) and come back an entirely new side. A side in which Paul Smyth can play as the right sided attacked in a 4-2-3-1, and the right back in a 5-4-1, simultaneously, dragging those massive lungs and tiny arse up and down that side all afternoon. A side in which Sinclair Armstrong, who was playing at Bedford on the day the first team lost their final friendly 5-0 at Oxford, is now the main man. The pair combine brilliantly for a goal that quickly dissolves the back of the away end into Black Friday at the Big Wembley Asda. Is this the same team/manager/club/lifetime? A second goal, beautifully teed up by Armstrong for Paal, suggests not. Of course we had to go through a torturous period of stoppage time at 2-1 – the whole world fell out of my arse and I went from cat on a hot tin roof to cat being carted off to the vet for a final jab – but we saw it through and that wasn’t really the point anyway. There hasn’t been a switch in mentality and output like this seen since the lads on Cool Runnings ditched "eins zwei drei” for "feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme”.
Back to London we went, at the sort of pace GWR feels is acceptable for your £80 (20 minutes late, we got a tenner back for some hookers and blow), in a state of numbed shock. A win, of course. But more than that, a bit of pride in what we were doing. We say it’s the hope that kills but travelling to South Wales on Friday with literally no hope whatsoever was profoundly bleak. At least here, even if it does turn out to just be for a flash, there was some semblance of what Gareth Ainsworth’s QPR could look and feel like. And at the back of that away terrace, it felt pretty bloody lovely indeed.
Little over a decade ago, when QPR were good and my hairline was still both hairy and a line, the Mrs LoftforWords of the time and I moved into a flat in the grey area between Barnet and North Finchley.
It came with a glamorous Iranian landlady, a strong smell of curry left behind by the previous tenants (and large wad of forgotten Rupees taped to the underside of the bed, what fun I had the day I walked into the Post Office mistakenly believing you can just change a few thousand quids worth of those for actual money without courting attention from the postmaster/Metropolitan Police Service), and a cooker that liked to noisily try and ignite the gas burners by itself at times that suited it rather than us – often in the middle of the night. The pilot light on the boiler went out, on average, three times a week, panicking the place’s woke, jumpy carbon monoxide alarm into action. Typical nanny state stuff, shut up and let me sleep, we’re tired of experts in this country. When the decision to locate a dimmer switch for the bathroom light inside the bathroom led to predictable consequences I tried to change the fitting myself for a standard light switch. It liked that idea, and my execution of it, so much the explosion blew me five feet backwards into the bathtub, where I landed unceremoniously still clutching the nub that remained of my screwdriver.
It was, let’s be honest, a deathtrap. Damp as Danielle Lloyd at the Tottenham Hotspur Class Of 2010 Reunion Party at Faces Chigwell. But, Northern Line adjacent. And what’s the occasional electric shock while having a piss when you’re only 35 minutes from Old Street on a £3,000 a year season ticket?
Mrs LFW agreed. At least to the point she left me for a handsome South African with a watertight flat in zone two. Initially, at least, we were very happy there together. Me settling into my peculiar new job of travelling around the world with the people who make and commission television programmes, reporting on what the people who make and commission television programmes were making and commissioning so all the other people who make and commission television programmes knew. Her thankfully escaping the vile, bullying world of celebrity gossip journalism – an environment where Dan Wootton/Martin Branning rose to the top by posing as different people/pornstars/Facebook accounts to persuade boys he fancied in his office to wank on camera for him and then hold it against them – and switching instead to the altogether more wholesome and sedate world of running ITV’s nascent rival to the BBC’s Good Food website.
One of her first big ideas – and do bear in mind this sort of thing was innovative in 2011 and Elon Musk hadn’t yet turned the thing into an emporium of tat and far right conspiracy theory – was to embed a feed on the site that would pipe in all the Tweets from ITV’s celebrity chefs in real time. This was very well received by her new bosses, enacted immediately (or as immediately as these things are ever enacted by web development teams), and by one sunny Friday afternoon had been turned live just in time for the weekend. We sat on our balcony (ground floor), looked out over the vistas of Whetstone (mostly the High Road) and reflected on a job well done all round. Everything was coming up Milhouse. And it was around this time exactly that @Ainsley_Harriott decided to Tweet "you can’t beat a good tit wank”.
Now… As much as it might amuse us to think Ainsley Harriott’s Twitter account had been hacked, and having gained access this was the first thing the little scamps chose to kick off with... Or, better still, Ainsley Harriott himself does indeed think and believe this and just decided to share the joy with his followers after a relaxed and leisurely Friday afternoon... LFW counsel (not a salaried position) has strongly advised me to point out that Ainsley Harriott actually tweets from @AinsleyFoods.
Sadly for Mrs LFW, that is a good deal more research into Ainsley Harriott than the tech people at ITV had gone to the trouble of. She spent a frantic evening trying to speak to somebody on the telephone within striking distance of the ITV website’s back office to get the thing taken down. None of these people have been within 20 miles of the office since Covid-19, and even pre-pandemic the idea anybody responsible for ITV.com would be working a minute later than 17.00 on a Friday was laughable. "Don’t worry,” I said, three beers deep into not really my problem, "some of the other chefs are bound to Tweet something and push it down the feed, nobody will notice.” But none of them did. Not a one. Cruel, cruel, funny bastards. And, so, a big Saturday morning of live cookery programmes dawned. ITV in direct competition with suspiciously similar shows on BBC1 and Channel 4. Presenters repeatedly advising viewers "all the recipes you see today are available on the website”. And there, on said website, waiting for your elderly white haired mother who quite fancied trying that lamb tagine, steadfastly, for the whole weekend, sat Ainsley’s endorsement of decent tit wanks. Right at the top, next to his big smiley head.
What’s this got to do with blue badges? Well since the railway descended into the unusable, expensive catastrophe of the last 18 months, where £200-worth of travel to Middlesbrough can be flushed down the spout at a fortnight’s notice, we’ve been forced into the car and onto the road. And through that we’ve clocked a phenomenon unique to the A1 – namely, the roadside sex shop. Now, let’s park how damning an indictment it is of Britain 2023 that there’s demand for a Pulse and Cocktails every 35 miles along the A1 but you can’t make a living with a Little Chef franchise any more, and just examine that business case study for a moment. The Little Chef used to serve an "Olympic Breakfast”, which was the standard farmyard massacre plus a clutch of potato disks from the deep fat frier, and they used to do that for around £8.99. You can’t make a living doing that, but you can doing… well, whatever they’re doing inside Pulse and Cocktails?
"Truck drivers”, is the answer I get to this nine times out of ten. Or, possibly, the shops serving as distribution hubs for online orders to housewives in the surrounding area bored of waiting for the old man to stumble in from the pub, pissed off the pro at the golf club has started ghosting her WhatsApp messages, and missing the now grown-up pizza delivery boy. But, unless this is Florida, and there’s literally a clutch of evilly trafficked destitute Asians in the back of those gaffs, what sort of pleasure is a truck driver attaining in there more than he couldn’t have at least equalled using the all-day breakfast menu of the Little Chef?
It’s something that has previously occupied my mind only as long as it has taken me to speed past one of these joints. However, on the way to Middlesbrough, somebody pootling along in the outside lane at 85 on the long curve between the M18 and M62 junctions realised the turning to their immediate left was, in fact, where they needed to go. They tried to execute that manoeuvre by passing beneath the undercarriage of the adjacent articulated lorry that stood between them and the goal. A hopelessly optimistic piece of decision making where the absolute best-case scenario was being alive and in Pontefract. It didn’t go well, and we sat there for a while waiting for human remains and bits of Renault Megane to be scraped up from the tarmac. On the down side, this delayed our arrival at Middlesbrough’s terrific Twisted Lip, and its tendency to twist eight large bottles of Budvar past my lips to numb the pain of whatever QPR are about to do. On the plus side, we did spend some time adjacent to the Doncaster branch of one of these stores, which gave us a chance to investigate exactly what is going on in there. There may be a picture or two to follow so, if you’re on a work computer, or you’re reading this on the tube, this is the time to stop scrolling.
The main takeaway was I really wouldn’t be worrying any more about your plastic drinking straws – there’s enough rubber and plastic in this gaff for Dame Ellen MacArseache to sail the thing around the world against the wind and the tide. My first puzzlement was at the mechanics of some of the offering. Take the "Ass Snake Beaded Dildo”, for instance. Essentially a collection of anal beads attached to a bendy tube, measuring in at a slim 19 inches. How… how far do you have to go up there before you’re just stirring it around in the Kenilworth Road bit of somebody’s lower colon? Secondly, the outright weirdness of what turns people on. There was an item called the "Big Ass Pussy Masturbator”, which was essentially a rubber arse, and vagina, with a pair of thighs sprouting out hacked off miles above the knee, and the base of a navel sawn off well shy of the tits. Presumably for people who bang one out watching the Paralympics? And then, thirdly, the cost. The Ass Snake Beaded Dildo was retailing at £79.95, and the Big Ass Pussy Masturbator was, wait for this, £349. Three hundred and forty nine quid? I’d be wanting Cameron Diaz to come round and help me into it for that.
Different strokes for different folks. I once looked out, cozy and warm in our usual seats in the front coach of the 08.44 to Kings Cross, and mocked the trainspotters braving the freezing cold on Doncaster station platform early one Saturday morning. My dearly missed old mate Stuart quietly told me, without looking up from his paper, they were all looking in at me going to QPR v Mansfield from Grimsby at this hour with similar disdain. Here I am mocking somebody dropping a couple of hundred quid on a rubber arse, while spending at least that getting to Middlesbrough and back to watch a team everybody in the car thinks will probably be relegated.
I can’t think of anything better than being one of those 500 tucked up in the corner (this is where you get the loyalty points, by the way, for all those asking next time we play Reading or Luton). Watching our team play well and dominate the game. Willing Paul Smyth’s annihilation of his full back. Lauding Asmir Begovic’s excellence while Seny Dieng wilts. Feeling that build of excitement as Sinclair Armstrong collects on the half turn and starts burning down the family homes of opposition defenders. This is where we live, and eat. Travelling the country on the off chance. Going in with zero expectation, and trying to keep a lid on our emotion even when Andre Dozzell, of all people, belts one in from 30 yards off the far top post. They’ll score, we tell ourselves. (They didn’t). This will spark them into action. (It didn’t). They’ll overwhelm us second half. (They didn’t).
We say these things to protect ourselves against the hurt we’ve experienced before. But QPR always win in Middlesbrough. Four of the last five visits now. It’s just one of those places that’s for us. The pubs, the people, the cost of the beer, and that little spot in the top of the away end where we watch the chicken children and men so fat their cocks are a distant memory to them get lairy and banterous, get aggy and upset, get forlorn and miserable, and then finally, long before the end, get going. Fuck off lads, and when you get there fuck off all over again. See you next year. Jack Colback’s game sealing second sends me climbing atop the final row of seats, humanity massing beneath me, to roar. Fucking have that. Jamie gets a split lip in the process. Afterwards he declares himself glad to receive it. We’re still waiting on Kath’s dental bill from the aftermath of Albert Adomah’s winner at Watford a year ago.
Later in the evening, eight hours into a ten hour round trip behind the wheel, designated driver Owain mistook the driveway of a small farmhouse for the entry to Peterborough Services at the thick end of 90 miles per hour. I had enough time to, in the British tradition, say "I don’t think this is it” and then close my eyes. Hard on the brakes, the unmistakeable feel of the skid, gravel spraying this way and that, the deadest of dead ends approaching at the speed of Bright Osayi-Samuel, somebody’s sausage casserole is about to be interrupted by the arrival of a car load of five QPR fans entering via the bay window at speed. What could you do but clench and pray? Had we gone then, and frankly it’s a miracle we didn’t, I’d have died happy. And had the resulting queue behind us stretched far enough, perhaps one ITV chef returning home from a culinary gig may have been positioned just right to sample the merchandise at the Grantham branch, and happen upon this little beauty that I think might just be up his street: "Breast and pussy male masturbator”. For when a simple cleavage will no longer suffice. Yours for a slim £129.
As David Pleat will tell you, you can’t help what you’re into. I’m, still, very much into following QPR away.
Watford:
On the pitch >>> QPR performance 0/10 >>> Watford performance 7/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10
Off the pitch >>> QPR support 6/10 >>> Home support 6/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 6/10 >>>> Stadium 6/10 >>>> Police and stewards 4/10
In the pub >>> Pubs 8/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 6/10
On the train >>> Journey 5/10 >>> Cost 5/10
Cardiff:
On the pitch >>> QPR performance 7/10 >>> Cardiff performance 4/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10
Off the pitch >>> QPR support 7/10 >>> Home support 5/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 5/10 >>>> Stadium 5/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10
In the pub >>> Pubs 5/10 >>> Atmosphere 5/10 >>> Food 9/10 >>>> Cost 8/10
On the train >>> Journey 8/10 >>> Cost 2/10
Boro:
On the pitch >>> QPR performance 8/10 >>> Boro performance 5/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10
Off the pitch >>> QPR support 7/10 >>> Home support 7/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 7/10 >>>> Stadium 5/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10
In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 4/10 >>>> Cost 7/10
On the train (yeh right) >>> Journey 3/10 >>> Cost 3/10
2023/24 >>> Austria Pt 1 >>> Austria Pt 2 >>> Wimbledon >>> Oxford
2022/23 >>> Blackburn/Sunderland/Charlton >>> Watford/Swansea/Millwall >>> Bristol/Sheffield/Luton
2021/22 >>> Hull/Boro 21/22 >>> Reading/Bournemouth >>> Fulham/Peterborough >>> Cardiff/Blackpool >>> Bristol/Birmingham >>> Peterborough/Coventry/Millwall >>> Barnsley/Blackburn >>> Luton/Nottingham >>> Sheffield/Preston/Huddersfield
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