It's a clash between two early Championship promotion contenders at Carrow Road on Wednesday as QPR travel to Norwich for the billionth time - having both made a total mess of their most recent Premier League stints, both would now like to make it back for want of something better to do with their time.
Lancashire and District Senior League >>> Wednesday November 2, 2022 >>> Kick Off 19.45 >>> Weather — High winds >>> Carrow Road, Norwich
Norwich are an opponent Queens Park Rangers have faced more than any other, but the practise accrued over 126 meetings doesn’t seem to have done them much good.
The R’s are without a win at Carrow Road in seven games going all the way back to 2008 when Martin Rowlands’ thrice-taken free kick won the day. They’d lost six and drawn three of nine before that, including 2005/06 where they led 2-0 with ten to play and were still defeated, and in the seven matches played here between the two since it’s been five defeats, including a pair of back-to-back 4-0s under Ian Holloway and later John Eustace’s caretaker charge.
Somehow, though, there’s something about this fixture. I don’t know if, at 38, I’m still all misty eyed over the colours — two unusual kits, home shirt vs home shirt, yellow and green v blue and white hoops, under floodlight… it just looks, mesmerising somehow. I always think and feel it’s going to be an attractive game, when actually more often than not Paul Murray has had his leg smashed to pieces and we’ve made Darren Huckerby look like the Norse God of thunder.
As ever, these pre/misconceptions stem from childhood. When I started going to Loftus Road, QPR were fifth in the Premier League, and Norwich were a threatening visitor because they were third. Memories of Damion Stewart and Matt Connolly red cards tend to pale into insignificance when you’ve sat in Pu watching Les turn on the halfway line and power his way through both banks of visiting defence before finishing into the far corner. So many afternoons watching Grant Holt dangle the referee like puppet will never match the feeling of being in the old Carrow Road side stand watching Devon White lollop through on goal in front of us and finish low and true (certainly a good deal lower and truer than we’d become accustomed to with him) to lift the roof of the away end. Norwich will always be a fun train ride pretending to be a grown up with my dad’s mates, and Bruno chants all the way home, however many times Zema fucking Abbey makes the returns here miserable. If your childhood was 1976 I suspect you feel rather differently, to put it mildly.
Norwich and QPR were not only founder members of the Premier League, but genuine contenders in its first inception. The Canaries were rewarded with Europe, and a trip to Bayern Munich, for their third spot. I’d shoot up an old folk’s home to have one Europa League campaign with Rangers of the sort that would these days be rewarded for our fifth spot. In theory these are the goals and aims of both clubs still, to make it back there one day, and yet it can increasingly feel like the sport is leaving clubs like ours behind — if it hasn’t, indeed, already left.
I sit here at this laptop constantly and get all pragmatic and emotionless about things like whether we should sell Chris Willock. For me, as both regular readers know, the answer is always yes depending on price, because I don’t see any other way up the ladder in the FFP era, for a club with our resources and restrictions, other than selling players for serious money and reinvesting that in several more players who you can hopefully do the same with. If we ever do get promoted again, I’ll do the same when it comes to the television riches that are bestowed upon us: bank the fucker, invest in infrastructure, set the club up for the next ten years, come back down, go back up, repeat, until you are in a position to have a crack at it. Do not, under any circumstances, go up and give all your money to chancers like Joey Barton and Jose Bosingwa again, coming back with nothing to show for it other than debt and regret. Doing a QPR, which became doing a Fulham, and is now doing a Forest — step away from the credit card.
Norwich have been something of a shining example of this approach. They’ve been backwards and forwards to the top table like Alan Partridge with his big plate — four times in ten seasons. The money has been spent sensibly, the ground and training ground improved, and the club set up as sustainable and still family owned by Delia Smith and co. Last season, this went slightly awry. They felt imbued with enough confidence to splash £60m on footballers — a club record outlay. The balance of the new arrivals was horribly wrong — trying to replace one influential loanee, Oli Skipp, who’d been so key to the title winning season at Championship level, with Billy Gilmour, just one of several dozen missteps. They lost their first six games, won only two of the first 19, and were effectively dead on arrival. Now back in the Championship, there’s been another £12m splashed this summer — not a particularly large amount by the standards of parachute payment clubs but still — and they’re plodding along in fifth, playing pretty unremarkable football under Dean Smith who neither sounds or feels like he wants to be there that much, to a crowd of people not sure they’re really that keen on him or his team either.
Their resources, and players, and strikers, mean they’ll be there are thereabouts at the end of the season. Sheff Utd were poor for the first two thirds of last season, but the advantages to parachute payment clubs post pandemic is such that they made the play-offs regardless and would have been in the final but for a remarkable goalkeeping performance from Brice Samba in the semi. But the raw excitement and emotion, the big flag parades through the town, the togetherness and atmosphere, that accompanied Daniel Farke’s first promotion here, has dissipated almost entirely.
These are now two clubs wondering what their place is in this new world, and really what the point is. You’re already seeing Nottingham Forest social media accounts lamenting their ruinous return to the top flight just weeks after it begun, daring in some circumstance to say they "miss the Championship”. Of course this is something of a lazy refrain, because if you go up and take the Premier League on in the manner of Leeds, Brighton or Brentford then it is still absolutely possible to go up there and not just survive, but thrive. Do you think Crystal Palace, with Eze, Oliseh and Zaha carving the top division up, wish they were still playing Wigan of a Tuesday night? Of course you feel like shit if you got it wrong and you’re losing 5-0 to Arsenal, but it's very satisfying indeed to watch your immaculately run club run a pork sword through Chelsea in your shiny and imaginatively designed new stadium if you get it right.
Nevertheless, it is rather soul destroying to think that the absolute best clubs like QPR and Norwich can now hope for is a promotion, and then counting a Premier League finish of seventeenth with exits in the first rounds of both cups as an enormous success. The haves now have so much compared to the have nots that there are Premier League games that just feel like a complete waste of your time. What point trying to battle the battered remains of the West Coast Mainline to get to Manchester and pay north of £50 to get into a stadium full of tourists filming the game on their mobile phone, at a kick off time dictated by a TV company, to watch you concede five, six, seven, maybe eight to Kevin De Bruyne and Man City? Norwich had three 5-0’s on their slate last season and a 7-0. Even in QPR’s most recent, mostly disastrous, Premier League stint between 2011 and 2015 they took points, and in several cases wins, from Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Man City. A decade on, that feels like an absolute pipe dream, not only for us, but for everybody else like us. QPR 2-1 Arsenal, Samba Diakite scores? QPR 3-2 Liverpool, Shaun Derry scores? Come on now, we’ve all had a drink.
After last season’s debacle there are genuine questions being asked of Norwich’s previously mythical sporting director Stuart Webber, and saintly Delia. Not only about what went wrong for the spend in 2021/22, but what exactly the point of any of this is? They’ve taken the unwise decision to clam up, stop talking to supporters, largely block out independent media, and try to drip feed sanitised platitudes through the club’s official channels. The dreaded Curbishley-at-Charlton syndrome of "taken us as far as they can” mantra is thick in the air, because like everybody else they’ve found over the last 30 years that where once a millionaire chairman was enough to transform Blackburn into champions, then a billionaire oligarch was able to do the same for Chelsea, now you really need to be owned by a Middle Eastern country to stand any chance at all, with all the brushing over of human rights violations and stoning gays to death that comes with that desire to see your team win 2-1 at Crystal Palace. Even Liverpool are now talking about the difficulties of competing with the ‘state-owned teams’.
Fans of Norwich, QPR, and plenty of other clubs besides, are looking at this situation and starting to ask what the point is? To get to the Premier League, to lose all your Saturday afternoon kick offs, to spend the weeks getting trounced in tourist traps, to see frequent defeats of 5-0 or worse as just part of it, to pay £50-60-70 for every away ticket? Or is it enough to just run your club well, sustainably, sensibly, and compete as best you can at Championship level? To yo-yo? To go up and bank the money? Or go up and give it a go?
Wednesday night, yellow v hoops, Carrow Road once more. Both in early pole positions to make it back to the big time again. Both starting to wonder whether that’s really all that — and, if it’s not, then why are we bothering?
Links >>> Restless natives — Interview >>> Bruno’s knockout — History >>> Comeback trail — Referee >>> Norwich Official Website >>> The Pink ‘Un — Local Press and Forum >>> Eastern Daily Press — Local Press >>> My Football Writer - Norwich City >>> Along Come Norwich - Blog
Team News: All three players who limped out of the first half of the Birmingham defeat on Friday will not travel to this one. Stefan Johansen made it through to half time but won’t play either game this week. Jake Clarke-Salter’s knee twist isn’t too bad, but he won’t feature on Wednesday. Tyler Roberts’ stock continues to fall with the supporters — he’s now out until after the World Cup break. Coming back in, Jimmy Dunne after an absence of three games, and star boy Chris Willock who has missed five.
Norwich are without top scorer Todd Flanders and Dimitris Giannoulis. Three subs turned the Stoke game on its head at the weekend so Todd Cantwell and Núñez may push for starts here.
Elsewhere: This week’s exciting round of Where Will Coventry Play Their Next Home Game? has belated landed on… Coventry. Always a turn up when that happens. Blackburn head there tonight and, given the alternative being eyed up was Walsall’s 11,500 capacity stadium and Coventry have 13,000+ season ticket holders, that’s probably for the best.
Carlos Corberan’s immediate impact at West Brom was understated as they were comprehensively outplayed and beaten by league leaders Sheffield Red Stripe on Sunday. The Baggies have now slumped to the foot of the table with 15 defeats from 17 played — 15 of the previous 23 teams to start with that record have been relegated, according The Second Tier podcast, so a win tonight at home to Blackpool wouldn’t go amiss at all. Especially as they’re due in W12 this weekend, and we all know what that usually means. Paul Heckingbottom’s triumphant Blades, meanwhile, head down to wildly inconsistent Bristol City.
Quietly heading the other way, Swanselona are into the top six on a run of seven wins from ten games ahead of their draw at Preston tonight. Luton v Reading and Boro heading to Hull round out the evening — the Tigers have lost eight of their last 11 after a big, expensive summer overhaul but are now set to appoint Liam Rosenior as their new manager after a protracted search.
Six Wednesday games including our own. Burnley, one defeat in 18 league games under Vincent Kompany, would be a strong fancy to cement their place at the top of the table with a home win against Rotherham. Huddersfield finally got a win on the board for Mark Fotheringham and his Amazing Technicolour Accent, beating Millwall at the weekend, ahead of a home meeting with Sunderland. Wawll had been four for four prior to that, but face a tough task in bouncing back Lynn at in-form Birmingham as we found out to our cost on Friday. You wouldn’t think Cardiff’s slump has much hope of improving home to Watford, and I wouldn’t wish Wigan v Stoke on my worst enemy.
Referee: Robert Madley is the man in the middle for this. He was dismissed from the PGMOL list in 2018 after a video of him mocking a disabled person walking past his car was leaked to his employer, but has been working his way back up through the leagues since the start of last season and made his Premier League comeback at the weekend with Brentford’s 1-1 draw at home to Wolves. He last refereed Rangers on the opening day of the 2015/16 season at Charlton. Details.
STOP PRESS - A late replacement here, it's Andy Davies now. Details.
Norwich: After an eyebrow-raising start to life back in the Championship that saw Norwich drop points to relegation favourites Cardiff, Wigan and Hull in the first three games, Dean Smith’s team then started to motor in the ominous fashion we’ve become accustomed to from this ultimate yo-yo team. They went unbeaten in nine games, winning six in a row, to reach the summit of the division, with Bristol City, Coventry, Huddersfield and Millwall all swatted aside at Carrow Road. However, all has not been well since. Saturday’s 3-1 home win against a typically uninspiring Stoke side snapped a run of six without a win, and one win in eight. They’d lost four of the previous five, including home losses to Luton (1-0) and Preston (3(!!!)-2) and a draw here with West Brom which, the way West Brom are playing, is a 3-0 loss in any other language. They currently sit fifth on six defeats — in their last two title winning campaigns at this level they only lost seven (20/21) and six (18/19) in total. Rangers have played Norwich more than any other team, but the practice hasn’t done them much good at Carrow Road — they’re without a win in seven visits here, losing five. The 1-1 draw achieved here in unlikely circumstances at Christmas 2020 snapped a run of three successive Norfolk defeats in which ten goals had been conceded and none scored, including two 4-0 losses.
QPR: After three straight away victories and four wins on the road from five played, QPR have now lost their last two away from Loftus Road conceding five goals in the process. Still, no team in the league has won more than our four away matches so far, and after tomorrow night the R’s seven of the top nine teams in the division on the road with Burnley the only exception. The R’s are currently third in the table, but have already lost five league games — when they last won this league in 2010/11 they only lost six games all season, and when they made the play-offs in 2013/14 they lost 12. Norwich are fifth on six defeats, when they won this division in 2020/21 they lost seven times, and the most defeats suffered by a team that went on to win the Championship in the last ten years Reading’s 11 in 2011/12. Thirty points is QPR’s best total after 16 games since their return to this division in 2015. QPR average 12.8 shots a game this season, the joint fifth best total in the league with Luton. Norwich are fourth averaging 13.9. Weirdly, West Brom are third with 14. Chris Willock’s return from injury means we can drag his stats out again — he has scored six times in nine appearances this season, and QPR have never lost a game in which he has scored (W13 D3).
Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Let’s see what last year’s champion Cheesy thinks this week…
"The defeat at Birmingham was a bit of a reality check to bring us back down to earth, and following that I unfortunately think Norwich might just be too strong for us.”
Cheesy’s Prediction: Norwich 2-0 QPR. No scorer.
LFW’s Prediction: Norwich 1-1 QPR. Scorer — Chris Willock
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