A 3-0 defeat in a deserted town, a goalkeeper crisis to begin the new season, a new series of The Calf Problem centres on a familiar cast member from s1, and Charlie Kelman says hello — LFW is in Austria, it’s hot, and here’s what we think about rivers.
Middle of last Thursday morning an American woman, who required everybody within a 70-yard radius to be aware of her presence, sat down at the counter of the shellfish and seafood emporium in Gatwick Airport’s North Terminal and, upon being presented with the menu, informed/harangued the minimum wage staffers there that the depressed and resigned looking daughter alongside her was allergic to shellfish and seafood.
And so, we come to the first theme of the 2023 Queens Park Rangers Grand Tour of a bit of Northern Austria: are you sure you’re in the right place?
Because this, this, surely cannot be the right place. Rohrbach, the sort of town The Specials used to sing about. Baking hot, completely deserted, entirely closed, and so far out in the back of beyond that, actually, we’re essentially in the Czech Republic. It has a cheese factory, full of docile cows, and apparently completely unstaffed. You could film The Last of Us here. A kindly woman, closing the main street’s only open cafe a little after one in the afternoon, sees us (and a chance to triple her annual profits) coming. She pours out eight pints of beer, charges us for them, then closes and heads home. "What do we do with the glasses?” we shout after her. "It won’t be a problem,” she replies. And she’s right. It won’t. She’s the only person we see for four hours. The afternoon silence broken only once, by an air raid siren — calling the reserve fire brigade to action we’re relieved to hear later, this lot do have form after all. Our Air BnB, of which there is one within 50 miles, is an abandoned clock tower with ceilings Ilias Chair would find a challenge.
The club’s assistance in the matter has been limited. There’s a sat-nav address for the "Raiffeisen Arena” and a caution that if you are daft enough to want to attend note there is more than one Raiffeisen Arena in Austria. It’s not that one, in the nearby city of Linz, or that one, off to the side of the nearby city of Linz. It is, apparently, this one, which Google Streetview rather ominously suggests is little more than the village PowerPlay pitch. Surrounded by hills and fields from which you could comfortably watch the match for free, it’s between a country road and the municipal swimming pool which, with the heat, is the only thing in Rohrbach A) open and B) doing any kind of trade. QPR attack the waterslide end in the first half and bemused locals gather at the fence in swimwear.
To reach it requires a train from Linz. This comes with a caution that if you are daft enough to want to attend note there is more than one train station in Linz. The enormous, shiny, brand-new train that whisked us here from Vienna on Friday at the speed of sound ditches you in the enormous, shiny, brand-new train station Austria has built here by way of investing in infrastructure for the population to use (it’ll never catch on). The train to Rohrbach is none of these things from none of these places. It leaves from a small car park with train tracks embedded into it, on the north side of the Danube. It is two carriages long: a single passenger cabin that looks like somebody has cut the bottom off a Jolly Boy’s Outing coach from the 1960s and stuck railway wheels on as an afterthought; and a smaller, wooden truck on the back for livestock. Not joking. It’s prepared for the journey by the driver reversing it blind up the platform while his mate hangs out the opposite end waving a flag out of the side to indicate it’s ok to proceed. There are four other QPR fans there waiting for it, three of whom had slid into the LFW DMs in the days leading up to it asking whether this could really be right ("Really? I mean, really?”) and Polish Paul — because of course Polish Paul, he is omnipresent. Is Polish Paul here? Good, then we can proceed.
A little after 11 the "locomotive” lurches into life and sets off at the speed of a QPR counter attack along the banks of the river, stopping first at suburban stations serving Linz, then villages, then hamlets, and eventually at people’s individual houses as long as they get up and press a big request stop button on the door of the driver’s cab in good time for him to apply the brakes. It’s two hours there, and one hour back, on account of the steepling gradient, and as town gives way to farm gives way to countryside and then pine forests it becomes spectacularly, breathtakingly beautiful. A single-track line, hugging the river as it climbs, windows all the way down to provide something by way of a breeze on the rare occasions we top 20 mph. People swim in the rivers here by the way — presumably one of the advantages of not having a privatised water board tipping everybody’s shit and used tampons into them.
It’s got to be one of the top ten train journeys in Europe, and I spend the entire thing increasingly convinced that 500 QPR fans are about to have a lovely time back in Linz — where we’ve accidentally arrived during their annual RittenFest and the place is absolutely bouncing — watching our team at the actual Raiffeisen Arena while we’re up here… wherever the fuck we are by this point.
Seny Dieng is not at any of the Raiffeisen Arenas. He’s back at home putting the finishing touches to a £2m-ish move to Middlesbrough, and I guess if you could do with curbing your Instagram lifestyle a little bit (particularly when you’re the goalkeeper in a team that’s won two of 28 games) then that’s a move that’ll certainly help. "Keep him at home” says Victor Anichebe to Paddy McNair in the comments below the signing announcement. Hmmmm. Quite. The news creeps through as the train leaves Linz, just before mobile phone reception becomes something the locals have only read about in books.
Seny Dieng, like the majority of his teammates, was poor last season. The nadir of Blackpool away will always stand out, but there was a litany of other mistakes besides as we laid out with evidence in his end of term report. By way of mitigation, would you have wanted to keep goal behind the porcelain pair of Jake Clarke-Salter and Leon Balogun, chronically out of form Jimmy Dunne, and Rob Dickie suffering some sort of prolonged nervous breakdown? Also, Dieng’s big strength has often been his distribution and with Gareth Ainsworth’s feet now firmly under the desk having a goalkeeper who can pass the ball is not any kind of priority — what little possession we had against Slavia Prague was lumped up towards ridiculously ginormous Hamzad Kargbo to no positive effect for the first hour, and then towards Lyndon Dykes to the high point of one disallowed Chris Willock goal for the final 30. New keeper probably doesn’t even need feet.
Given the state and location of me at this point I’m actually interested to listen back to this myself just to see what I thought. https://t.co/wzJRANWL4y– LoftforWords (@LoftforWords) July 8, 2023
Nevertheless, Dieng was a significant upgrade on Joe Lumley and Liam Kelly in what had quickly become a problem position for QPR following Alex Smithies’ departure. His form was poor last season, but then whose wasn’t? He’ll be missed.
None of this, though, is really the point. Like everything else that has gone on this summer so far, it’s a pure economics and maths issue. QPR have a £25m loss for 21/22 in their rolling three-year calculation, and it’s staying on a year longer than the Ebere Eze sale which currently mitigates it. Without another significant sale the club has put itself in a position where it needs to have an enormously frugal year in which costs and wage bills are slashed way back. Going from losing £25m to losing less than £10m within three seasons, without selling players for significant money, or doing enormous damage to the standard of your team, is incredibly difficult. Rob Dickie, a year left on a contract he had no intention of extending, was sold for whatever we could get for him. Dieng, in a similar contract situation, now likewise — this one a particular blow as he one of the few they’d had genuine interest in early, for far more money, from Everton and others. I’d be amazed if they’re the last of this — Chris Willock looks absolutely prime for a similar move to me, though apparently Jesus is handling his affairs now according to his Instagram.
It's just where we are, and Gareth Ainsworth said as much in his post-match press interview on Saturday: "We have to adhere to FFP. We know that. We must do it this season. I’m working hard with Lee and the board to not put this club in jeopardy with points deductions, fines. By the same token I want players in the building. We have targets, whether we get them is another matter and I’ve missed out on a couple already.” How galling for him to spend 10 years grinding away with no budget at Wycombe waiting for an opportunity exactly like this, only to get it and find that the same job needs doing again.
QPR will make signings, not only because they’re QPR and QPR always make signings, but because they still need to put a team on the field. They will sign a goalkeeper. Jordan Archer’s pitch for the big job consisted of conceding two first half goals you’d have saved yourself, although in his defence the two-man wall he put up for the first from a direct free kick burned up on impact and allowed the ball to pass clean between them. If he’s our number one this season I’m switching to spirits. Bournemouth’s Irish international Mark Travers was a name doing half-hearted business in the cool of the pitchside bar on Saturday, but again you’d think wages would be a problem there unless it’s a very generous loan deal on the Cherries’ part. The level of these signings is going to be interesting/frightening, and getting turned down by Wigan’s distinctly mediocre, shortly-to-be-30-year-old central midfield clogger Max Power last week doesn’t immediately scream roll up roll up.
Still back myself over Archer tbf pic.twitter.com/3Khswlg0eM– LoftforWords (@LoftforWords) July 8, 2023
My own pitch for the gig was not a conspicuous success. While Slavia’s players and staff — Radek Cerny among them - mingled with supporters on the pitch at full time ours… did not. All full of beer bravery I offered to keep goal for one of the local ten-year-olds kicking a football about by himself. "Penalties?” I ask. "Yep”, he says. And then the little fucker started doing keep-ups on his head. Sensing immediately I was in trouble, that goal started to feel awfuly big as he took five very purposeful strides back from the ball and top binned me off to my left to the delight of the watching ghouls.
Beginner’s luck? Well, having made the mistake of throwing him the ball back he placed it on the penalty spot once more, took another five steps back from it the other way, and did exactly the same to me again down the opposite side with his weaker foot. Now deservedly humiliated I headed out to meet him for sporting handshakes and (please, dear God) farewells only to find he wasn’t even wearing boots. He’d done the whole thing in his bare feet. He’s in the Slavia youth set up apparently, dad reckons he’s got "half a chance”. Nobody had told me that when I was giving it the patronising "aww would you like to take a penalty against me?” Still, we'll keep the video in case he wins the Euros for the Czechs ten years from now.
Better than anything I saw in QPR colours on Saturday that’s for sure.
How much of a problem that is depends really on how keen you are to start banging away nice and early on the panic. Gareth Ainsworth, rightly, made a big play of Slavia Prague being one of the top three teams in the Czech Republic, and a regular in European competitions. They looked good, both in their fantastic red and white halved kits, and on the field with quick, slick, rehearsed combinations and a skill and physicality that we couldn’t get within yards of. What’s also worth adding, however, is that this was our first friendly, two weeks into summer training, with the squad being ripped apart and new signings yet to arrive. Slavia are on friendly four, are much deeper into their summer, and start their league season a week earlier. It was technically Ziyad Larkeche’s debut, at left back after arriving from Fulham, but it was little more than getting 45 minutes into his legs, often outnumbered against a much better opponent. In as much as these glorified fitness exercises are ever a fight, this certainly wasn’t a fair one.
Last season’s theme of availability bubbled away below the surface. The list of names left out to "help with their loading” had a lot of familiar faces, including new signing Paul Smyth. Jake Clarke-Salter, fresh from publicly declaring himself one of the leaders of the group determined to put "the worst injury season of career behind me” (is this a good time for me to mention he actually made even fewer appearances in 2016/17 and 2017/18?), lasted 14 minutes of the second half before leaving the field with… wait for it… wait for it… say the line Bart… "a calf problem”. Bottle slammed into the hoardings, head in hands on the bench, see you for... Huddersfield in October? As much as things change… Speaking of which — Sam Field started the season with a yellow card for crunching a geezer down at the picnic table end of the ground.
The defence for the second half was then Rafferty Pedder, Aaron Drewe, Joe Gubbins and Kenneth Paal — like a DVD extras scene from The Borrowers. The thought of them all going to Jungle Jim’s or Go Ape or whatever it was on the Sunday is frankly terrifying. JCS will probably castrate himself on a climbing frame while trying to pour someone a glass of water. Leon Balogun inviting three of the reps back to his room for tea after an argument about a harness. Ainsworth standing by, hand on shoulder: "You see, Anya, nobody is more dedicated to zip lines than Leon. He’s a professional.”
Of the youngsters that were given a chance, it was very difficult to judge given the circumstances of the game. It was my first look at Iraq international Alex Aoraha in the flesh, but when our possession is being immediately turfed over the midfield towards a big lad up top and then, on almost every occasion, given away, what is there to say about the poor plane watchers left in the middle of midfield? I’ve seen us be effective under Gareth Ainsworth - against Watford and West Brom and Burnley and Stoke - but I’ve also already sat through a lot of hours of football where we’re doing that and I just wonder exactly what the plan is to even score a goal doing it, never mind win a game.
I guess Pedder was possibly the pick of them, but again a moment in the second half where he tried to pull a ball out of the air and got the touch a yard or so slack was immediately seized upon and returned with interest into the goal at the jacuzzi end of the ground within three passes — probably the sort of thing you get away with at B Team level, but not here, even in half paced games like this one. We desperately need somebody, anybody, from that tranche of our squad to step up. Taylor Richards getting fit, getting in the team, and getting good would be an enormous thing, given we’ve spent a chunk of summer budget we don’t have on him — his little trick and jink inside second half was about the best thing we did, and nearly brought a goal. Some wreckage to cling to there. Our defending from set pieces, however, remains that of a team that just enjoys the challenge of recovering losing positions.
The pace of things was nicely encapsulated by the Slavia bench, where an increasing collection of their squad stretched out topless in the afternoon sun with towels over their heads on the far side of the pitch. Love Island Smoking Area 3 QPR 0. Looking for a shadier spot, QPR’s first half subs were presented with a nice ego-levelling school PE bench in amongst us in the bar. They looked… reticent at the prospect (God moves in mysterious ways Chris, come and sit over here with me). Hat tip to Charlie Kelman, who didn’t have much luck on the pitch constantly showing short or running channels for balls that were larruped off towards Dykes regardless, but was the one all afternoon who actually made the effort to talk to the few QPR fans there, ask how we’d got there, what the journey was like, how the weekend was going, talk about the season and his hopes. It kind of felt like the very least that should have been going on, all things and locations considered.
It really doesn’t take very much, and with the direction of travel as it very clearly is at the moment they’re going to need to generate all the good will they can get.
If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via PayPal
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures — Action Images