QPR took seven points from a possible 12 over Christmas to move five clear at the top of the Championship and can now be afforded a much needed rest this weekend.
Football is for winners. When you’re a child taking your first steps in the game you may be told that the most important thing is enjoying your football, and then when you’re much older you may be told that it’s all about the beer and social side of a day out with the lads. People will say they go to football to be entertained, to feel part of something, to see their friends and a multitude of other things. Players will say they just want to cement a place in the first team, or try and get to 15 goals in the season, or play in the Premiership one day. Managers will set modest and achievable points and position targets for their team and say they’d be happy with a season of consolidation.
It’s mostly all bollocks – everybody in football wants to win – this Saturday, next Saturday and the Saturday after that. There’s no feeling like winning, and there’s nowhere quite as lonely as Norwich railway station after a defeat no matter how good everything that has gone before has been.
And so it always puzzles, and at times angers, me when I see teams openly throwing away their places in cup competitions. Apart from the respective leagues clubs in Britain have the League Cup, FA Cup and Football League trophy to compete for. That’s four league trophies and three cups to divide between 92 clubs every year – a lot of disappointment is inevitable. Clubs like Man Utd and Chelsea can afford to be picky because they have sufficient quality to know that they will be there or thereabouts at the end of the season when the really big prizes are handed out but for the rest of us there is no excuse for tossing aside what few chances we have for silverware.
According to stories in the press this week one in six of us will live to be 100. I have the stomach lining of a 54 year old air traffic controller, a consequence of too many cooked breakfasts and years spent watching Zesh Rehman and Karl Ready, so I doubt I’ll be one them but even if I was I never expect to see QPR win the Premiership. The best I ever think we can achieve in my lifetime, which may have another 70-odd years to run, is pushing on for a European spot at some point. The very best moment I can ever have as a QPR fan in my life is if we win one of the cups.
Now for Rangers that’s unlikely at the moment. Quite apart from the fact we haven’t won a game in the FA Cup for ten years, the worst record of any team of any size in the entire country, we are currently a Championship side and are therefore unlikely to be lifting a piece of major silverware any time soon. It’s not impossible though – Millwall and Cardiff made the FA Cup final and Tranmere, Chesterfield and Barnsley have enjoyed great runs in it. We’ve given up our spot in this competition in pathetic circumstances over the last decade, often when we had nothing else to play for by way of league position, and it’s a sad statistic that now hangs over us.
Millwall played European football after their final appearance, even though they didn’t win. Imagine not only going to Wembley with QPR for the FA Cup final, but following that up with European fixtures under the lights at Loftus Road, and trips to far flung corners of Europe to see our team play. It would be the first time in a generation QPR fans have been able to do that, and I’d be the first one on the plane.
But it’s the way the Premiership teams will gladly surrender their League Cup and FA Cup places so easily that angers me most. Clubs like Sunderland, Wigan, Birmingham, Blackburn and others all have a decent chance of winning these competitions – genuine, historic cup competitions with European places up for grabs not to mention the glory of seeing your club lift the cup at Wembley. All of them sling reserve teams out and crash out of the trophies year after year in front of miniscule crowds under the blanket excuse of terror at the perceived threat to their Premiership status a cup run poses. Teams like Bolton, Stoke and Sunderland should be having a bloody good run at this thing this year because they’d stand a great chance of lifting it. I bet they don’t though – expect meek exits from scratch teams in front of half full stadiums. It drives me mad.
When young players are making their way in the game they dream of lifting trophies and winning medals. When old pros sit their grandchildren down to tell them about their careers it’s the cup finals and league championships they tell them about. Where are the memories, honour and glory in deliberately losing in the cup to ensure a sixteenth place finish in the Premiership? And who says going through a few rounds in the cup knackers your league form anyway?
However, for this season and this weekend only, I’m suspending my beliefs. I shall be travelling to Blackburn on Saturday, at some expense too, but while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I want us to lose I certainly hope the vast majority of our first team is left at home. Neil Warnock has hinted at as much when asked about the game, while maintaining that he wants to win. A defeat here would make it four defeats in seven games and the doom mongers on the LFW message board would have a field day with that statistic, racing around hysterically screeching something about the sky falling. A win would help confidence and momentum, but the rest for our players would be much more valuable in my opinion.
There have been too many games this Christmas. When even I’m saying that it must have been bad. I think three is enough, another double round this weekend was excessive. QPR have played around 100 minutes of the 360 this Christmas with ten men, and faced games at an in form Norwich and against a horrendously physical Coventry outfit. Shaun Derry said his legs felt like concrete during the second game and the R’s looked absolutely out on their feet at Carrow Road on Saturday before conceding in the last minute against Bristol City on Monday. Watford, admittedly hindered by a second half where play was suspended for three separate floodlight failures, lost three key men to muscle injuries at Scunthorpe on Monday. It has all been too much – gratuitous amounts of football that QPR have done superbly to come out of five points clear at the top of the table.
If we were in the middle of the Championship I’d have said sod it, rest players against Norwich and Bristol City and go for the cup game. We are playing a Blackburn side mired in a deep farce, under new owners who rival our own Flavio Briatore in the ridiculousness stakes and with an agent weighted backroom set up that is doomed to failure in the short, medium and long term. This is a cup upset waiting to happen and a fresh, full strength QPR side would have little difficulty in polishing Rovers off this weekend with Steve Kean sure to make plenty of changes himslf.
But I’d rest most of them. Mackie looks like my Seat Ibiza did when three years of thrashing the arse out of it resulted in four broken petrol injectors, Shaun Derry must have to spend his evenings in an iron lung, likewise Clint Hill. Kaspars Gorkss, Alejandro Faurlin and Adel Taarabt have played more minutes than most and are all players we cannot afford to have injured or suspended. Heidar Helguson has to be nursed through games at the best of times and two starts in five days last week had him unable to continue halfway through the Norwich match. I wouldn’t play a single one of them. I’d have Georgios Tofas, Petter Vaagan Moen, Martin Rowlands, Gavin Mahon, Hogan Ephraim and Patrick Agyemang in from the start. Hell I’d almost support the selection of Fitz Hall and Leon Clarke if it gives the other lads a rest.
The League Cup exit at home to Port Vale in August hurt at the time, but meant we were only playing one game a week while many other Championship sides were on a Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday schedule. Shaun Derry in particular is hugely important to the success we’re having this season and the fewer games he plays the better. Should we beat Blackburn after a replay in the next fortnight that would leave us facing a January of seven matches played Saturday, Monday, Saturday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Saturday. Send a reserve team and lose and our first team effectively has four fixtures this month with two free Saturdays, and that could be absolutely invaluable.
For one season only I’m happy to suspend my protective nature towards our great cup competitions if it helps to further our ultimate goal of winning promotion.
I thought I’d stick that in there because I sure as hell won’t be putting it in a match preview any time soon. No doubt with the football we are playing and the results we have had if you lashed out on a season ticket at Loftus Road in the summer you’re very pleased with your purchase. But QPR haven’t played at home on a Saturday at 3pm since the Cardiff game in November and have this week lost another fixture to a Sunday lunch time kick off thanks to Sky – Nottingham Forest on February 12 was due to be our next normal kick off, that honour now goes to Leicester on March 5 and I’d say there’s a more than good chance that one will be shifted as well. That is roughly three and a half months without a standard home kick off.
It’s a price of success, a small price at that, and if we are to win promotion then we had better get used to it with Sky screening more games every season. But if you cannot attend midweek games and choose to watch the televised games on the television then your season ticket for this year would, as it stands, be used only 13 times - £40.70 a match for my seat. For many, many supporters it would have made sense to simply pay match by match this season.
That’s without getting into how much lamer a match day experience is when the game is at 1pm on a Sunday, and of course our side’s apparent camera shyness which could yet derail our promotion push if Sky don’t leave us alone soon. Perhaps we shouldn’t have complained so loudly about the media’s Cardiff love in after all.