End of Term Report 22/23 — Midfield Monday, 22nd May 2023 13:21 by Clive Whittingham Part three of our annual end of season assessment of the individual QPR players focuses on nine midfield players who between them contributed nine goals and just five assists from 224 collective appearances. 6 — Stefan Johansen EEverybody has their favourite pet hate at QPR at the moment, on and off the pitch. Depending on who you follow it’s all the fault of Tony Fernandes, Amit Bhatia, Ruben Gnanalingam, Lee Hoos, Les Ferdinand or whoever the manager is at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within our dugout. Among the fans, there are knives out for multiple squad members. Hey, good news is lads, there’s plenty of blame to go around, it’s been a dreadful season. The defender write up posted last week has provoked steady debate on the message board and socials among those for whom Rob Dickie, Leon Balogun, Ethan Laird, Jake Clarke-Salter or Osman Kakay is their bête noire. We now have this midfield piece, in which we’ll spend more time talking about Taylor Richards than Taylor Richards has managed to make it onto the pitch for. Then a postmortem of QPR’s “attack”, where the better marks will be shared by a retiree who makes Bernard Manning look like Hammersmith and Fulham Weightwatchers’ slimmer of the week and a geezer who, when he wasn’t missing the goal from half a yard out, was laid up on a ventilator. The write ups of two of the worst loan signings this club has ever made in its history are still to come. We’ve been examining the UCAS grading system for what comes after F. Amongst the vitriol, the vendettas, the bitterness, the recriminations, the blame, one name slips by almost completely unmentioned. You’ve opened this article to watch me tee off on Taylor Richards, and we'll get to that just as soon as I’ve picked a club from the bag. In the meantime, let me tell you who the biggest problem is in this first team squad at the moment — it’s Stefan Johansen. We repeatedly say this team lacks voice, leadership and spine. Stefan Johansen is meant to be the captain of it. Where was he in the dog days, when the team was imploding, when Rob Dickie looked like a bloke who’d been beaten around the head with a frying pan, when Jimmy Dunne was chasing referees around begging them to disallow his latest bed shitting, when the loan signings had checked out, when Tyler was taking a seat and raising his hand once more? Where was the club captain? Where is that driving of standards, that policing of a dressing room? Where was he making sure the departure of one gobshite manager didn’t make us go all graphite on the roof? He’s so bad at that job that within a fortnight of Chris Martin being dragged back from his Mykonos retirement barbecue he’d been given the armband himself. Bristol City, fourteenth in the table, were content to release Martin in January, and we made him the captain. By the end of the season he was going on the club’s own official website saying the players aren’t dedicated enough off the pitch. That’s Chris bloody Martin talking. Where was the club captain? How many post-match interviews did we hear from him? We say this team struggles to cope with adversity. We say it lacks stones and minerals and balls and all of that stuff. We watch our Instagram footballers bask in the glory of their moderately good times and collapse like the flimsiest house of cards the moment the going gets remotely tough. We talk about how they lack experience and need to be able to deal with those moments better. Stefan Johansen is one of your most experienced players. He’s the one who’s meant to have been there, seen it, done it. He’s the one who’s meant to know what it takes to grind out the victories you need for promotions, league titles, play-off campaigns. His record prior to joining QPR was ridiculous — at least a promotion, title or play-off qualification in nine of his previous ten seasons. So, where is he? Where is that influence? Where was any of that when we so desperately needed it through the spring? How much digging in was he doing in a 33-minute cameo off the bench at Blackpool?
We say the club now lacks the FFP headroom and budget to do anything about any of this, that we have to make more of what we’ve got, that we have to sell what few assets we have left. So many of the problems we’re now facing, and about to face, are born from us pushing the boat out in the summer of 2021, making all the loans permanent, signing several others besides, selling nobody. It’s parked us behind a financial eight ball as big as the sun. Stefan Johansen is almost certainly your top earner. He’s taking up more of that FFP headspace than anybody else we’ve got. Stefan Johansen was the biggest expenditure in that intake. We got so steamed up over his form here on loan that in a fit of horny ‘I must have it’ we gave a 30-year-old a big fat three-year contract to persuade him to come here permanently — obliterating all the financial discipline we’d previously shown in refusing to do exactly that for Nahki Wells. And what is he contributing for it? We talk about availability being the key problem for QPR last season. Too many players sitting out too much football, too much salary bill parked in the stands. Too many players sitting down, too many choosing not to play when they could have stuck their hand up. Stefan Johansen earns more than all of them, and he started just 21 times. When he does play, and he’s fit, QPR are so much of a better side it’s startling. We require him to be there, and in condition, to function. When he is, and he is, and we do, it’s brilliant. His most consistent run of games and form came in October, when we topped the table, and he scored goals at Millwall and Bristol City, got a pair of assists against Wigan, won man of the match at The Den. But this is so seldom now. He’s done. His legs have gone. And there’s another year of that millstone contract still to go. I hold my hands up, I wanted him signed, I was excited, I thought he was terrific on loan, I got carried away too. But this signing, and the deal it took to achieve it, is the epitome of the hubris and needless risk taking that has led us into this bleak cul-de-sac we now find ourselves in, with only multiple player sales and months more of footballing pain by way of an escape. He was the king of those loan signings, he was the one we pushed the boat out furthest to sign permanently, he was the one we all thought was the final piece in the promotion puzzle, he was the most expensive, and he is now the biggest drain on our limited resources for the least return. You can’t talk about Roberts, Richards, or anybody else in this squad, without first talking about Johansen. Unless you can re-animate this guy, find a break clause in the contract, or renegotiate the terms, then we’re already starting next season’s marathon swim with a lead weight tied to us. In numbers:
8 — Luke Amos ELike Seny Dieng, a rare example of a QPR player emerging from the end of the 21/22 season with their stock enhanced. Luke Amos’ ability to get up and beyond the strikers, and even score the occasional goal from midfield, very much made him Sideshow Bob in the land of the bald at QPR. He scored six in Mark Warburton’s last campaign, including dramatic late winners at home to Blackpool and Derby, while the rest of the midfield contributed two between them — and even one of those originally went down as an own goal at Reading before being given back to Dom Ball. Given that strong finish there was some hope that he may be able to hit the ground running under Michael Beale and provide the legs, energy and goalscoring threat that is otherwise entirely absent from our midfield. Initially the signs were good. Amos was a key part of the 3-2 home win against Middlesbrough in August. However, sadly rather typically, he then wasn’t available again until October 1. Rangers won there, at Bristol City, with him getting 20 minutes, and then again with him starting during the week at Sheff Utd. They kept winning too, taking maximum points in six of Amos’ first seven appearances of the season. His value to the team is shown in a squad leading win percentage of 42.11%. Our midfield is so immobile, so slow, so incapable of getting up the pitch to support the strikers and pose goal threat, that even the addition of one part used Luke Amos can be transformative to it. We are, sadly, back to that theme of availability though. Amos only managed eight starts in total. He didn’t play at all from the start of November to the end of the year and then after getting a couple of comeback games in over Christmas disappeared again until March. He gets more of a pass than most in this regard — having been through the trauma of Ale Faurlin’s three ACL ruptures, QPR fans are sympathetically and empathetically attuned to a player who, like Amos, suffers that injury more than once. Honest Mick also admitted he’d played players before they were ready, and for longer than he’d been advised to, in the Boro home game because we needed to “get this thing going”. Amos wasn’t the only one who subsequently missed time after being flogged for those three points, it didn’t do Chris Willock much good either. But, still, we quickly got into the pattern with Amos that we did with so many of our other players this season — missing for weeks and weeks at a time, without an update on his condition, or even any firm news or information on what the problem is exactly. He’s largely escaped any criticism for that, others haven’t been so lucky, and again I’m imploring the club to rethink this strategy of telling us as little as possible about our players for fear that Blackburn Rovers will suddenly change their entire strategy to face us on the basis of the news Luke Amos might make the bench. Luke did a decent turn off the bench at Burnley in that surprise victory which all but sealed QPR’s Championship status. It was pretty clear, however, that he wouldn’t be getting a new deal at the end of the season. Having spent all week leading up to the Bristol City game on the final day saying he wanted to have a look at some other players, some of the younger lads, and some of those playing for contracts, Ainsworth then picked the same stodgy 4-4-2 as usual for that dead rubber, with two 34-year-olds in it. The only new thing was a start for Amos. Basing a new contract award on one performance against Bristol City does feel like a very QPR thing to do but luckily for us and sadly for him he played dreadfully. It was really quite sad to watch, as he berated and beat himself up throughout the game, nothing really going right and the team losing a club record twelfth home game. Lightweight and fragile, you could never fault Amos’ effort or commitment, but at times he desperately needed to just relax and get out of his own head. He’s been very unlucky with injuries during his time here and I guess all there is left is to wish him well wherever he ends up. In numbers:
15 — Sam Field BI get the impression if you sat Sam Field down to talk about the season just gone it would quickly disintegrate into him sobbing uncontrollably into your shoulder. Absolutely no surprise to see him sweep the board at the hollowest end of season awards we’ve had at Rangers for many years. In most cases we were left to pick from a shortlist of one, but even more depressing than this is what made Field stand out so much from the crowd. Field was our only outfield ever present, starting all 48 games — his 4,033 minutes on the field was the most by any outfielder in the Championship. He maintained a consistent level of performance throughout the season. More to the point, he maintained a consistent level of effort and commitment to the cause throughout the season. At times, through the winter, it really did feel like Sam Field against the world. Charging around desperately making one sliding tackle after another as the defence behind him and team overall threatened to become completely overwhelmed. Nobody in our team made more tackles (113), more blocks (87) or more interceptions (81). Not so much Field The Shield as Field the One Man Team. Game after game, minute after minute, hour after hour completed in that engine room, while all around him checked out with their half-arsed efforts and insincere sit-down hand up routines. Right down to the bitter end, at home to Norwich and away at Stoke, he was picking up both the LFW man of the match awards — against the Canaries a point was only preserved by his latest desperate rescue act in the Loft End penalty box. When Ainsworth decided to switch to a back three, it was Field asked to go and play left centre back — went well against Watford, less so against Blackpool. The goal against Burnley was vitally important, and beautifully executed, but it also felt just so perfect that it was him that scored it. Nobody in this team deserved that moment more. Watching him run around, tongue out, not really knowing what to do or where to go, over stimulated, like that time a dog got into your school. But happy. Something neither he nor we have been very often over the last 18 months, and something both of us deserve a lot more moving forwards.
It is, however, a pretty sad indictment that turning up for work, putting a shift in, making a level of effort, trying your best, maintaining a 5.77/6.19 grade average, is enough to not only win you the Player of the Year award, but win it so obviously and by such a wide margin. Field’s been decent, but little more than that, as he admitted in his last interview. Honest Mick’s attempt to turn him into a more attacking midfielder, which did start with a headed goal at Crawley in pre-season, wasn’t a particular success and soon reversed, but I do think Field could and should contribute more at the attacking end of the pitch. His goal at Fleetwood was a bit of a nonsense but the technique on the strikes that won the games at home to Wigan and, memorably, away to Burnley suggest there’s potential for maybe half a dozen goals from midfield there. It's probably worth pointing out at this point that Sam Field hasn’t always been this durable ever present. The end of his time at boyhood club West Brom, and his availability within our budget, was precisely because he’d struggled with fitness and injuries early in his career. Whisper it quietly, Taylor Richards has more senior appearances to his name at 21 than Field did at the same point. Field has started more games for QPR since the World Cup break than he did in his entire six years at The Hawthorns. In an effort to find value in the market QPR have not been shy of buying players with chequered injury records in recent times, and that policy has been brought into sharp focus this year by the breakdown of so many of the players we brought here last summer. But we do have to acknowledge that there will inevitably be something wrong with every player we sign, because otherwise they’d be too expensive for us, and Field is a great example of what can happen when it goes right. It’s not all doom and gloom, with major surgery required all over the pitch we do at least have a player with his best years still ahead here we can build around. “If we had 11 Sam Fields we wouldn’t have a problem” said Richard Dobson on the Open All R’s Podcast earlier this month — well, quite. In numbers:
17 — Andre The Friendly Ghost ETell you who would have been good in this situation — The Queen. Joe Public loves a royal visit, get that big posh train of hers parked up at Shepherd’s Bush Overground, have Lee Hoos roll out the good plates and the free drink tokens, line everybody up along the side of the pitch, and let’s have Liz walk along and shake all their hands and ask “and what dooo you doooo?” Maybe then, from Andre Dozzell’s own mouth, we might be able to find out, because at the moment this is just an ornament. Something that looks like a footballer, in a football kit, that we just stand at the side there and look at, and it sits there and looks back at you, doing nothing of any use whatsoever, just existing. The sort of tat your nan accumulates a lot of, necessitating a huge house clearance when she slips in her own piss one too many times and you have to put her into a home. Pick Andre Dozzell up, look at the sole of his foot, I swear to God it’ll say Made In China on there. Ostensibly a midfielder, Dozzell contributed zero goals and zero assists to the cause this year from 30 appearances. He scored an absolute banger in a pre-season friendly against some chumps from the seventh circle of German footballing mediocrity, and at that point I was basically waterboarding myself in Mick Beale Kool Aid. If this guy can actually turn Andre Dozzell into an effective, dangerous, attacking midfielder, contributing goals and everything, then my good God he’s going to make Terry Venables look like one of Paul Hart’s beer shits. Inevitably, it was beyond even the powers of Honest Mick. There was a near miss, from the edge of the box, late in the game at Bristol City, and another very similar chance at West Brom on Easter Monday. That was it. You could count his effective performances on the finger of one finger — Watford at home. Sitting down on Sunday evening to put the latest QPR clusterfuck into some sort of coherent prose for LFW, there was more than one occasion that I noted with some alarm Dozzell’s name on the team sheet, and had to WhatsApp around to confirm this to be the case and get some group think on a potential mark out of ten, because I’d either clean forgotten he’d played or never noticed him there in the first place. I can genuinely sit and watch QPR play with Andre Dozzell in the team for hours and hours and hours without ever once noticing or realising he’s there. We used to say Jermaine Jenas had a weird knack of always being ten yards away from anything that’s happening, well ten yards would be something to aspire to for Dozzell. Hell, just being in the same post code of any moment of consequence for this team would be a start. We’ve got Ian Randall on a bonus scheme for managing to get a photograph of Dozzell doing something, anything, at all, in any game — the one below is the only one he’s managed so far, we’ve printed it out for a frame. During the collapse of the Mark Warburton promotion push we did stem the bleeding to a certain extent with a 2-2 draw at promotion chasing Huddersfield. After weeks and months of insipid, unwatchable backwards and sideways football from the team, QPR did at least go forwards that day with some purpose, and Dozzell, Luke Amos and Ilias Chair drove that. I remarked at the time that Dozzell, at least, is capable of playing forwards, through the lines, and getting us up the pitch. I can’t really recall him doing that once last season. He’s probably got a large scale print of that bloody Andre Gray assist at Cardiff on his living room wall but, look, we’ve had that wank now, a lot, we need some new material. In numbers:
20 — Taylor Richards FThe noise you can hear is the QPR Think They’ve Done Something Clever alarm. This noise will sound every time QPR think they’ve done something clever, releasing Yoann Barbet to sign Jake Clarke-Salter for instance, and enable you to evacuate your loved ones and most prized possessions to higher ground to avoid the inevitable hurricane of piss which is sure to follow. Taylor Richards was one of five loan signings at QPR this season, except he wasn’t actually ever a loan signing at all. This was, to all intents and purposes, a permanent transfer from the start but the excesses of 21/22 have left the club sailing so close to the FFP wind once more that they wanted to kick the transfer fee 12 months down the line into the next set of accounts. The solution? A loan with an obligation to buy unless relegated. Genius, right? I don’t know how we think them up. Never mind you Sunderland, with your Edouard Michut and Amad Diallo, this is how you do a loan signing. What’s more, it’s a replacement for Ilias Chair and/or Chris Willock before they’ve even left the building, just like we did buying Willock before Bright Osayi-Samuel left. It’s exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. Any prize from the middle shelf guys, brilliant stuff. Problem. What if the year he spends here on loan is a train wreck? What if the boy who once injured himself doing a jumping test during his Birmingham City medical turns out to be, hold the line caller, horrifically injury prone? What if he starts only one game out of the 48 you play all season long, away at Coventry, and you lose 2-0, and he plays like an absolute penarse? What if, by the end of the season, he’s in worst physical shape than most of the regulars at the Crown and Sceptre? What if he disappears, not even making the bench, for long periods of unexplained time? What if, when pushed on this, manager two of three manages to bite his tongue and remain professional, when actually he’s livid about the entire situation and wants to say far, far worse, and simply says “Taylor’s struggled to get himself going” (which with one start in seven months is manifestly fucking obviously fucking true) and even this drives this hyper-sensitive man baby onto his social media to object, causing said manager yet another problem on the weekend he lost his job? What if manager three of three gives him a little cameo in a late season game against Coventry and his contribution is to do four bandy legged step overs, the four bandy leg step overs of London’s drunkest man, in front of an opponent who stifles a laugh, takes the ball off him, pops it into the giant space behind, and they score? What if, on the ten occasions he does actually make it onto the pitch long enough to receive a mark, QPR lose nine of those games? Well, now you’re in the shit aren’t you? Idiot. Because now you’ve got a team in need of major surgery in all sorts of key areas right across the pitch, you’ve got precious little FFP headroom to do that with, and you’ve already committed a chunk of the budget to signing a player who, in addition to All Of That, is a technical, fancy, ball playing attacking midfielder for a manager who doesn’t do technical, doesn’t do fancy, doesn’t do ball playing and whose midfield experiences football in the same way Big Jet TV experiences air travel — standing on the ground, neck craned, watching the action, high above their heads, up in the sky.
There was the tragic death of his close friend, which naturally hit him hard, to take into consideration by way of mitigation. This, however, didn’t take place until the turn of the year, and Taylor Richards had been a problem child on and off the pitch for QPR long before that happened. He did impress as a substitute in the home defeat to Huddersfield — desperately unlucky not to score in that game. At Rotherham, another defeat, he did at least look like a player capable of getting the ball down and making something happen, though even that was tempered by the now infamous incident where he stopped mid-game, as his man was running at him with the ball, to do his shoelaces up, leaving Aaron Drewe to try and cope with the resulting two v one situation. He might have scored with his first touch to win the game at West Brom over Easter. And so you just have to hope that given a full pre-season, given time to get over his grief, hopefully injury free, you’ve actually got a really good one here after all, and we’re sitting here next year writing about one of the great turnarounds. At the moment this looks like such a fucking unmitigated disaster there were points I was kind of hoping we did go down just so we could escape this deal. In numbers:
37 — Albert Adomah DThe best, and worst, bits of the various lockdowns we endured together, were the Big Goals. Macauley Bonne in the last minute at Derby, Charlie Austin’s first back in our colours at Luton, the comeback victory at home to Brentford. Nick London and Andy Sinton, our eyes and ears and presence, on their shoulders. Some of them we did experience as a group. When Bonne honed in on a Yoann Barbet cross and headed in a last minute leveller against Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough we were in that utterly preposterous point of the pandemic where you could congregate together in a pub as long as there weren’t more than six of you at a table and you all had a Scotch egg —Taxi Joe scaled the supporting pillar in the middle of the Crown and Sceptre in celebration like a hairy pole dancer and had to be chased down from the ceiling by Jake the Barman, with a broom. When Dom Ball drew his left boot back against Cardiff City, Covid had decided it would leave you alone if there were no more than six at your table, and you had a toasted sandwich, and the table was outside. The Crown’s garden dissolved into a carnage of airborne beer, grilled cheese and flailing limbs to the disgust of Catherine the Landlady (“I hate you all as individuals, but thanks for the business”) and the twat who lives next door who’s one of those Move Next To Heathrow Airport and Complain About The Planes sorts. They were, in their own way, little magical moments in our grim lives, much needed relief in a bleak time, sugar for your Shredded Wheat. But with them came the immediate downer that we couldn’t actually be there. That we couldn’t see Ball’s ridiculous 30 yarder arcing through the air towards the top corner, that we couldn’t be crammed in behind that goal at Kenilworth Road watching Bonne’s game-sealer come travelling towards us, that we didn’t have that long boozy train ride back from Swansea after Lyndon Dykes won it with the last kick. Bitter sweet memories are all I'm taking with me, and one of the bitterest and sweetest moments among them was Albert Adomah’s first ever QPR goal, scored in the very final minute of a Monday Night Football game, off the end of an immaculate first touch, right in front of what is usually the away end, at Vicarage Road in Watford. Oh to have been part of that seething, heaving mass behind the goal, to have suffered those bruised shins, to have contributed to that noise, to have raced back to Mabel’s for last orders, running for the last High Barnet tube singing the name of the local boy finally scoring in our colours. Delighted he scored, ecstatic we won, mood improved ten thousand percent, but ten minutes afterwards it was time to switch the television off, and then it was just us, alone, in the dark, in the living room again. Day after day after day. That desperation to get back to the thing we love the most has dissipated somewhat through 2022 and 2023. Following them around a broken country with a collapsing infrastructure and transport network has, once again, become a chore. There is so much wrong with QPR on and off the pitch again at the moment. But we did, at least, have that moment replayed for us, in our presence. A beautiful flowing move down our left flank, cutting Watford apart, the lesser-spotted early release from Ilias Chair, the overlapping attacking run of Kenneth Paal which we’ve sadly gone away from since, the perfect low cross and then, honing into view, a queue of QPR shirts unmarked in the box ready to finish. Stefan Johansen nearly botched it, Albert’s first touch was nowhere near as good as it had been for the original, but the finish off the underside of the bar was pristine and this time we got to enjoy in all its violent, tumbling, phone smashing glory behind that goal. It was one of few moments of genuine joy in the season, and it felt so apt that it was Adomah to provide it.
His second goal of the season was pretty similar. Another move down the left, another low ball across, another moment just before when you thought the chance had gone (this time because Lyndon Dykes’ low shot was saved), and a split second of terror as the ball hits the woodwork that, actually, he’s bloody missed it. At Stoke the ball bounced into the net off the post, once again in front of a packed away end. But there were now raptures this time. No tumbling down stairs. This time it was pure relief. A goal, almost missed, to win a football game, borderline unwatchable, to save a team that had topped the table in October from being relegated out of it altogether. It was great to win, nice for Adomah to be the man to do it, but it was nothing to celebrate really. In a 1-0 defeat at Sheffield United at the end of Mark Warburton’s reign it was our distinct misfortune to be standing in the part of the away end where Albert Adomah was, ostensibly, meant to be attacking the home full back. He looked absolutely spent. From a guy who gets the final ball right every single time, to somebody who literally couldn’t even kick the ball hard enough to lift it off the floor. I could have defended against him myself that night. Adomah has had a fantastic career, in which he’s basically been available to play every single game for every single club (well in excess of 100 appearances for four different clubs, 500 Championship appearances surpassed in March), but he looked done then. There was little question in my mind that we’d even be offering him a new contract at all — nice idea, little cameo for his home town club, some great moments and memories, but two seasons was plenty. To not only renew his deal, but renew it for another two years, I just still cannot get my head around. He's been available this year — featured in 40 games, albeit 26 as a substitute. But from that he’s contributed just those two goals, and zero (zero) assists. Bristol City’s first goal on the final day at Loftus Road, scored after Albert had unadvisedly tried to execute a bicycle kick in his own box and missed the ball entirely, did rather sum up that while the spirit might still be willing the flesh is spongy and bruised. I'm starting to wonder how many takes some of those Instagram videos require. And another year still to come. In numbers:
47 - Tim Iroegbunam COf all the loan deals we did this season, Tim Iroegbunam was by far my favourite. Sadly, given the way our loan market activity panned out, that’s a bit like picking your favourite colonoscopy, or the best episode of Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. There is a strong, vocal corner of modern football support’s broad church who exist online rather than at the games, are over the top pessimistic, frequently extremely angry, and absolutely obsessed with signings. It is all about signings. More than goals, more than results, more than games, more than league tables. Signings. Always be signing. If you’re not signing, you’re not spending money, you’re not doing it right. They spend the summer haranguing their club of choice, and any board member or senior figure who might be daft enough to have a social media account, to “announce Austin”. Every Tweet, about pre-season friendlies, season tickets, Carabao drinks promotions, temporary box office closures, met with a tidal wave of identical replies: “this isn’t Austin”, “announce Austin”, “Austin or admin gets it”, “nan stays in the cage until Austin”. When Austin is eventually signed and cannot live up to that hype, they are then the first accounts to turn on him, his wife, anybody they can find really, copying him/her/them into their “get out of my club” Tweets. A new arms race begins, to say the most over-the-top and hateful thing you can think of. There is zero acknowledgement they wanted the signing, absolutely no understanding of FFP, and no comprehension that the money/budget/headroom has been spent now on that player they wanted and doesn’t exist — just an immediate new quest to sign some other flavour of the month to replace Austin, who is now apparently complete crap. These are the people Jim White is speaking to when he says Nottingham Forest have “won the transfer window”. It’s a generation that has grown up experiencing football through computer games rather than in stadiums, and for the Fifa Ultimate Teams bois signings like this one in particular are as close as they’ve ever been to sex. A Premier League academy player, that @YouthHawk2638 has been tipping as the next Jude Bellingham, who won everything in the game on their last Football Manager ‘save’, going on the slate from some proper, big, important club you’ve heard of, for idiot scum outfits like ours to fall over themselves committing loan fees, wages and guarantees of playing time just to borrow for a bit. Nothing revs them up quite like it. Formation graphics start appearing with the child front and centre: “we’ll cook with Iroegbunam”, “get Iroegbunam and we’ll cook”, “this line up cooks”, “Tim and we cook”. It’s like some episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White cruising round Premier League academies in his Pontiac Aztec, pointing out of the window and proclaiming “that’s where we’ll cook”. Among all of Honest Mick’s dick swinging about how many agents he’d been on the phone to about players, which was concerning enough, was the assertion that loads of loads of these academy lads wanted to come here and play, and the wholly unedifying prospect of us basically walking around with our dick in our hand all summer begging to borrow kids from Aston Villa, a team we were playing (and beating) in the league barely three seasons ago. Eventually Tim Iroegbunam was landed (go get the HMS Piss The League memes) and what Tim Iroegbunam needed at that point was absolutely none of all of this. None of it. He needed the exact, complete, polar opposite. Under hype, under promise, lower expectations, hopefully if things go well over deliver. He only turned 19 at the end of June and had played precisely 97 minutes of senior men’s football in his entire life to that point. We asked him to come in and play central midfield for QPR in a 48-game Championship season, and essentially be the main man. It was a tall order, absolutely not helped at all by all this talk of “cooking” and Beale thumping his tub, even when the season looked like it might go well. When the whole thing turned into the biggest fucktastrophe since NASA’s weather guy on The Challenger mission proclaimed it “a bit chilly, but probably ok”, he was plunged into a situation players with many thousands of times his experience would have struggled with. How did he do with it? Overall, not bad. His main strength was driving forwards, with the ball at feet, committing and beating men, and joining the attack from midfield. At QPR they’ve burned people under suspicion of witchcraft for a lot less than this. Goals from central midfield have been a persistent problem for many seasons at Loftus Road, and when Luke Amos went on a bit of a hot streak at the end of 21/22 I thought we were going to make him a knight of the realm. Iroegbunam was very good at home to Reading live on Sky, accelerating into the area to win a late penalty to win the game. His best performance came at Preston in Neil Critchley’s first game, where he played high up the field in a hard-working, athletic three-man press immediately behind lone striker Lyndon Dykes. We played really well as a team that day, should have won by more, and Iroegbunam was the best player on the pitch — desperately unlucky to see a first half 25 yarder come back into play off the inside of the post. Quite why Critchley went away from that system and style as quickly as he did (literally the week after) I have no idea — even Andre Dozzell was half decent at Deepdale. Later, after things had gone a bit J G Ballard, it was Iroegbunam scoring one of only five Loft End goals all season long at home to Blackburn, and skilfully driving on into the Watford penalty box for a brilliant winner against The Hornets. While all the other loans checked out to one degree or another, Iroegbunam was still plugging away right to the end of the season as the ballast in a Gareth Ainsworth team watching the ball whizzing around over his head — infamously, and through absolutely no fault of his own, attempting one pass in an hour of football at Burnley and completing at 0%. Rangers should have used him further forward much more often to take advantage of these strengths. Too often he was too deep, as a defensive central midfielder, or asked to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune in a painfully basic 4-4-2. Given those strengths, two goals and one assist is pretty pathetic. His defensive game exists only in the same way punishments for tipping sewage into Britain’s chalk streams exists. It’s an ideal, a thought, a concept. The faint strains of a song you cannot quite place, drifting in on a summer’s breeze. Practically, it’s not there. Critics used to say Ale Faurlin let men run off his back, Tim Iroegbunam lets them run off his front. I’m not sure whether it’s inexperience, lack of concentration, all the crap going on around him, but it needs serious work. Keep your eye on him for Luton’s second goal in their 3-0 win at Loftus Road. I should flag Norwich away as a counter point to this — booked after ten seconds, he gave a fantastically disciplined performance in that 0-0 draw thereafter. But, still, only QPR would use a kid with those respective strengths and weaknesses in the way we did this season. He showed you what he was about, against Reading, against Preston, and by and large we ignored him. He bottomed out, along with several others, in the 3-0 loss at Hull. Touching the ball just 27 times while playing central midfield, he gave it away 30% of the times he had it. But, I say again, 19 year old, learning his trade, first full season in senior football, in a collapsing team. That’s what you get, more often than not, with loans like this, out of an academy system entirely unsuited to producing players physically and mentally capable of competing in men’s football. For Aston Villa, this loan has been fantastic. What an awakening into the harsh realities of real football this has been for him, packing the experience and drama of half a dozen seasons into one nine-month crash course. He, and they, will benefit enormously from that. And us? Well, I guess we’ll just wait and see which child we’re so desperately privileged to cook with next. In numbers:
Others Elijah Dixon Bonner made one substitute appearance which was enough to make the shortlist for Young Player of the Year. His surname is good comedy value for the U10s in the crowd. Charlie Owens, now 25 years old, has been released on a free transfer after six years of employment with QPR in which he made one start and two sub appearances in the League Cup, and four substitute appearances split equally between two loan spells at Colchester and Wycombe. Links >>> Goalkeepers >>> Defence >>> Midfield >>> Attack 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 Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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