A year on from his first, heartfelt, piece for LFW, Ian Elmer returns to assess the situation at Loftus Road from his point of view as the players prepare to return to pre-season training.
Just over a year ago Loft for Words was kind enough to post a very personal and heartfelt piece I wrote about the passing of my father shortly before the end of the 2011/2012 season and all the emotions that were linked to this and QPR’s ultimate redemption and survival at Man City on the final game of the season. It was at times a painful piece to write but ultimately ended on a real note of optimism for the forthcoming campaign, when it seemed that surely we would learn the lessons of our return to the Premier League and begin to establish ourselves over the seasons to come.
Of course, as we are all painfully aware now, that optimism was horribly misplaced and I and the rest of the QPR faithful (funny how the things in life that mean the most always try to test your faith) had to endure what can only be described as an unmitigated disaster of a campaign with the team we love seemingly finding every wrong way to approach the task in hand. This in turn led to an utterly predictable and ignominious relegation that if we were honest we could all see coming from the very first game of the season, when we were comprehensively brushed aside by a Swansea team that we hadn’t come close to beating us at Loftus Road in 19 previous attempts.
So, fast forward to June 2013 and QPR are back in the Championship, with a team in a total state of flux and long hard 46 game season ahead in a league that demonstrates year in and year out that anyone can beat anyone else and frequently does. The last time we were in the Championship we had a battle hardened manager in Neil Warnock who knew exactly what to do to get us out of it and a trump card in Adel Taarabt who could win a game with a drop of a shoulder and a shimmy. This time round we have (at least at the time of writing) a manager who has great experience but little Championship pedigree and in all likelihood will be minus Adel to act as a talisman, though it is a moot point as to whether he would even want to play him in the first place.
So, where the hell do we go from here? Are we going to do a West Ham and grind our way back to the Premier League or god forbid do a Wolves and look forward to potential London derbies with Brentford and Leyton Orient and visits to Stadium MK? For what it’s worth I think it will be somewhere in between but there are things – really obvious things – that can be taken on board to try and make the 2013/14 season a more enjoyable experience than the last two we have had to endure. None of this is rocket science, but here are a few things for consideration:
I begin this with a heartfelt plea to the QPR board. Please, please, please no matter how things pan out next season try and bring a bit of stability to this club and give us something to build on. If Harry Redknapp is a) the man you want to manage us and b) committed enough to see it through then stick with him and don’t sack him at Christmas if we are lying in the bottom half of the league. Surely recent history has demonstrated that, for Rangers at least, it simply doesn’t work.
In rare moments of whimsy I sometimes try and imagine what would have happened to us if we had been brave enough to keep faith in Neil Warnock for the whole of our first season back in the Premier League. Don’t get me wrong, I am no Warnock apologist and am as conscious as any that he got some things wrong and may have even lost some elements of the dressing room, but let’s face it we scraped survival in that first season and then spent millions of pounds the season after to finish rock bottom. In my humble opinion you can’t hope to achieve anything at a club of our size if you don’t try and find a stable working environment that players and staff alike can but into. We won four games in the Premier League last season, Norwich won ten. Is anyone going to tell me that they had on paper better players than us? I would question those that do, but they achieved their survival with a minimum of fuss and a consistent and stable team. I rest my case.
An equally heartfelt plea would go to Harry Redknapp himself. If he honestly wants to stay and fight to get us back up again then fine, he does so with my absolute best wishes and support and I for one will get right behind him. If however he is looking at the back pages over breakfast in Bournemouth for some other team that needs a new manager and is better for him then all I ask is that he makes the decision as quickly as possible so that whoever should fancy becoming QPR’s next Ethan Hunt has a sporting chance of having a full pre-season and a say on who he recruits.
Shaun Derry, Alejandro Faurlin, Clint Hill, Jamie Mackie – remember them? With the notable exception of regular go-to man of the year Clint Hill it would be fair to say that the rest of them were hardly regular fixtures in the QPR team last season. Whether you have an opinion or not on their abilities as Premier League players what we do have with the names I have listed is a quarter of what was a very successful Championship side, all of which are still available as QPR players at present. You could argue of course that our last Championship campaign was two years ago and that the confidence and possibly the abilities of them may have suffered since but I think each of them could still do a very good job for us in the upcoming season and perhaps most importantly love playing for this club. Let’s use them and not lose them.
One of the small rays of sunshine in all the doom and gloom of last season poked through the thunderclouds on the very last day in the shape of Michael Harriman who did enough in a single appearance against Liverpool to make the likes of Jose Bosingwa and several other of our grossly overpaid ‘professionals’ hang their heads in shame if only they had the common decency to give a toss about us. We also have other untried but youthful players available for use should we decide to use them - Max Ehmer for one, even the young South Korean left back Yun Suk-young that we signed last season but never got near the first team squad.
Harry Redknapp needs to make a decision at the beginning of this season: does he go all out for promotion by reshaping the team with experienced players (read ‘journeymen’) or look at some of our younger squad and see if they can step up to the mark? Long game or short term fix? More of that below but there are already suggestions following Tony Fernandes’ alleged veto of the signing of the aged Wayne Bridge that Harry’s hand may be forced on this.
And by this I am not advocating the Tony Pulis/Sam Allardyce school of football, I am talking about how we approach season 2013/14 and what it could mean in seasons to come. In my spare time I like to play a bit of poker, with a reasonable amount of success. If you play the odd tournament or two you soon realise that that most poker players fall into one of two categories – those who bluff and bluster their way through the game in an effort to build up enough collateral early on to bully the rest of the players later and those who take their time to assess the situation and the players around them and then slowly build their stack to a position of power. I favour the latter approach and more often than not watch the loose players blow up early on whilst I continue. Now I am not for one moment trying to say that a game of poker is the same as a game of football but it does act as an analogy for the season ahead and the knock on effect for seasons to come.
It is a dilemma – do we keep splashing the cash and try and get straight back up with a team designed to get us out of the Championship with a subsequent rebuilding job to do again if we get promoted or do we take a longer term view and start the rebuilding process now, whilst bearing in mind we could then be stuck in the what is a very difficult league for a number of years? For my part, true to character, I have had it up to here with the boom or bust approach we have taken over the last couple of seasons and would be prepared for a slightly extended stay in the Championship if the club that I love could remember why it is I loved them in the first place and build steadily towards a brighter future.
Not too far away from Loftus Road at the Madjeski Stadium, Reading have signalled their intent early on with the capture of Wayne Bridge and Royston Drenthe as their spearheads to get them back to the Premier League. I don’t have a real problem with Bridge though I am also equally comfortable enough about us not signing him. Royston Drenthe though? To me the Royals are only a couple of bad signings away from matching the mistakes of their hooped counterparts and going all-in way too early in the game.
So, that was just a few pointers that the great and good who run my beloved club may want to consider. I’m not saying anything new here, and if the unwashed masses like us can realise this from our vantage points in the stands surely those who are highly paid to make the key decisions that shape the club’s future must do to… mustn’t they?
Pictures – Action Images