Part two of our annual examination and grading of the QPR squad focuses on a defence which collapsed completely amidst a raft of muscle injuries to multiple players.
I often think Osman Kakay occupies an excessive amount of the online discourse/abuse at QPR for somebody who is, at the end of the day, the club’s reserve right back. But then, I quite like Osman Kakay, certainly a good deal more than a mounting gaggle of online critics.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend he’s much good, but his role in the squad is basically a utility defender, to sit on the bench, who can fill in two or three different positions when required while only pulling a very modest wage out of the club. If either of those things change then we can talk, but for now he does that reasonably well. He wants to play for QPR, he makes the effort when he’s on the pitch and - bar a knee injury which sidelined him for the last handful of games - he’s been fit to turn up for work each day for the last few seasons. Now, at a normal football club in a normal season that would certainly be damning with faint praise, but at QPR in 2022/23 it basically qualifies you for the King’s birthday honours list.
His best bits this term came in attack. He runs forward with pace, purpose and can cross a nice ball. This made such a difference to the team at its most comatose that we ended up giving him man of the match in a home defeat to Blackburn, despite us losing, conceding three goals and him defending poorly, purely out of exasperation at how easy it really can be. As Ethan Laird’s crossing from that side descended rapidly from David Bardsley to Les Battersby, it was nice to see a full back go forward and put a decent ball over every now and again. This peaked in the home game with Reading, where his assist for a flying Lyndon Dykes header made for a genuinely lovely, and very old school QPR, goal. He started the season in the team on the opening day at Blackburn and struck the crossbar from 30 yards in the first half — oddly, he does seem to have a bit of a demon long shot on him. This has inevitably led to him being subjected to a pastime the message board enjoys even more than handing out "pay as you play deals” — the suggestion that a player changes his position entirely. Could Osman Kakay make a winger? It’s going to be a long summer chaps.
His worst bits came in defence, which I admit is not ideal for a defender. His positioning is often woeful. Sometimes weirdly so. It can look like he’s wandered into a game of football off the street having never seen the sport before in his life. There was A LOT wrong with Birmingham’s third minute winner at Loftus Road — we’ll be bringing this goal up again in the Dickie and Dunne write ups further down — but just watch it back again in the clip above and keep your eye on Kakay throughout, noting where he’s standing, who runs past him, and just how long it takes him to realise there’s a problem. That is, sadly, fairly typical of how he defends — as if he’s never been coached. A sense of danger so poorly attuned the guy could sleep through his own house burning down. Like many others, he bottomed out at Rotherham away, and then somehow got worse still the week after at Blackpool. It should be said though, in between those games, in a backs-to-the-wall scrap for a desperately needed 1-0 home win against Watford, he was fantastic, and genuinely man of the match.
If you’re telling me he’s going to be the first choice right back next season, or that actually the four-year contract he signed last comes with a chunky wage, then I’d have more of a problem. But if not, then as Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink would have said, he is what he is.
In numbers:
13 starts, 10 sub appearances, W5 D4 L10 (26.316% win percentage)
0 goals, 1 assist (Reading H)
35 goals conceded (1.521 a game), 2 clean sheets
3 yellow cards (Boro H time wasting, Fleetwood A foul, Blackburn H foul)
2 LFW Man of the Match Awards (Blackburn H, Watford H), 0 Supporter MOTM Award
LFW Ratings — 6, 6, 6, 5, -, 6, -, -, 6, 5, 6, -, 7, 2, 6, 2, 5, 5, 5, 2, 7, 1, 5 = 4.89
Interactive Ratings — 5.61
I feel like Jimmy Dunne and Rob Dickie almost come as a pair, and not only because they have played together as our centre backs for the vast majority of our games over the last two seasons. They were both brought in with the idea they could be developed to sell for profit, they’re both similar ages (Dickie has turned 27, Dunne will be 26 later this year), similar points of career, similar strengths and similar weaknesses — speed, both across the ground and of the mind, a key problem for both. They’re both great when the going is good, and cope very poorly in times of adversity. They’ve both suffered enormously in the collapses of this and the previous season, and both played big personal roles in those nosedives.
When we look at both of them, I think it’s interesting to go back to this point last year. Coming out of 2021/22 and going into the Mick Beale era I’m not sure the centre back position would have figured very high on many people’s lists of areas we should spend what limited budget we did had last summer. Please do use the comments to correct me if you think I’m wrong but I think the general impression was the team had played with a back three for a couple of years, Jake Clarke-Salter was a direct left-sided replacement for Yoann Barbet in that, and Dickie and Dunne remained two of the players we’d hope our ‘development coach’ would be coming here to work with and build up. In fact, Mick Beale switched to a back four, and worked hard to replace both Dickie and Dunne in his line up immediately. Clarke-Salter was one of two players we spent money on in the transfer window, and his wages won’t have come cheap moving out of the Chelsea puppy farm - though naturally QPR set off on one of their ill-advised hype offensives saying he’d in fact accepted a lower offer than the one he had on the table at Coventry just to come and work with Honest Mick, which naturally then blew up in their face when Beale walked out. Although Leon Balogun came out of contract from Rangers, players at that stage of career, and with that sort of CV, don’t come and play for QPR for £3k a week. It was very clear those two were Beale’s first choice pairing, and the fact both of them turned out to be made of porcelain was a huge part of the team’s downfall — we played with 18 different defences and eight different centre back combinations across the 48 games, not the area of the field you’d ideally choose for such constant upheaval.
Jimmy Dunne was first for the chop. During the pre-season friendly against Palace he watched some of the second half sitting on the grass with his socks round his ankle down by the corner flag at the Loft End which said a lot about where he was at that point (Balogun not even here yet). His place back in the team wasn’t long in coming, because of the fragility of others but also to his credit as well. What few clean sheets we did keep this season (only nine in total) tended to happen when Dunne was on the pitch (he started seven of those) and the combination of him and Balogun through October brought quickfire shut-outs against Millwall, Stoke and Sheff Utd (Dunne was both the LFW and interactive ratings man of the match in the latter). Incidentally, you’ll notice he's got nine clean sheets in the stats below, that simply means that among his four substitute appearances he was on the field long enough to receive a mark, and the team didn’t concede in that period of time.
There was a winning goal at Preston to celebrate, but his form collapsed with the rest of them in the second half of the season. Not to the extent that his partner Rob Dickie’s did, but still pretty dramatically. Points for being available to play and, in a season where we were once again questioning exactly how much certain players were bothered about playing for QPR or cared what was happening, like Ilias Chair here you have a player who perhaps at times cares too much.
We conceded so many goals in the latter part of the season where Dickie and Dunne went charging off into situations together in desperation, trying to solve problems often not of their own making, but in turn leaving huge gaps and spaces behind them for opponents to exploit. There was a comment in our interview with Les Ferdinand about players trying to solve all the problems themselves in times of crisis, rather than just focusing on their own job, and while he obviously didn’t mention names I wondered if Dunne, Dickie and Chair were quite high up in his thinking there. In the following clips watch Dickie and/or Dunne go charging off together trying to solve an issue, only to create further problems further down the chain. Preston’s second goal (Balogun and Dunne on this occasion), there’s no better example than Birmingham’s winner at Loftus Road, or indeed Millwall’s first.
The form of the pair of them by the end of the year probably backed Mick Beale’s assessment that the centre backs needed changing, certainly if you want to play out from the back which it’s becoming painfully clear neither Dunne nor Dickie are very good at. Eventually Gareth Ainsworth gave up on the idea entirely, just asking both of them to turf it down the field and we’ll play in their half instead. At Stoke in the penultimate game Dickie completed just four passes all afternoon, and Dunne two. Dickie had been man of the match at Burnley the week before, and Dunne wasn’t far off it at Stoke where he just had to stand there and win headers. With Ainsworth in charge expect a lot more of that if it’s these two at the back again next season.
In numbers:
40 starts, 2 sub appearances, W11 D11 L20 (26.19%)
2 goals (Boro H, PNE A), 0 assists
64 goals conceded (1.52 a game), 9 clean sheets
7 yellow cards (Blackpool H dissent, Sheff Utd A foul, Sheff Utd H foul, Hull A fouk, Sunderland H dissent, Blackpool A foul, Norwich H delaying restart)
3 LFW Man of the Match Awards (Sheff U A, Coventry A, Cardiff A), 3 Supporter MOTM Awards (Sheff U A, Preston A, Cardiff A)
LFW Ratings — 7, 6, 6, 5, 6, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 8, 7, 5, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 5, 7, 2, 6, 6, 3, 5, 4, 3, 6, 3, 3, 6, 1, 4, 4, 2, 5, 3, 5, 7, 7, 4 = 5.166
Interactive Ratings — 5.84
Personal confession at this point, because I am ashamed about it, it has played on my mind and I think it also speaks to one of Rob Dickie’s biggest problems.
During the 3-0 home defeat to Sunderland Dickie went in for an aerial challenge weighted at least 70-30 in his favour, right underneath where I sit at Loftus Road, and lost out. He then got backed into a corner with the ball by a high Sunderland press and, literally, just gave up — turned 90 degrees to the right and just lazily thumped the ball into touch five yards away. Like a dog on fireworks night. And I lost the plot. Full blown head loss. The team was shit, it had been shit for weeks, and he’d been particularly shit in it. Everything you hear about this group of players from everybody you talk to at QPR is they are hyper sensitive to criticism, and after Neil Critchley called them out publicly for their mentality in the wake of the embarrassments at Hull and Fleetwood it looked, felt and smelt like they simply weren’t having him any more and were happy to play like absolute tarts for several weeks and stick another half dozen defeats on the board to get him the sack — which they succeeded in doing. Dickie felt particularly culpable in that to me* and I had a loud, aggressive, obnoxious go at him. And he heard me. He looked up, looked me dead in the eyes, and heard and saw every word of the abuse and every beat of the sarcastic applause. Not since Joe Allen had his soul stolen by Adel Taarabt on that patch of grass ten years before have I seen a footballer quite so checked out. Rob Dickie looks permanently concussed at the best of times, and these were not the best of times.
(*Dickie, in his recent appearance on The Open All R’s Podcast, claims that, on the contrary, he felt very sorry for Neil Critchley as a guy coming into a bad situation who stood little chance of success in the circumstances and lost his job through little fault of his own.)
Could I have picked a worse player to do that to than Rob Dickie? Bar chasing Aaron Drewe round the soft play with a board with a nail in it, probably not. There have been two glaring problems with his game from the moment he arrived here from Oxford United. The first, a lack of pace which caught him out several times in his early Championship appearances and saw him sent off in an early midweek loss at Barnsley, has largely been covered up through coaching, better positioning and so on. The second, however, is his inability to cope in times of adversity — this is a problem that, far from going away, actually seems to be fairly chronic, and sadly epitomises the entire team. There’s a cliché about being a "confidence player” which I always think is a bit daft because which footballer is able to play to their full potential when low on confidence? But, in as much as it does exist, it applies to Rob Dickie more than almost anybody else I’ve ever seen.
When he is in the right frame of mind, he can look like one of the best centre backs in this division. Indeed, when he hit the ground running at the start of 2021/22 and was not only performing miraculous feats of defensive magnificence like his goalline clearance at Hull away, but also combining that with a string of increasingly eye-catching goals, he was being talked about as one of the division’s hotter properties. That, under the player development model, as somebody we’d invested a modest sum in from the division below, is exactly what we needed him to be. When he’s not, however, he can look like a player that has no business whatsoever playing at this level. Sadly, it doesn’t take much of a personal mistake, or a trough in the team’s form, for him to retreat back within his head, at which point he’s lost to us.
His performances this season have often been atrocious. At Rotherham Dickie’s defending for Jordan Hugill’s opener was a joke, and it unravelled through to full time by which point we’d lost 3-1 to three goals with his fingerprints all over each of them, including him conceding a shambolic penalty for the second. Hugill bossed him around all day like a little boy. In 20 years of LFW there had never been a 0/10 rating until the 6-1 defeat at Blackpool when he and Seny Dieng both got one. His one of the worst 90 minutes of centre half play I have ever seen from anybody in my life. Again, this was sparked by a moment of adversity — in this case a fairly harsh decision to penalise him for handball in the first minute and award Blackpool a penalty. With 89 minutes left against the only team in the Championship who conceded more than we did last season that didn’t need to be terminal for either Dickie or the team as a whole, and yet by the tenth minute we were 3-0 down and it finished 6-1.
This player we’d become accustomed to seeing cross the halfway line with the ball at feet to good, and sometimes extraordinarily spectacular, effect, was replaced by a husk. Zero goals and zero assists this season, and oh so many aimless, panicked whacks into the Ellerslie Road stand. You sit in those middle blocks over there with hot coffee in your hands you’re a braver man than me. He’s rescued from a D/E or even E rating because, as I laid out at the start, we’ll be hammering unavailability of players in this report and Dickie did at least turn up for work every week with 40 appearances across the season, but by the spring it was getting to the point you wished he wouldn’t. I have rarely seen a player so clearly desperately in need of being taken out of the firing line. He rated more than a six on just five of the 39 occasions he was on the field long enough to receive a mark.
It's, sadly, another tick in the declining asset value box, just at the point the club really needs to be sucking in a decent transfer fee or two. I said in the final preview of the season, and I’ll repeat it again now, I do wonder if in that development model we’ve lost sight of the important aspect of having players who play for Queens Park Rangers because they want to play for Queens Park Rangers. If you’re constantly selling the place as a stepping stone, some chore you’ve got to do or pain in the arse you’ve got to go through to get to a proper football club who you really want to play for, then don’t be surprised if you end up with loan players downing tools to protect themselves for their next loan, players running contracts down and again focusing more on preserving their fitness so they can get the best offer, or players who thought they were coming here to develop and get sold on who then get disillusioned if that doesn’t materialise. It was said when he signed that Jamie Mackie had a hand in persuading Dickie to come here as "a good place to develop”, and amidst the jokes about how much he must thank him for that now is Dickie potentially one of those players who thought he was coming here for his own version of the Ebere Eze story only to end up stuck, battling relegation, playing long ball football, in a crap side?
There was, at least, something of a redemption story to finish with. Gareth Ainsworth stripped his beleaguered team right back to basics in the end. Dunne and Dickie had been struggling badly with trying to play the ball on the deck for 18 months and in the end Ainsworth got rid of it entirely — at Stoke in the penultimate game they completed just six passes between them in 90+ minutes. They kept a clean sheet and got a win to preserve Championship status. The week before, at champions Burnley, told to just stand there and defend, Dickie was right back to the brilliant best of his peak under Warburton, repelling the best team in the division with three goalline clearances of varying magnitude of miraculous. Nice for him personally after a horrible season, incredibly valuable for us in the context of that game, and potentially the first step to a brighter future because days like that will fuel confidence and belief, which Rob Dickie clearly needs a lot more more than some beered up, bald twat screaming at him.
In numbers:
34 starts, 6 sub appearances, W8 D10 L21 (20.51% win percentage)
0 goals, 1 assist (Luton A)
61 goals conceded (1.525 a game), 5 clean sheets
0 red cards, 7 yellow cards (Sunderland A foul, Rotherham H foul, Birmingham A dissent, Reading A foul, Rotherham A foul, Blackpool A foul, Wigan A foul)
1 LFW Man of the Match Award (Burnley A), 1 Supporter MOTM Award (Burnley A)
LFW Ratings — 6, 8, 7, 6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 5, 6, 5, 5, 5, 7, 4, 6, -, 5, 5, 6, 2, 6, 5, 2, 4, 2, 5, 2, 1, 6, 0, 4, 3, 3, 5, 3, 5, 8, 6, 4 = 4.769
Interactive Ratings — 5.40
When you decide to release a mainstay of your defence - who’s just done 98 consecutive starts for the first team, including several with a broken collar bone, and that memorable day against West Brom where he came back onto the pitch with a hole in his head the size of the Blackwall Tunnel and finished the job against the Daryl Dike monster who’d done it to him - you’ve got to get the replacement right. I felt releasing Yoann Barbet was a mistake, said so at the time, and copped it long into that night on Twitter for doing so.
Barbet, as a free transfer signing from a local rival, will have been on a decent wedge. Making him an offer he deemed attractive enough to stay and sign rather than return home, or take up offers elsewhere in the Championship where left-sided centre backs are very on trend at the moment, would not have been cheap. Swapping him out for a younger model, with loads of re-sale and profit potential, did, in fairness to QPR, make sense. I thought Jake Clarke-Salter looked a pretty good deal on a free transfer all told, albeit we did say in the signing piece when he arrived that he’d never managed to make 30 league appearances in a season before which, in hindsight, was a bigger red flag than we gave it credit for at the time. If it looks like a tart and it quacks like a tart there’s a fairly good chance it’s a tart.
When he has played, he’s often been very good. He’s got the highest win percentage of any player in the squad (37.5%) and is among the higher average ratings from both me (5.437) and you guys (5.84). But that’s only from the 16 appearances he’s managed, and there’s the rub.
You saw it immediately, on the opening day at Blackburn, where he was a bright spot in a 1-0 loss, stepping out of defence with well-read interceptions, carrying and playing the ball forwards with purpose and accuracy. That was July 30, and he didn’t play again until October 1. That day, at Bristol City, again, absolutely superb, couldn’t fault him, 8/10. His best run of games occurred here, in October, where he played every match. No coincidence either that this was when the team was at its best, winning five out of six games until we went to Birmingham on a Friday night aaaaand… Clarke-Salter lasted 21 minutes before doing the sit down routine again. One of the huge frustrations this year has been the nature of all these supposed injuries — if people were busting legs and ACLs then fair enough, but it’s always this weird routine of sitting down, waving an arm in the air, and nobody ever really being able to explain publicly exactly what’s fucking wrong with them. It breeds suspicion and contempt.
At that point Clarke-Salter had played eight times, and he only managed another eight in the rest of the season. Missing from December 17 to January 28, he then managed 40 minutes as a second half sub at Hull. A week later he got a start at Huddersfield, played 90 minutes (poorly), and was then not seen again until April 19. On that night, against Norwich at Loftus Road, he played well for an hour, sat down again, and we even had the weird spectacle of one of his team mates lifting him back up onto his feet from behind and Clarke-Salter shrugging him off, stepping to the side, and sitting back down again just to make it doubly clear he absolutely would not be carrying on. Gareth Ainsworth insisted there was nothing wrong with him, he’d just done the hour they expected of him in his comeback game. He also said there was nothing wrong with him the game after, at Burnley, but he’d left him out completely as a protective precaution. And yet, we get to Stoke, another week later… no Clarke-Salter. We get to Bristol City, another week later, no Clarke-Salter again. Is this prick injured or what?
If you’re signing for QPR, there’s something wrong with you — complete players command transfer fees and wages we can’t reach. The club has tried to find value in the market in recent years by signing players with chequered injury records and for a while came up trumps — Sam Field played more times this season alone than he managed in six years at West Brom. We have to take these chances, but certainly availability has been a key issue this season and needs to be prioritised more moving forwards.
If Clarke-Salter is going to do this for the duration of his chunky four year contract, then we’re going to fall out. I don’t care how fucking smooth and composed you look stepping out of defence with the ball at your feet if you’re only available to do that a dozen times a season. Could be the best player in the world, no good to us sitting in the stand every week.
In numbers:
13 starts, 3 sub appearances, W6 D2 L8 (37.5% win percentage)
0 goals, 0 assists
19 goals conceded (1.18 a game), 4 clean sheets
1 yellow card (Huddersfield A foul)
0 LFW Man of the Match Award, 0 Supporter MOTM Award
LFW Ratings — 6, 8, 7, 7, 5, 7, 7, 4, 4, 4, 4, 7, 3, 5, 5, 4 = 5.533
Interactive Ratings — 5.84
Kenneth Paal had more reasons than most to flounder this season, and yet here’s finally somebody we can say a few nice things about.
While something of a darling of the bar chart-loving analytics community last summer, and rated as a shrewd signing, the odds were not in his favour. There were all the human aspects — moving to a new country, moving to one of the world’s biggest cities, leaving the pregnant partner behind in Holland to do it. Physically Paal didn’t immediately look built for the Championship — standing next to Ilias Chair at Crawley in pre-season they looked about the same height to me — and, without getting into lazy stereotypes here, the Dutch league is more technical and less physically abrasive than the Championship as per absolutely everybody who’s ever played in both. QPR played 48 games this season, and Paal featured in 41 of those. His four seasons of Dutch football saw him play five, 29, 25 and 27 times respectively so this is a substantial step up and significant achievement in his first season of Championship football, all while playing in a struggling team. Then there was Honest Mick’s long drawn out story about how he’d nursed Paal as a baby, making the boy all big and strong by letting him suckle at his droopy man boob. Paal was therefore front and centre of mind when we wondered just how pissed off these players would be that Beale had bailed on them, but actually he seemed to cope with it better than most.
At Blackburn on the opening day I think both he, and we, perhaps wondered what on earth we’d got ourselves into. Little Ken, in the deep end of the pool, sans armbands. But he was quickly up to speed. One of the few enjoyments I’ve had this season is watching Championship teams try to take advantage of a perceived physical advantage over Paal and come up looking rather stupid. Millwall away was one of those nights, as they repeatedly switched crossfield balls and back post crosses from left to right, on top of him, and he won every header and one-on-one encounter all night. I think, in hindsight, I was probably wrong not to give him man of the match there. Potentially also the case at Stoke in the penultimate game, where they tried the same thing with the same ‘Paal Parker’ result of this little guy flying through the air and winning every header regardless of however many inches he was giving up in height.
There were peaks and troughs, as there were always going to be even if the season had gone well. I was particularly upset with him at Hull. He was absolutely woeful for half an hour, made Cyrus Christie look like Cafu, and then became the latest in a long line of QPR players to sit down, demand treatment for something or other, and refuse to continue. In that case the physio actually stood him up and sent him back on, only for him to walk two yards and sit down again. There was way too much of that shit going on last season and for Paal to be doing it as well at that point was a real et tu, Brute? moment.
Confidence and morale absolutely in the bin, he was probably the most culpable for Coventry’s opener at Loftus Road where QPR players were first, second and third favourites for a loose ball in the centre circle and somehow conceded a goal ten seconds later after Paal came charging into a situation that was never his to be involved with, tackled Sam Field and sent the ball careering off his shins into the path of Gus Hamer to free Viktor Gyokeres who’d of course run into the space that Paal had vacated. That, and Blackburn’s third at the same end where Joe Rankin-Costello was somehow allowed to turn out of a tight corner and cross for Sam Gallagher despite Paal and Andre Dozzell being touch tight to him, were the nadirs. Chris Martin gave him an absolute spray after the Cov one, and I genuinely thought the guy was going to burst into tears.
QPR were at their best, early in the season, when Paal and Laird were high up the pitch being used as attacking weapons. Both of them scored striker-type goals from inside the penalty box in that period of hot form, at home to Hull and Cardiff, and neither notched again once Beale-ball was abandoned. Where he fits as a full back in a Gareth Ainsworth team, I guess we’ll find out. Full backs can be such an important part of a modern attacking set up, and Paal was bought to be exactly that. Mark Warburton’s team was always at its best on the rare occasions Lee Wallace was fit enough to go flying up that left side to team up with Chair and Willock, and the idea of having a younger, fitter, technically better, Dutch version of that was exciting to me. The Watford away win, where Paal and Laird were unplayable and both registered assists, was a highlight of the season. Does that exist in our blueprint moving forwards? He got four assists and a goal last season, but they were all before Christmas. If not what now for Paal? It is, again, a problem of not only changing managers so often, changing managers mid-season, but also allowing one manager to recruit his players for his style, and then hiring somebody who plays the complete opposite way.
If it’s not to be, I think it’s a shame. There’s plenty about Paal already, and a lot of growth potential there too now he’s got that first Championship season into his legs. But I want to see him piling forwards, attacking, playing the ball, and is he going to get the opportunity to do that here? It’s a shame. For now though, one of the few you could mention in the same breath as Sam Field when it came to the end of season awards.
In numbers:
40 starts, 1 sub appearance, W12 D10 L18 (30%)
1 goal (Cardiff H), 4 assists (Watford A, Hull H, Bristol City A, PNE A)
55 goals conceded (1.34 a game), 8 clean sheets
0 red cards, 2 yellow cards (Cardiff H foul, Sunderland H foul)
1 LFW Man of the Match Award (Swansea A), 1 Supporter MOTM Award (Milwall A)
LFW Ratings — 5, 6, 5, 5, 7, 7, 6, 8, 6, 8, 8, 6, 5, 7, 7, 5, 7, 6, 6, 6,, 7, 5, 5, 6, -, 6, 6, 1, 5, 4, 4, 6, 4, 4, 3, 5, 3, 5, 6, 7, 5 = 5.575
Interactive Ratings — 5.88
Be honest, this is the one you came here for isn’t it? Ok, fingers cracked, here we go then.
Leon Balogun was a joke signing to begin with, as I wrote at the time. The club has released Yoann Barbet, a player who completed 98 consecutive starts for the club, because he was expensive and coming into his 30s with no sell-on value. Mick Beale, on the record in interview with us in June, said Rob Dickie and Jimmy Dunne were perfectly experienced enough now and the club shouldn’t be paying money to 30-somethings to hold their hand. In a meeting with supporters in August that I attended at the training ground he doubled down and, among other forthright declarations, castigated the club for spending money on players of the age, expense and profile of Charlie Austin and Andre Gray the previous season — "you can’t be doing that here”. Then, lo and behold, last week of the transfer window, here’s Leon Balogun. A 34-year-old, in a position we already owned two development projects in and had just spent what little money we had on a third, brought in entirely because the manager had worked with him before and wanted him. Exactly the sort of signing a director of football system is meant to prevent. Fucking QPR, doing what manager wants manager gets again. Nuts.
Of course, as both regular readers know, what tends to happen when I tee off on a signing like that is he goes on to be the next Clint Hill — or, in the case of Clint Hill, the actual El Guapo — and we commence a period of time where I look a complete tit. I have written, there seems to be a collective opinion among QPR fans, and it has been oft stated by managers and players down here, that the team we have now is quiet, lacks leadership, lacks experience, folds under pressure, and doesn’t cope with adversity. We are too nice, too easy to play against. We defend opposition set pieces so abysmally they may as well be opposition penalties — no team in the league conceded as many goals as set plays as us across Mark Warburton’s three seasons, and we topped the league again last year with 16. The balance in the squad between loans, development prospects, youngsters, experienced heads etc. is out of whack. Leon Balogun could, potentially, have helped with a lot of this, and initially that’s exactly what happened. Just nine clean sheets for the team all season, and Balogun played in five of those. We looked, briefly, defensively secure with him and Jimmy Dunne together at the back, winning well to nil at Millwall and Sheff Utd. A clip of him gathering the players together at Bramall Lane immediately after Chris Willock’s winner, urging focus and calm and talking about what the next five minutes look like, went viral. A grown-up had entered the chat. Leadership. He looked very good indeed, scored against Wigan at home as went top of the league, and I looked like a prat. We won more games with Balogun on the pitch than any other player apart from Ethan Laird and Jake Clarke-Salter (33.33% win ratio). It’s ok, I’m used to it, I enjoy it.
This, and not only the collapse of the team in the second half of the season but the dire form of Rob Dickie and Jimmy Dunne in particular, has fuelled a perception that actually Beale was right all along, that Balogun is "the best defender at the club” and we wouldn’t have been in the shit if only he’d played more regularly.
Not for me Clive, and here’s a few reasons why.
The idea Balogun was playing brilliantly up to his injury, and that his problems only began when that happened and Mick Beale left, is re-writing history. QPR took one point and scored one goal in Beale’s final five games, which included fixtures against three of the bottom four teams in the league at the time, and consecutive home matches against the bottom two. There were early signs of his fragility at Luton, where he started at right back and got a bang in the back under the first long ball of the game — not a particularly serious injury, not an injury that kept him out of the starting line up for the next game at home to Cardiff all of three days later, and not something you shouldn’t expect going to Kenilworth Road to play against this Luton side, but still apparently enough to have him bail out after ten minutes and toss Osman Kakay into that cauldron. Sorry, somebody was talking about leadership? He was poor in a home loss to West Brom and then played like an absolute fucking pillock in a 2-1 defeat at home to a desperately poor Huddersfield team, at the time rooted to the bottom of the table. Daddy Mick was still with us at this point.
He then disappeared, for five months, with an injury that we’ve still to this day only ever been told publicly was "a calf problem”. Into this vacuum the club has allowed a whole torrent of rumour and counter rumour to flood, with people who like Balogun spreading stuff about a broken foot/ankle/leg/skull that our idiot club missed on the scan, and people who don’t like him surmising that he came here to play for Beale and fucked off the same moment he did. Taking time out from retweeting anti-vax conspiracy theories to post a steady stream of pro-Glasgow Rangers content to his socials didn’t particularly help with this. Whatever the reason, we shouldn’t have been surprised. Balogun is 34 years old and here are the number of league starts he’s made per-season for the last few years per Soccerbase: Rangers 21/22, 17; Rangers 20/21, 15; Wigan 19/20, 10; Brighton 18/19, 5; Mainz 17/18, 14; Mainz 16/17, 13; Mainz 15/16, 17. Now, hands up, Rangers used him in Europe, he made 29 starts in all comps the season before he came here, and I’ve used league starts to suit my argument to a certain extent, but still… He managed 15 starts for QPR this season in the Championship, and that’s about par for the course. If he’d been brought here in some sort of leadership, mentorship role to add that voice we need and play occasional games then fine, but we brought him into a 48-game Championship season and expected him to play every week. It was never, and will never, work. This idea that "if only Balogun had stayed fit everything would be ok” is football’s "if only Boris Johnson stopped lying for a bit he’d have been a good prime minister”. It’s not going to happen, it was ridiculous we ever pretended it could/would.
Balogun belatedly returned to action at Wigan, at which point the season was in complete freefall and I thought we were absolute relegation certainties. I’d spoken to a few people at the club in the international break that preceded that game about various off-pitch things and found them all weirdly relaxed and confident that the season would all turn out fine, that we wouldn’t be getting relegated, that "FiveThirtyEight.com only has us 15% likely to drop” and so on. "Just need to get to the summer, just need to get this season over with…” Having just lost 6-1 at Blackpool and, pathetically, at home to Birmingham, I was starting to feel like I’d been accidentally watching some other team play by mistake. Growing frustrated in one such conversation I said "if you guys think these injured players are all going to come back and save you I think you’re going to be disappointed, and what’s more if you think the QPR fans are going to be delighted to see them all and welcome them back with open arms you’re going to be in for a shock”.
All was revealed, and came to a head, that afternoon at The DW Stadium. The confidence, the calmness, the FiveThirtyEight.com, was all some Christopher Nolan shit. That was the pledge, and the turn, and now it was time for The Prestige. They’d all be back. All of them at once. Ethan Laird, Kenny Paal, Chrissy Willock, Illy Chair, Honus Wagner, Cap Anson, Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown... All your favourites. And against idiot scum like Wigan, themselves with one foot already in League One, we’d obviously go there and shit em. Rangers genuinely thought they’d mastered teleportation, that inferior opponents would be overwhelmed and the crowd would be left in a euphoric rapture of surprise and delight. In fact, when they reached into the hat and pulled out what was there, it was one rabbit with myxomatosis and a flatulence problem.
The illusion collapsed immediately. Gareth Ainsworth had promised, for weeks, a cavalry charge, and here it was, played on a kazoo. You’ve heard about goal-side and inside right? That’s for schoolgirls. Here’s a plan with some chest hair. Let’s try wrong-side and outside. And from there, right at the moment the forward crosses into the penalty area, go to ground and commit into a big Hail Mary sliding tackle. The inevitable resulting penalty was enough to win the six-pointer 1-0. From a shortlist a good deal longer than the one for our Young Player of the Season award, it was possibly the stupidest thing I’d seen QPR do all season. And it held that position for about an hour until, at full time, Balogun came across and booted off with the away end. Fuck me dead. Cupping his ear at angry supporters at the front of the stand, aggressively shrugging off Albert Adomah’s fairly sensible attempts to move him away. It was at this point that the patience and tolerance of the QPR supporters for this group of players snapped en masse for the first time.
Whatever the inevitable mealy mouthed Instagram statement reckoned, everybody who was there knew exactly what went down in that moment. It had never once crossed Leon Balogun’s mind that, as a Mick Beale signing, him disappearing for five months immediately after Beale walked out, and spending it posting about Rangers on social media, with no updates as to his condition or due back date, while we were all traipsing the country watching the team get its arse handed to it, might have put a few backs up. That some people wouldn’t immediately appreciate him coming back into the team and costing us a key game with a daft penalty came as a complete shock. None of this could ever possibly be his fault. A couple of the long-suffering faithful told him some home truths in the immediate aftermath of a defeat, and he didn’t like it. It was there for all to see.
QPR, as I swear only QPR could do, doubled on down again. No Ben. High tea at the training ground, hastily convened, so Leon could talk to some of the people the club had managed to pick out from the video, explain that it was all a big misunderstanding, put his point of view across. That banging you can hear is me repeatedly thumping my head on the desk, desperately trying to bring about the satisfying crack of my skull, so I can end this all bleeding out into a pulpy mess across my keyboard. Why are they like this? Why? Make them stop. With the manager alongside him, in a meeting they knew was being minuted, they basically chucked the medical staff under the bus saying Balogun’s injury had been mishandled and that he’d had to go off to Germany under his own steam in January to get another opinion and proper treatment. Perhaps he was misdiagnosed, perhaps the treatment at QPR is sub-standard, perhaps the players have been mishandled, perhaps that’s the real reason for all these strains, pulls and epidemics of tightness. That will, indeed, need sorting this summer if it’s the case. But the medical staff at QPR are probably on salaries pretty similar to a lot of you guys reading this. How is it for them to have all this laid at their door, in public, by a senior player and manager, in a meeting with fans, with no way to answer back or put their side? "Lots needs to change here this summer” i.e. if I get my way you’re losing your job, and good luck with that mortgage. All to make more excuses and cover stories for this over-precious, under-performing squad of privileged rich footballers. I thought it was a stupid idea, that should have been laughed out of the room at its first mention. To then go through with it and do that I felt fairly poor.
The correct response would have been to shut the fuck up, go out into the next eminently winnable game at home to midtable Preston, put on a proper performance and get a result. Not all this Instagram statement, fan summit, PR drivel. I am done with all this "we go again”, "back stronger” "say something like…” insincere social media horseshit, both in football in general and from this group of players in particular. Instead, Rangers lost 2-0. In the first half Balogun tried to dribble a ball around Troy Parrott while last man and ended up sending the Spurs loanee clean through on the Loft End goal. His part in the second goal is borderline farcical. The team, rightly, were told they weren’t fit to wear the shirt. They deserved it. Balogun was better, but not by much, at West Brom, where Rangers shipped another two goals early and were lucky not to go for a third. They then regressed once more at home to Coventry, where his shambolic display got him a 3/10 mark and ended with… another injury. A hamstring this time. No indication as to whether that one is the physio’s fault as well yet but maybe we’ll get invited to some sort of Super Sunday Brunch Spectacular at Heston over the summer and find out.
The club made a point of saying that although Balogun is on the released list, he will be sticking around for his rehab. One message boarder says that’s a PFA stipulation clubs have to extend if you’re injured but out of contract, and they just announce it in cases like Angel Rangel’s and Ale Faurlin’s when it looks good on them. Gareth Ainsworth, while rooting out and dropping some fairly prominent and younger members of his team in recent weeks, has been at pains to repeatedly say he likes Leon a lot and really rates him as a person. He would, of course, know a lot better than me. Listen to him, not to some gobshite blogger. All that stuff about this team needing leadership, voice, spine, experience still applies. That vacancy still exists. I have my suspicions that if Balogun gets over this latest injury adequately, we might not have seen the last of him. As I said right at the start, I don’t ever think we should have seen the first of him.
In numbers:
15 starts, 1 sub appearance, W5 D3 L7 (33.33%)
1 goal (Wigan H), 0 assists
15 goals conceded (0.93 a game), 5 clean sheets
0 red cards, 4 yellow cards (Stoke H foul, Sheff U A foul, Birmingham A foul, Coventry H foul)
1 LFW Man of the Match Award (Wigan H), 0 Supporter MOTM Awards
LFW Ratings — -, 7, 7, 6, 8, 5, 7, 8, 5, 7, 5, 4, 4, 2, 5, 3 = 5.533
Interactive Ratings — 5.90
Never fall in love with loan players we say, and for a while here I genuinely thought that was going to be the problem with Ethan Laird. I thought he was brilliant at Swansea, completely wasted at Bournemouth, and a terrific coup for us last summer.
If you’re going to make loan signings they should either be with a realistic view to a permanent signing if it works out, or somebody so good they elevate your team to a different level and you could never possibly hope to afford them. Kyle Walker was the latter for Neil Warnock’s title winning team and I genuinely thought we had a second coming on our hands here. Although Rangers lost Laird’s debut against Blackpool poorly, he quickly made an impact on the team. We lost one and won eight of his next 11 games and he came in hot with ratings of 6, 7, 8, 8, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 7, 6. Only Jake Clarke-Salter has a better win ratio in the team this year than Laird’s 34.38%.
I’m staggered I didn’t give him the star man award at Watford (Ilias Chair). For me that day was exactly what we like to think of when we describe how we think QPR should play and look — two talented, ball-playing full backs, piling down both flanks, causing havoc, setting up goals, you score two we’ll score three. Both Laird and Paal got classy assists that day, I thought they were terrific. Laird scored a goal against Hull from the sort of position you usually find your striker in, such was the attacking influence he had on the side early on. His ability to run inside a full back and drive at goal, or go outside to the byline and produce a great cross, made him a thrilling watch, vital cog in Beale’s system, and almost impossible opponent for players at this level.
I suspect he would reason that, post-Beale, the role of the full back in the team under Critchley and particularly Ainsworth changed entirely. From one built for him and Paal to excel in, to the exact opposite. And the status as a loanee from Man Utd does make you forget that he's just a 21-year-old lad starting out in the game, younger even than Aaron Drewe who gets a bit of a free pass from most. Still, to go from that level, to the one he played at through the second half of the campaign was a remarkable as it was despicable. Compare his first dozen marks with us to his last: 5, -, 7, 6, 4, 4, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 4. One of the most frustrating things about the season just gone is that these players had shown themselves well capable of competing at this level, we had seen how good they could be, and now they were churning out slop. Laird was, arguably, the worst culprit of all. The gap between his best and worst was a chasm. From the best right back in the Championship, to somebody being kept out of the team by Aaron Drewe.
He swiftly rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Fred Karno’s Sit Down Army. Over and over again, sitting down during the game, demanding to be taken off, each time with what the club described as nothing more than "tightness”. All of them occurred in the second half of the season, when the promise of a promotion push and Mick Beale were long gone, and the cause was obviously lost. The first half exit against Sunderland on a Tuesday night, with a hiding to nothing at Middlesbrough away on the Saturday, felt pretty shameless. Laird, who’s clearly never going to be good enough for Man Utd, is out of contract there now and has a big summer ahead to find a new move — a task that would be made more difficult if he came back from QPR injured.
As with Leon Balogun, this all came to a head at Wigan in his latest comeback game. Once more, having apparently been fine one minute, he just sat down on the turf and signalled he was done for the day. For the first time the away end behind him turned aggy, and booed him off. In this case some of his teammates, most notably Ilias Chair, came across while he was sitting down for what looked like a pretty frank conversation — certainly not an "are you alright sweetheart” sort of a vibe. Ainsworth went out to bat for the player, all the usual "given his all” waffle, but once again admitted he’d fled the latest disastrous defeat with nothing more than cramp/tightness which wouldn’t keep him out for future games. Within a fortnight, Ainsworth’s tune had changed. Laird’s input into the 3-0 defeat at home to Coventry meant that he, like Chris Willock, became the latest high-profile name to be bombed from the first team by the new manager. Ainsworth chose to go to Burnley and face Anass Zaroury, the best winger in this division, with Aaron Drewe starting, and Ethan Laird on the bench. That spoke a volume that goes up to 11.
In the end, one of the worst kind of loanees. When the going was good, life and soul of the party, doing funny little dances in front of Cardiff players to delight the crowd and fuel the club’s Tik Tok account. When it wasn’t so good, he was the first looking for the emergency exit.
In numbers:
30 starts, 3 sub appearances, W11 D7 L14 (34.38%)
1 goal (Hull H), 3 assists (Watford A, Sheff Utd A, Reading A)
35 goals conceded (1.06 a game), 10 clean sheets
0 red cards, 4 yellow cards (Cardiff A delaying restart, Wigan A foul, Burnley A time wasting, Stoke A foul)
2 LFW Man of the Match Awards (Stoke H, West Brom H), 0 Supporter MOTM Award
LFW Ratings — 6, 7, 8, 8, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 7, 6, 5, 7, 6, 5, 5, 5, 7, 5, 5, -, 7, 6, 4, 4, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6, 4 = 5.625
Interactive Ratings — 5.88
Others
Conor Masterson had worked with Mick Beale previously at Liverpool and therefore got a decent shot at first team redemption in the pre-season when he was used at Crawley and elsewhere in the Sam Field deep midfield role. He subsequently made a first Championship appearance since November 2020 as a late sub in the 3-2 away win at Watford. He spent the second half of the season on loan back at Gillingham, who were bottom of League Two at Christmas having scored just 12 goals in the whole first half of the campaign but went flying up the table after a New Year takeover and investment in a dozen players including Conor. He started 19 games, came off the bench in another, scored against Tranmere and Barrow and immediately moved to Priestfield permanently upon expiry of his QPR deal this summer. That, it seems, is his level, however the decision to loan out a centre back with 70-odd first team appearances to his name, 20 of those for QPR at our level, while Leon Balogun and Jake Clarke-Salter were pisballing about re-enacting Platoon, leaving us with Dickie, Dunne and only Osman Kakay for cover, was 64-carat mental. We ended up with Sam Field at centre back at one stage for goodness sake. Thick as a brick.
I guess Les et al would point to Joe Gubbins, but now aged 21 he has played 13 senior football games in his life — three for Aldershot, nine starts and a sub appearance for Southend, and three different sub outings for QPR. He didn’t play a single minute for anybody anywhere in 2022/23, but was an unused sub for the first team on several occasions.
Aaron Drewe came out of left field to suddenly make a start at Rotherham. With Ogbene on one wing and Fosu on the other that was a tough gig for him and Kakay, and proved as much. A week later both of them excelled as wing backs in the 1-0 home win against Watford, but just when you thought a corner had been turned came the horror show at Blackpool and, sadly, the home team went after Drewe from the first minute to devastating effect. He made eight appearances in the end, five as a starter, with marks of 6, 5, 7, 1, 5, -, 5, 5 (4.857). Having only ever played for Chelmsford, Oxford City and Weymouth prior to this season, he acquitted himself as best as could be expected. Like many of our "kids” though, he’s not that young — 22, older than Ethan Laird.
Which of course brings us onto the standing joke which is 26-year-old Nico Hamalainen. Easy to forget that we actually went to Sunderland, at the Stadium of Light, in August, with him starting at left back. Terrifying. Afterwards Beale would only be drawn as far as to say "well, he certainly doesn’t train like that”. And here’s the thing, apparently, with Nico. So the story goes, every time a new manager starts at QPR they watch the first couple of training sessions and immediately ask who Nico is and why on earth he isn’t in the team, because at Heston, away from the glare of the crowd, and essentially knocking about with his mates, he’s allegedly very good indeed. Put him in front of supporters, against strangers in opposition, and he goes to pieces immediately. Still, difficult to feel sorry for the boy from West Palm Beach who has earned a living this handsome from a sport he’s this bad at, who once more this season was treated to a ridiculous globe-trotting loan deal, this time with Belgium’s immaculately named Racing White Daring Molenbeek — owned by John Textor, an American who also owns Botafogo in Brazil which is where Nico got to spend spring break the previous season, which I’m sure is all just a completely legitimate coincidence. They won promotion from Belgium’s second tier this season, a cause to which Nico contributed four substitute appearances and 49 minutes in total.
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