QPR were beaten at Loftus Road by Luton Town for the first time since 1984 on Thursday night, going down to a comfortable 3-0 defeat which brings up four consecutive home losses for the R’s.
Neil Critchley has got a hell of a job on his hands here.
Queens Park Rangers’ 3-0 monstering at the hands of Luton Town on Thursday night was the first time the Hatters have won at Loftus Road in 18 visits going back to 1984/85 season — also the last time they completed a double over the R’s. In the two meetings this season Town have scored six goals, and could have had several more besides; they have conceded once, and that a freakish consolation own goal off their goalkeeper when the game at Kenilworth Road was long since done and put to bed.
More troublingly, this was QPR’s fourth consecutive defeat at home, in which nine goals have been conceded and just one scored. They have won just one of their last nine fixtures home and away, and scored only two goals across those 800+ minutes of football. Promotion certainties Sheffield United are in W12 next, and four of the five games after that are away from home including three long slogs back up north. Any hope of a new manager bounce, or that last week’s surprise win at Preston might jump-start a team temporarily stalled by mid-season upheaval, has now largely drained away through 180 desperately poor minutes against Cardiff and Luton. This team, top of the table as recently as October, is now cratering, with an attack I wouldn’t back for a goal against an U8s team, a defence conceding goals that would shame a pub side, and a midfield that’s doing nothing to help solve either problem. They can do it, we’ve seen them do it, we saw them do it in the first half at Deepdale last week, which only makes performances like last night’s more frustrating and less forgivable.
Luton took the lead on nine minutes with a goal that was coming from the moment they were able to switch good, early ball out to Alfie Doughty on their right wing. Remarkably, QPR were so narrow, their shape and stricture so flimsy, that there wasn’t a Rangers player on the Ellerslie Road side of the centre spot when the ball was played to him. Off he ran into that space, as you do, and as the home side frantically tried to funnel across and get to him they subsequently then left a Morrison’s meat counter queue of unmarked players for Doughty to pick out at the back post. Carlton Morris was in that line, running hand aloft completely unchecked by an opponent throughout the entire move, and when Doughty picked him out with an accurate cut back he finished crisply and accurately into the far corner. It’s can be just that easy.
Morris could have scored a moment before that too, when Harry Cornick’s routine long throw was nodded into his path in the penalty area, but he actually caught a scissor kick too cleanly and the ball flew straight at Seny Dieng. He did score again two minutes after half time, rendering anything that might have been said in the home dressing room during the break completely meaningless, when a free kick from the left was accidentally flicked on into danger by Kenneth Paal and Morris had reacted far quicker, with much greater awareness of what was going on, than his marker Lyndon Dykes and was able to tap in at the far post.
The defending for both goals was shambolic, but a theme of both meetings with Luton this season has been the respective performances of the strikers on show. Morris, Elijah Adebayo, Cauley Woodrow and even Harry Cornick and crusty old Cameron Jerome are all streets and streets ahead of the forwards QPR have to select from. Morris had three chances, and converted two of them. For much of the night the service, both long down the middle and low from wide, for Dykes was so appallingly bad you couldn’t help wonder what the Scottish international was meant to do with any of it, but having lost Morris for the second goal he then did finally get on the end of a good cross from Roberts late in the game only to somehow divert the ball all the way back from whence it came, past Ethan Horvath the goalkeeper, and wide of the far post by a fair chunk from just five yards out. For all my constant whitterings about FFP and the cost of strikers, Luton operate on a budget and wage bill smaller than ours, and yet have been able to recruit this collection of attackers, all of them available over the last few years for the same money or less than we spent on Dykes and Macauley Bonne — in the case of Morris and Woodrow, twice, because Barnsley were able to pick them up on a Barnsley budget from Norwich and Fulham prior to them coming to Kenilworth Road.
Whether Critchley quite grasps the size of the task in hand here yet is open for debate. His post-match interview for his first home game in charge bore absolutely no relation at all to the game I’d just sat and watched. His claims that QPR had been in some ways unlucky, that the scoreline flattered the visitors in any way, that this wasn’t a three nil game, should not pass muster with anybody who sat through it. It seems from my Twitter replies and some of the message board threads today that a portion of you agree with him. For me, Luton were greatly superior to QPR in all departments.
The new manager’s team selection raised eyebrows. Key men Jake Clarke-Salter and Stefan Johansen remain absent, with Andre Dozzell and Leon Balogun, by way of mitigation. The solution he came up with looked like a 4-2-3-1 on paper, but quickly and often started to look like the 4-4-2/4-4-1-1 he used up at Blackpool. This is what we were told to expect by our regular contributor from Bloomfield Road — a central midfield used entirely as coagulant, with any skill or flair consigned and confined entirely to the wide areas. If he is going to try that here, then this squad of players will take some crow-barring into it. QPR haven’t played with conventional wingers for several managers now — with all the recent hires preferring variations of 4-3-3, 4-2-3-1 or a back three and wing backs. In an effort to find one here Critchley benched Chris Willock to select Mide Shodipo (Lord give me the strength to carry on) and although a couple of early, purposeful runs produced dangerous low crosses into the box which nobody got on the end of, that went about as well as one would have expected.
What we do have is lots and lots of modern footballer boys who would like to play ‘ten’, and here one of those, Ilias Chair, was asked to hug the other touchline. From there, one early click and collect around a stranded full back drew applause, and another dribble and low toe-poke saved by Horvath was as close as Rangers came all night. When it came to time for substitutions Chair (who, to be fair, seemed to be complaining of stomach cramps or some such) went off for Willock in a like-for-like swap, prompting boos from the crowd for a manager in his first home game — shades of Paul Hart right there. With this set up, Dykes isolated and Roberts way too far behind him doing a good impression of somebody who’d never played the position before, Rangers produced 36 crosses and found the target with four of them — 11%. More often than not inaccurate balls were being wafted vaguely into a penalty area populated by one striker and three centre backs. They went back to it time and time again, also introducing Albert Adomah to see if he could do any better, and to my mind it worked twice all night — for the late Dykes miss which he should have scored, and a free kick which Roberts flicked up and onto the top of the bar. By the end the players seemed to be in open revolt with each other, with each cross that missed its target bringing another flurry of angry finger pointing and rants at each other about who should have been where and why. Tactically, relative to what Rob Edwards did with Luton, I thought we were alarmingly bad.
Talk about tactics and substitutions and strikers and so and so forth all you like, I’m just going to repeat what I said after we lost 3-0 here against Burnley a fortnight ago — you’ve got to compete better than this. Luton, like Burnley, are a better team than us. I know we don’t like them much, but there’s no shame in losing this game because they’re a good team that will push the play-offs this season. But, again like Burnley, you’ve got to do more than this, particularly as the home team, to make life difficult for them. I don’t want to go all Mike Bassett England Manager on you here but you’ve got to tackle people, you’ve got to kick people, you’ve got to win headers, you’ve got to put your foot in, you’ve got to win at least your fair share of the first contact and the same with the second ball. QPR did none of that last night. You’ve lost to a team that wins headers, wins tackles, plays at intensity, plays with physicality, plays forwards quickly when it has the chance, and runs, and you’ve lost because you weren’t willing to do those things yourself. We were soft, with the opposition, and with the referee. Easy to play against.
I want to see somebody put a challenge in. Rangers were so passive in this game even Gavin Ward could referee it. At home, bit of a local derby, some needle in the fixture, very decent sized crowd given the ludicrous kick off time forced on us by our Sky overlords, and you’ve got players pulling their legs out of tackles, ducking their head when attacking a cross at the near post, because they’re more afraid of getting hurt than they are determined to try and score the goal or win the ball. When Luton needed to foul somebody they did so — 20 times in fact. We weren’t "at it”, as they say — a nothing ball knocked in behind Dickie in the first half looked like it might drift out for a goal kick, so he sort of left it, and Dieng stayed on his line thinking about other things, Luton guy decides to chase it, suddenly we’re panicking and having to stick it in the main stand and having a row with each other about whose responsibility it was, because we’d been too casual, because we weren’t concentrating, because we weren’t alive to the danger, because the fucking goalkeeper was fast asleep.
There was no intensity, pace or tempo to QPR’s play. Rangers had nearly three quarters of the possession, but spent almost all of that moving it around between defensive players in non-threatening positions at a snail’s pace while Luton calmly filed back into their shape and wondered what the fuck we were doing. Nobody seizing the initiative, nobody driving forwards into space, nobody committing and beating an opponent, nobody with the ability or the bollocks to play a positive, progressive ball through the other team rather than side to side in front of them. If you disagree fair enough, we all have different opinions about football, but I just can’t believe any QPR fan was able to sit through this and think it was anywhere close to fine — it was the farthest thing from fine.
I said on Twitter last night that everybody involved in this should be ashamed, and yeh I’d had a couple of beers and was angry walking away from the ground, but I stand by that in the cold, sober light of day. We’re lacking confidence, we miss Johansen when he doesn’t play, I’m prone to hyperbole and exaggeration and over-emotional rubbish, I accept all of this, but I’m fairly staggered at the amount of people I’ve heard and read today that think this wasn’t that bad, that we were somehow in this game, that it was one of Mark Warburton’s "fine margins” things. It’s from a lot of people and posters I respect as well, so I’m probably wrong, but it absolutely wasn’t, not for me. There were yawning chasms between these two teams and their input last night. Rob Edwards says his lads defended their goal when they had to which they "do well and enjoy doing” — can you say the same thing about us?
Luton who, let’s not forget, also had a gobshite manager who gave it the "us against the world” "special club” tub thumping bullshit and then deserted them in the international break requiring an unplanned midseason change of boss. They haven’t missed a beat, whereas we’re struggling to register a pulse. Are there players who now, as a result of Beale’s defection, no longer want to be here? Are there loan players who know they’re being recalled in January and now don’t want to get injured for fear of killing their second half of the season move? Are there players who think they’re off in January and don’t want to jeopardise that transfer with a knock? I don’t know the answer to any of this, but the performances have tanked to such an extent — remember Watford, Millwall, Bristol City, Cardiff? — that you can’t help but start to come up with conspiracy theories as to why. When your star man has gone from such red-hot form that when he drew his boot back from 20 yards at The Den I said "goal” before he’d even hit the thing, to now not being able to get in the team ahead of Mide Shodipo, you’ve got to wonder what’s going on. Taylor Richards came on and did a reasonable turn off the bench — his low cut back should have been a goal for both Lyndon Dykes and Albert Adomah and somehow they both contrived to fresh-air their shots at the open goal from four yards out just to really put the tin hat on everything — but he wasn’t even in the squad at Cardiff and might not have been here had Andre Dozzell not been absent. We’re apparently committed to paying quite a chunk of money for him next summer, he looks half decent when he comes off the bench, and against Livingston in the World Cup friendly, and then disappears. Perhaps we’re just shit, it wouldn’t be the first time, but it all feels just so… weird.
I guess the third goal is a perfect microcosm of all this. Doughty’s shitpinger screamed into the top corner from 25 yards out and was as pure a strike as you’ll see in the Championship all season from one of this game’s outstanding players. ‘Come on Clive, what do you want them to do with that?’, you might ask me if you’re in the "it wasn’t that bad last night” camp. Watch it back again, if only for Tim Iroegbunam’s involvement in it. He’s a kid, learning his trade, fair enough, but look at the desire and drive of Doughty relative to the QPR man. I’ve heard of central midfielders letting opponents run off the back of them, but here he lets him run off his front. There are several moments in the build up too, where a ball is bouncing and loose, or miscontrolled, and QPR could put a foot in — what’s Albert Adomah doing here, for instance? There’s a 50/50 challenge on the edge of the box for one of our centre backs to try and win, but Morris has got on the move and is there first and strongest ahead of Dickie to divert the ball back into Doughty’s path. This is pathetic stuff. We’ve lost four games at home on the spin, we’ve scored two goals in nine matches, and we’re not even getting that angry or upset about it. Zero yellow cards and QPR fans telling me "come on it wasn’t that bad”. I’m sorry, it’s not good enough.
I’d challenge anybody who thinks that any aspect of that last night was acceptable in any way.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
QPR: Dieng 5; Laird 5, Dickie 5, Dunne 5, Paal 5; Shodipo 5 (Adomah 78, 5), Iroegbunam 4, Field 5, Chair 5 (Willock 66, 5); Roberts 4 (Richards 78, 6), Dykes 4
Subs not used: Kakay, Amos, Archer, Masterson
Luton: Horvath 6; Bree 7, Lockyer 7, Potts 7 (Freeman 76, 6); Clark 7; Doughty 8, Campbell 7 (Berry 85, -), Mpanzu 7, Bell 7; Morris 8 (Jerome 85, -), Cornick 7 (Woodrow 58, 7)
Subs not used: Adebayo, Watson, Isted
Goals: Morris 10 (assisted Doughty), 47 (assisted Bree), Doughty 81 (assisted Morris)
Bookings: Doughty 43 (foul), Clark 67 (foul), Potts 72 (dissent), Mpanzu 76 (foul)
QPR Star Man — N/A Yeh, good one.
Referee — Gavin Ward (Surrey) 6 Really struggles to police time wasting and any sort of clock running — Luton deciding they were having a water break mid-match seemed to flummox him, and the beautiful Jack and Rose moment between Potts and Doughty by the South Africa Road stand in the second half was laughably farcical — but there was nothing to referee here and he was fine by and large.
Attendance — 16, 030 (1,500 Luton approx.) Very much doubt there’ll be that many here on Monday after this.
If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk.
Pictures — Ian Randall Photography
The Twitter @loftforwords