QPR’s goalkeeping chaos of 2021/22 was replaced by Seny Dieng doing all 48 matches by himself in 22/23, but sadly the Senegalese international felt like an asset whose value was in something of a decline by the end of the campaign.
As we once again begin the trawl of each individual player’s contribution to the QPR season just gone there clearly aren’t going to be many positives given the way the campaign panned out. If at any stage you think the marks are a little harsh, well the team went very close to being relegated, only two clubs lost more than our 21 defeats, we set a club record for home defeats in a season (12), and we had the worst defence in the division bar Blackpool. Seny Dieng conceded 74 goals in league and cup last season — you don’t get a high mark for that.
Let’s, however, start with some good stuff. Dieng did, at least, score a goal for QPR this season. His injury time headed equaliser at Sunderland in August, sending the fans who’d stayed to the end tumbling off down concrete steps in a seething euphoric mass, won the club’s Goal of the Season vote for novelty value alone — it was the first time in the history of the club a goalkeeper had scored a goal for Rangers. It’s more than several of our midfielders, and one of our strikers, managed in 2022/23 and when you watch Dieng in the opposition penalty box, or with the ball at his feet, it’s difficult not to conclude that he’s a long way from being the worst outfield player we’ve got in the squad. On another journey into opposition territory, at home to Millwall, Dieng ended up tricking a full back with a Cruyff turn out by the touchline.
He was also available. Dieng is one of two ever presents this season who played all 48 matches, along with the Player of the Year Sam Field. There are going to be several running themes on this May’s report cards, and actually being available to play for the bloody team is going to be the biggest one of them.
QPR did not suffer, or at least did not report suffering, a single serious injury last season — no broken bones, no ruptured ACLs, no hamstring’s torn off the bone as in previous seasons. And yet multiple members of the first team missed vast swathes of the season with non-descript muscle injuries. Now, this could be a poor communication strategy. Perhaps, in attempting to keep cards close to chest and not tip opponents off, QPR have unwittingly made pariahs of several players by saying they had a "calf strain” only for them to disappear for several months. You may also subscribe to the idea that all of these players desperately wanted to play, were deeply frustrated at not being able to, and the whole thing was simply terribly unlucky and coincidental. I don’t. I think several of these players had injuries that could have been played through, and ordinarily would have been. I think people have sat out when, if it had been an FA Cup quarter final or we were in play-off contention, they could and would have put their hand up and Neil Critchley said as much in his final post-match interview at Middlesbrough. I think the amount of times players have gone off, sometimes in the first half of games, with "tightness” has been embarrassing, and likewise the amount of times an injury was suffered they couldn’t possibly even get to half time with but turned out not even to be serious enough for them to miss the next game. I think, as Grant Hall and Lyle Taylor were forced to show publicly by withdrawing their labour for the lockdown games, players do get to a point where they’re looking after number one and concerned about jeopardising next season’s move, contract or loan deal by suffering an injury for their current club and several have not wanted to risk playing with a knock or a niggle once they realised the team had gone to shit. I think if Beale had stayed and the promotion push had materialised, as several of them were promised when they came here, they’d have been available much more than they were.
Even if all of these injuries were absolutely genuine and as bad as the players made them out to be then, I’m sorry, but muscle injuries in this quantity scream poor preparation, poor warm ups, poor warm downs, poor diet, poor lifestyle, poor treatment, sloppy standards — and, again, you had somebody from the club, Chris Martin in this case, say similar on the official website after the Coventry home game. QPR are going to be operating on a very tight budget, with a smaller squad, moving forwards into next season, so your biggest ability at Rangers in 23/24 is going to be your availability. For all these reasons and more, players who’ve sat out long periods of time this season can expect extremely low marks in this year’s end of terms. Dieng played every match, so he ticks that box at least.
He has also been playing behind a complete mess. The team collapsed catastrophically, and the defence in front of Dieng was often shambolic. This season he has lined up behind 18 different defences — 15 different versions of a four, and three different combinations of a five — and eight different centre back pairings/trios. The regression in Jimmy Dunne, nervous breakdown suffered by Rob Dickie, and porcelain fragility of Jake Clarke-Salter and Leon Balogun have left the goalkeeper badly exposed. For a good chunk of the season you could pretty much throw your hands up in the air and wonder what exactly you wanted our last line of defence to do with all that going on in front of him. That his own form and confidence suffered was pretty inevitable. How could it not?
And yet, sadly, another regular theme is going to be rapidly declining value of what the club no doubt counted on as their most sellable assets. Dieng is most definitely in that camp. He was one of the few players the club had received some genuine interest in, from Everton and others. He was also one of the few to come out of the wreck of last season’s play-off push with his stock on the rise — his injury at Blackburn, and particularly the absence of his distribution game, was seen as a key factor in the team’s demise and the decline in the Warburton-style of play to a point where Rangers were just knocking it around between the defenders unable to get out. Our win percentage with Dieng in the team in 21/22 knocked on the door of 50% and having him back from the start was seen a big plus. By the end, though, even his distribution game was miles off it. Presumably there’s some element of Gareth Ainsworth wanting to go longer, wanting him to slow the game down, and Seny acting under instruction, but there was some weird stuff going on with his kicking and throwing in the latter stages of the season. Against both Rotherham and Norwich he appeared to be wasting time over dead balls when logic dictated he should be hurrying up — at Rotherham he burned off a good minute moaning about Jordan Hugill standing too close to him when the referee had already said it was fine, at a point when we were losing the game 1-0. I bet Jordan was devastated. Those quick releases to spring counter attacks out of hand and boot which used to be a bit of a trademark have been replaced with a painfully slow, frustrating delay, allowing the opposition to file back and creating a situation where we’re simply turfing the ball down the field and hoping to win a 50/50 header on halfway.
This team has survived relegation despite long losing runs before. Under Ian Holloway in 2016/17 it did so largely because it had the best goalkeeper in the division — Alex Smithies’ performances kept his team’s head above water despite all its failings. Hell, Alex Smithies’ penalty saves alone were worth six points a season. While Dieng did, at long last, manage to save a penalty in open play this season — from Joel Piroe at Swansea in September — at times during the run in he was actually doing the opposite to that Smithies rescue job. There was an amateurish spill of a a pretty meek downward header for Luke O’Nien’s opening goal for Sunderland at Loftus Road; parries into traffic for goals against Norwich, and West Brom that should have been held; a goal at The Hawthorns scored into an empty net after he’d gone to punch a cross and missed the ball completely, flapping about like Christ in a Crucifix store; at Blackpool, where he conceded six and may as well have not been there, scoring the first ever 0/10 in 20 years of LFW, he came to the edge of the box to catch a long free kick downfield and dropped the thing cold allowing the hosts to roll into an empty net and later flapped horribly at a corner which was also then in turn headed into an unguarded goal; at Reading he got caught between a parry and a catch on a tame shot and ended up spaffing it up, over his head, down onto the line, and into the open goal via Jeff Hendrick; at Huddersfield he got caught trying to to make a big flashy camera save from a first half free kick and ended up neither catching the ball nor palming it away to safety, the hosts scored from the rebound and another two points were burned away. That’s… a lot. "Busy in goal, poor shot stopping” is not the corner of that analytics graph above you ideally want to be in. Mick Beale was critical of his slapdash approach to a pre-season friendly with Crystal Palace, the sort of team he should have been wanting to impress and possibly be bought by. Big Instagram footballer vibes without the big Instagram footballer performances.
Was there ever really a game where you came out, Smithies-style, thinking we got a result because of the goalkeeper? Sunderland away, where he not only scored but then made one of the best double saves you’ll ever see in injury time to preserve the point; Norwich away, perhaps, where he was excellent in a 0-0; and Fleetwood in the cup where he kept the score down on an embarrassing day all round. Two draws and a defeat. It should be said, he did get 6.00 in the interactive rating, the highest average in the team bar Ilias Chair and Sam Field, so you guys seem to have rated him slightly better than me.
And so here we are. Some positives, plenty of mitigation, but a pretty bleak picture. Dieng turns 29 in November. He signed a four-year contract in 2020 — though one presumes there’ll be an option for a fifth on that deal as we seem to insert that clause into every contract. The club needs money, but whereas Dieng was previously considered one of the division’s hotter goalkeeping properties and you could realistically have talked about £3m-£4m deals with the likes of Everton, now the speculation is linking him with Ligue 1 club Reims for a start and that certainly wouldn’t fetch you that sort of coin — not least because, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Reims have to pay a £22k fine every time they…
In numbers…
48 starts, 0 sub appearances, W13 D12 L23, 27.083% win percentage
74 goals conceded (1.541 a game), 9 clean sheets, 1 goal scored (Sunderland A)
0 red cards, 2 yellow cards (Watford A time wasting, Preston A time wasting)
3 LFW MOTM awards (Sunderland A, Norwich A, Fleetwood A)
LFW Ratings — 5, 7, 5, 8, 6, 6, 6, 7, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 7, 6, 7, 6, 5, 8, 6, 6, 6, 4, 7, 5, 5, 7, 6, 4, 6, 4, 4, 6, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6, 0, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 5, 6, 6, 5 = 5.583
Interactive Ratings — 6.00
2 Supporter MOTM Awards — Sunderland A, Norwich A
Others >>> Not a great deal to say is there, as nobody else played. Jordan Archer was a permanent substitute, and that’s frankly all he should ever be trusted to be at this level. Murphy Mahoney followed his cameo appearances at the end of 2021/22 with zero first team appearances either here or on loan, which will have done him the power of good prior to turning 22 next season. Joe Walsh got eight games of Conference football split between Maidenhead and Dorking under his belt and another ten in the league below at Hampton and Richmond, which isn’t too bad at 21 given Seny Dieng was doing loans at Whitehawk and Hampton and Richmond at that point but also isn’t burning any barns down. Matteo Salamon also played ten games for Hampton. Harry Halwax has been released back to The Beano.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into what was probably a throwaway comment in interview from somebody understandably keen to keep things close to his chest, but the comment by head of recruitment Andy Belk in our interview with him a couple of summers back that he isn’t really involved with the goalkeeping side of the things and actually goalkeeper coach Gavin Ward does a lot of that still niggles me. Is that the case? Is that normal? Do other clubs do it like that? Ward was a big champion of Dieng, so chalk one up in the successes there, but otherwise is that working? We seem to churn through a very high amount of not particularly brilliant goalkeepers at all levels of the club to me.
Links >>> Goalkeepers >>> Defence >>> Midfield >>> Attack
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