You’re going to need a bigger boat – Report Sunday, 6th Aug 2023 21:04 by Clive Whittingham Everything we expected and more from the shambolic rabble that is QPR’s class of 23/24 as the R’s crash to a 4-0 defeat at Watford on the opening day – a scoreline that could have been so much worse had the home side not called off the dogs at half time. Join us, then, on a journey through the many moods of a football supporter whose team begins the season by getting torn a new bum in its very first game. “Oooh it’s an emotional rollercoaster” say drones charged with convincing you this slop is worth parting with ever increasing ticket and television subscription fees to consume. Rollercoasters go up and down though, and end up back where they started. For Queens Park Rangers, Saturday, and you fear the next nine months, was, and is, a trip heading entirely downward, at ever increasingly frightening gradient and speed. A journey being attempted in a bin, on wheels, on fire, destined to end goodness only knows where by May but certainly no place good. The pilot’s wearing cowboy boots, and says it’s all going to be fine, but this is a guy facing the Siege of Tenochtitlan armed with a mop and a saucepan on his head. It is the farthest thing from fine. There were 17 separate correct guesses of a Watford 4-0 victory in our prediction league, a record for the number of people getting the score right in one game, and a damning indictment of where the club and team is at this moment. What love remains in this hopeless place clings to Gareth Ainsworth’s ten year stint atop the silk purse and sow’s ear emporium at Wycombe. His apparently boundless levels of energy and positivity, along with the soothing shrewdness of erudite assistant Richard Dobson, have been turning water into wine for a decade. These guys won Michelin stars with a box of Sugar Puffs and have been hired to cook up that recipe again. The early signs have been more Kitchen Nightmares than MasterChef Grand Final. Ainsworth admitted in interview to us a fortnight ago that he’d expected the relatively meagre task of adding two or three wins from the final dozen games of 22/23 to be pretty straightforward, accomplished in reasonably swift order, and the task of rebuilding for 23/24 begun three or four months out from its onset. In the end only two unlikely wins in the final three fixtures, in which QPR saw more of Lord Lucan’s pet unicorn than they did of the football, separated them from Pizza Trophy games with Chelsea’s Puppy Farm and Cheltenham becoming a league fixture rather than a day at the races. Ainsworth admitted he was “frazzled” by the experience, and concluded he’s a “builder, not a turn-around manager”. Eeek. Pass me an emoji, the one with all the gritted teeth on show. The “building” has been more Rogue Traders than DIY SOS. Having rightly pinpointed the availability of key players as a problem last term – steady on Poirot, there’ll be no crimes left for anyone else to solve at this rate - emphasis has been placed on sport science, physical and mental wellbeing, and player management. We talk about “loading” now. A lot. And yet, already, both first choice centre halves are missing. You are not allowed to know what is wrong with Jimmy Dunne, or Jake Clarke-Salter, nor when either of them might grace us with their presence again, but do please keep tipping your hard-earned into this money furnace during a time of spiralling rent, mortgage and food costs won’t you? There’s been talk of using the management team’s knowledge of League’s One and Two to strengthen the squad on a skinny budget, but the only new arrival who fits that bill is Leyton Orient’s Paul Smyth, who was at QPR two years ago anyway, was released because he couldn’t get fit, and who’s also spent the whole pre-season injured. Lewis Wing, Chris Forino, Josh Knight, Paul Smyth… bar Wigan clogger Max Power we haven’t been linked with a single player from downstairs who hasn’t previously played for Wycombe. By ‘knowledge of the lower divisions’ did they actually mean knowing how to scroll through their WhatsApp groups? Have we got Roy Essandoh's number somebody? Other new arrivals have been people you’ve heard of, jettisoned by their clubs because they’re right at the end of their careers, persuaded to come here by contract lengths no other clubs were willing to offer them, and talked about in such revered terms you’d think prime Dennis Bergkamp had agreed to join because he just loves that new bloody training ground so much. Ainsworth’s got a wide on the size of the Blackwall Tunnel for his new goalkeeper, but there’s a prevailing nag that his decision to open a soccer school in West London might have more to do with him being here than any desire to punt a football at Lyndon Dykes for nine months. At one point, second half, four nil down, Asmir Begovic appeared to be deliberately running the clock down. Every week a new low. This is how Custer must have felt - just when you think it can't get any worse another load of sodding Indians turn up. You want to hope, you want to believe, you want to go with it, you want to be optimistic, you want to look forward to a new season. And yet it’s all overwhelmed by suspicion. It's looked, felt, and sounded odd. Ainsworth has said Chris Willock has responded well to the tribulations of the spring and is in the best shape of his life, but doesn’t select him. He’s said there’s been a complete mentality change around the place, and yet the pre-season performances have largely mirrored those of the end of last season with all the same problem children involved. The manager said there’d be three new faces in time for Watford, and we ended up with one well-worn Jack Colback who’s apparently not going to be fit enough to start for weeks having not played a game of football anywhere since March. All ten of the outfield starters for Oxford last Saturday were here last year, and each of them used that debacle to revise in turn everything they're all about. Even the adversity that comes with a League One team turning the heat up a bit in a pre-season friendly is too much for them to bear. Oxford started their season with a 2-0 loss at Cambridge, by the way.
Jimmy Dunne said the result wasn’t a “fair reflection of where we are” but, like Ainsworth’s assertion Paul Smyth was basically fit to play and would be involved in the final friendly 48 hours before he once again named a team without him, each lie incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt has to be paid. On Saturday afternoon there was a knock at the door, and this isn’t a bill that could be paid with the sort of cheap talk and warm diarrhoea football fans get spooned into their ears during the close season when there’s no result on Saturday to highlight what bollocks is being talked. Watford, who worked through three more managers last time out with a team so disinterested even QPR completed a league double over it, scored after 30 seconds with a starting line up made up entirely of the players who were here previously. QPR kicked off, gave the ball away immediately, conceded a free kick, Morgan Fox followed a forward as he dropped off, Dele-Bashiru ran off Andre Dozzell into the vacated space, Begovic sat on his arse and let the ball squirm beneath him, and that’s one nil. Suspicion fast became realisation. It’s not as bad as you thought, it’s worse. Bayo’s free header on eight minutes drew a save from Begovic, but QPR then afforded Imran Louza 20-square yards of space on the edge of the box and invited him to pick his spot which he duly did for two nil. Matheus Martins - through, round and over the top of Osman Kakay - got a shot away which the Bosnian keeper stopped with his legs. Begovic also made a big save to deny Dele Bashiru a second. But this was all within the space of a minute or two and barely 60 seconds later Rangers were painfully slow out to a short corner and then didn’t pick up Martins as he made a near post run and flicked a third in with his head. The embarrassing simplicity of the third somehow then surpassed by the fourth as Sierralta ran in behind unchecked and squared for the unmarked Bayo to slot into an empty net. Lies thrive in the dark; somebody had just turned on a bright light. Realisation fast replaced by anger, from an away end that journeyed through stunned, open revolt, widespread booing to, finally, in hundreds of cases and well before half time, an early exit. The prospect of more than 3,000 boozed and coked up QPR fans in Southampton at the end of the month, with Russell Martin’s team clocking through 1,000 completed passes for the first time in Championship history, has the potential to get all kinds of ugly.
Ainsworth continues to beg for patience. QPR fans who remember his playing days here cannot help but feel desperately sorry for him. He’s wanted this job his whole managerial career, and he’s got it now, at this point, with the place in this state, and no FFP headroom to do a thing about it. Any new manager is going to immediately want to know how much there is to spend and the answer to that is zero, less than zero in fact because they’ll be required to sell at least one more player. That sets the calibre of candidate you’d attract here at a certain level even if you could afford to pay off the one you've got. We were only able to tempt somebody with Ainsworth’s record because he loves the club and wanted the job. With everything already stacked against him, having to start the first game missing both centre backs and your new central midfielder was cruel. Asmir Begovic looked like a dad filling in for an absent son; Osman Kakay is ok as a reserve right back, but now he’s first choice and got absolutely pulverised; Morgan Fox is a poor Championship left back who can occasionally play centre half if pressed, here starting after just 60 minutes of pre-season on the right side of the defence; Joe Gubbins has never given any previous indication of being remotely good enough for this level and was a painful watch, the referee made him change his shorts in the second half presumably because they were caked in shit; Kenneth Paal is carrying himself like a guy who knows he’s just torched his career, and spent the day allowing opponents to cross the ball into the box to see what would happen; Sam Field often gets a free pass, but the away end turnstile clicked fewer people through than him on Saturday and he got the standard yellow card for a foul after being comprehensively schooled; Andre Dozzell is just an absolute fucking embarrassment, ponsing about like football owes him some sort of living, I’d brand him a ghost if I wasn’t so afraid an actual ghost would come for me in the night and call me out on it; Ilias Chair has checked out, bar a couple of fleeting second half moments down the left he looked miserable and disinterested, and spent the moments after the final whistle chatting with Watford players rather than acknowledging the away fans left in the ground; Charlie Kelman, bless him, absolutely miles off it; surprise witness Paul Smyth saw as much of the ball as I did and contributed about the same; Lyndon Dykes waved his arms around a lot. This isn’t even a League One team, on paper or in practice. It looked and played like a Conference North team that had ended up over its head in an FA Cup tie. I’d say Watford took them out into some deep water and drowned them, but you could drown this lot in a bowl of Cornflakes. After being beaten 3-0 at home by Sunderland last season I wrote the Mackems brought a bright, young, creative, attacking team to Loftus Road, furnished by a clever and purposeful recruitment operation that’s brought together an exciting group of promising prospects from Premier League academies, Europe and Latin America, while QPR brought a big bucket of shit and a whisk. It seems this season we've even dispensed with the whisk. It was a brutal, horrible experience watching them get systematically taken apart like this. From anger we drifted into acute, profound embarrassment. However did it come to this? You can only pray further new arrivals, Colback and Dunne make a difference. They surely couldn’t make it worse. The eight starts Jake Clarke-Salter makes for us this season could be crucial, might be worth giving some seriously careful thought to which games we use those in. For all that though, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly what on fucking earth the manager was doing. “We set a trap for Watford”. Did we? What was that then, lull them into such a comfortable sense of security that try and play the second half with four players for a giggle? Let them punch us so repeatedly, for so long, they eventually get tired and have a little nap? All the talk is of a backs-to-the-wall survival effort, staying in the Championship against all odds, shoving all the season previews that have us dead last where the sun don’t shine. But those sorts of scenarios usually involve banks of four, thick midfield fives, crowded spaces around the edge of the box. Stodge the centre of the park up, protect your area, dig in, make life awkward. Five pints of coagulant please landlord, and a glass of white wine for the lady. Rangers neither pressed, nor sat deep; they posed no attacking threat, while at the same time failed to defend. The spaces were wide open, blatantly obvious, easily exploited, and all of it right from the very first whistle. A 4-2-3-1, this kind of a 4-2-3-1, set up and playing like this, against Valerian Ismael? You’ve had all summer to come up for a plan for playing Watford, and this was the plan you came up with? You're just going to let Ngakia do that are you, from right back? Embarrassment now drifting into incredulity. Bart Simpson did more homework on his Libya project than we’d seemingly done on the hosts. Staggeringly inept.
The most eye-catching piece of team news was the decision, once more, to leave Chris Willock on the bench with troublesome Taylor Richards whose permanent move from Brighton this summer risks going down as the worst transfer this club has ever completed. When you’re leaving players of that calibre on the bench, while selecting Charlie Kelman and a barely fit Paul Smyth from the start, then adding Stephen Duke-McKenna at half time, it looks perverse and certainly makes a mockery of the idea that everything’s much better at QPR mentality and attitude wise this year. Richards didn’t make it on despite the rapidly unravelling situation, while Willock was given the final minute of injury time at the end of the game prompting howls of “you don’t know what you’re doing” from those who’d stayed that long to vent their spleen. Cards on the table, it was actually the only bit of Ainsworth’s whole approach to this game I did have some time and understanding for. You cannot continue to play and behave on the field as Willock and Richards did at Oxford last week and expect to start the next game regardless because of who you are. If you’re trying to repair or create a culture in any team environment, turning a blind eye to their contributions last week and picking them regardless because of who they are is toxic. I’d rather he pick inferior players, lose games, lose his job, doing it this way, than bending on things like this. The idea they’d have made any kind of significant difference had they played also ignores the fact neither has turned in a performance even approaching acceptable, never mind game changing or influential, between them in 2023. You’d hope the embarrassment of not even being able to get into this QPR team, playing like this, might sting them into action, but I won’t hold my breath unless God’s got time for a quiet word on his rounds this week. Go get the bible verse for the Gram.
Sinclair Armstrong started the second half, and must do so from the beginning as soon as possible. Finally here was a player willing to do a bit of running, a bit of closing down, a bit of tackling. Somebody with a bit of personal and professional pride, who doesn’t think being 4-0 down to Watford at half time is acceptable, and isn’t having it. Who, when the goalkeeper goes down because his bloody eyelash has been knocked out of place, makes it his business to mark a card and boot said goalkeeper up in the air to show him what a proper foul looks and feels like first chance he gets. When Danananananana Bachmann insisted, and got, play be restarted with an uncontested Watford drop ball despite play being stopped with QPR on the attack, Armstrong wasn’t having that either, and booted off with both the Watford captain and the referee. Good. Fucking good. And you, Ilias Chair, Lyndon Dykes, coming across and telling him to leave it and calm down, well you can get into the sea and stay there. Never mind calm down, how about you two get mad? Senior players. How about you start smashing one or two up? Dykes went through on goal in the last minute and passed the ball sportingly back to the goalkeeper. Fucking calm down? Spare me. God, I wish Armstrong’s improvised chip of the keeper off a loose through ball had dropped into the net rather than wide. You can have two sweets from the jar Sinclair. No chocolate for the rest of you. The marginal improvements second half, with Duke-McKenna doing the sort of passable impression of midfield ratter Dozzell ought to be able to manage in his sleep, were tempered only by the clearly obvious truth that Watford had called the dogs off. Presented with an unexpected pre-season friendly to prepare them for their season beginning for real a week from now, they decided to rest and recuperate through the second 45 rather than keep pedal to the metal. This would have gone to double figures if they’d played the second half as the first. This QPR team has another couple of fours in it at least, certainly a five at some point, probably a six, and perhaps a seven or more. Ghoulish as it may be, part of me was disappointed they didn’t score more. Something, somewhere, at some point needs to wake this club and these players up to itself. Stemming the bleeding in this manner only enabled them to try and sell you the second half as some sort of positive platform to build from. It was nothing of the sort. Short of kicking back with a paper and a cigarette Watford couldn’t have been any less interested and even then they managed to chip Begovic from 20 yards and hit the underside of the bar, and draw a number of other camera saves. They finished with 71% possession, 24 shots on the goal, a whopping 13 of those on target. I think there’s been a rape up there. The fury of the first half had long since given way to apathy, resignation and misery. Apathy, resignation, misery… but not surprise. If any of you, anywhere, were surprised by any of this, then you haven’t been paying attention. Links >>> Photo Gallery >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread Watford: Bachmann 5; Ngakia 8, Porteus 6, Hoedt 6, Morris 6 (Andres 45, 6); Louza 9 (Kone 66, 6), Sierralta 7 (Livermore 66, 6), Dele-Bashiru 7 (Chakvetadze 66, 7); Sema 7, Bayo 7, Martins 8 (Kayembe 82, -) Subs not used: Healey, Pollock, Asprilla, Hamer Goals: Dele-Bashiru 1 (assisted Louza), Louza 20 (assisted Ngakia), Martins 38 (assisted Sema), Bayo 43 (assisted Sierralta) Bookings: Morris 45+1 (foul) QPR: Begovic 5; Kakay 2, Fox 3, Gubbins 2, Paal 2; Dozzell 2 (Dixon-Bonner 90+7, -), Field 3; Smyth 4 (Duke-McKenna 45, 6), Kelman 2 (Armstrong 45, 6), Chair 3 (Willock 90+7, -); Dykes 3 Subs not used: Archer, Larkerche, Adomah, Richards Bookings: Armstrong 67 (foul), Field 76 (foul) QPR Star Man – Sinclair Armstrong 6 Kicked the goalkeeper up in the air. Referee – Thomas Bramall (Sheffield) 6 Adding seven minutes to that first half tantamount to a war crime. Attendance 20,087 (2,000 QPR approx.) That Southampton game risks being very ugly indeed. 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 Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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