A trip to Southampton, where QPR never lose, brought about encounters with a man in a bath of baked beans, the French, and eventually the staff at the St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington for LFW.
The hellish (but occasionally brilliant) life of the local newspaper journalist can best be summed up by a long, drawn out, intensely annoying and ultimately quite magnificent encounter I had with a peacock.
In small, rural Derbyshire towns where time used to be spent digging coal out of the ground but is these days mostly passed by watching – or starring in – episodes of Jeremy Kyle's human bear pit, a peacock turning up on the high street, as one did early in my journalism ‘career’, is reasonably big news. How did it get there? Where did it come from? Where was it going? The locals queued for their sandwiches at lunch time and looked at the rather confused bird strutting up and down looking like a peacock.
Of course, pretty soon one of the people who likes to pop into the local newspaper office and talk to the reporters popped into the local newspaper office and talked to the reporters to see if they'd seen the peacock as well and what, exactly, they were going to do about it. ‘After all,’ they rambled, ‘there hasn't been a peacock sighting in Belper since George was on the throne, and even that turned out to be a swan that had encountered a stray pot of blue paint.’
It is, still, this sort of nonsense that gets certain people of a certain age in a certain kind of town talking in the queue for their cigarettes – and as they're the only people who actually buy the local newspaper these days it's that sort of chatter that the poor local hack fresh out of some big city university suddenly has to become interested in and engage with. Dreams of frequenting Premier League press boxes or being front row centre on the press benches for a landmark legal ruling seem a long way away when you're looking up at the roof of the local butcher's shop with half a dozen greying locals all muttering "yep, it's definitely a peacock alright. Bold as brass so it is."
Three weeks of writing stories about a stray peacock later, God – not such a humourless bastard as it turns out –sensed my waning will to live and threw me a bone. "I'll come and collect it," said a man on the other end of the phone after trotting out some story about being the groundsman at a local stately home none of the newspaper staff had heard of before.
So there we all stood in the newsroom car park as our saviour turned up in a Ford Fiesta Zetec and tried to load the bird onto the front passenger seat. Clearly this was not the owner of this or any other peacock – the logistics of taking it away in a three door run-around car would surely have occurred to him well in advance if he was – but as he finally managed to close the passenger door and walk around to the driver's side it had gone well beyond the stage of asking what the hell he thought he was doing and advanced to the point where we knew something brilliant was about to happen and we wanted to be there to see it.
Into the driver's seat he climbed and the engine started with a roar – well, an apologetic wheeze but I'm embellishing quite a few things here for comedic effect so go with it. The noise of the engine caused the bird - puzzled looking to this point but fairly sedate - to go bat-shit crazy (technical term). Our man, unperturbed by the flapping wings and loud squawking, attempted to move off but as the car started to crawl forwards the bird lunged over the handbrake and started pecking furiously at his eyes. Outside, the grizzled newspaper staff watched in absolute silence as the Fiesta, by now simply a heaving mass of bright blue feathers and blood, rolled gently down the incline of the car park, picking up speed as it went, before crashing reasonably spectacularly into the brick wall at the far end.
I felt like telling this story to the poor swine dispatched from the Southampton Echo, on a Saturday, to our pre-match pub before the recent QPR match at Southampton. He was there to interview and take pictures of the local do-gooder who'd decided – seemingly without thinking about how cold he would be – to sit in a bath full of baked beans for the duration of QPR's visit to the city a fortnight ago. "Don't worry dear reporter," I felt like saying, "there will be wonderful moments in your career to counter this one.”
But I didn't. I was too busy, with the rest of the LoftforWords lot, ensuring we were well placed around the tub for the photograph of the "regulars showing their support" that appeared in the Echo the following Monday. Like you do.
For West London football fans of a hooped persuasion Southampton sits on the south coast like some sort of idyllic paradise where the sun always shines and Queens Park Rangers never lose. Since the Saints said farewell to their ramshackle Dell and moved across town into the functional but characterless St Mary's bowl all manner of QPR teams have visited and never once suffered a defeat.
John Gregory brought the worst QPR team it's ever been my misfortune to clap eyes on here in 2006 and won 2-1 – the late Ray Jones memorably mugging Kelvin Davis out by the corner flag and smoothly gliding the ball home from an impossible angle before running along the touchline pointing to the QPR badge on his chest. We thought we'd found a star. Then he drove his car under a bus. Tragic.
Luigi De Canio followed suit, winning 3-2 here with two goals from Patrick Agyemang – a player with no discernible footballing ability whatsoever. Paulo Sousa, as he did in every single match he's ever managed to date, settled for a 0-0 and even the beleaguered Rangers outfit at the tail end of Ian Holloway's reign salvaged a draw with a Danny Shittu goal having fallen behind when most of the travelling fans were still taking their seats.
And here the Hooped masses were again. Just three wins in the Premier League all season and reeling from morning newspaper allegations that a recent training trip to Dubai had been more stag party than boot camp, QPR were firmly rooted to the foot of the table at kick off but took the lead early through Loic Remy, recovered from a shambolic equalising goal and the subsequent loss of goalkeeper Julio Cesar to injury and then won the match late on. As in excess of 3,000 visiting fans roared their team on Jay Bothroyd became the latest unlikely name written into an ever lengthening role of QPR honour on this ground. Maybe it’s the sea air, or the unsetting Southampton sun, that inspires genius from such mediocrity.
Or maybe it's the stadium itself?
QPR had been promised an intimidating atmosphere for what was not only a relegation six-pointer, but also the return of Harry Redknapp to the club he once walked out on to retake the reigns at bitter near neighbours Portsmouth. But atmosphere and such concerns of the common-or-garden football supporter come below even the bathroom fittings in the list of priorities when constructing places like St Mary’s, along with character and individuality.
Paint this ground blue and it would be the same as Leicester City 's. Middlesbrough, Derby, Cardiff and Coventry are all almost identical. Doncaster Rovers' new home looks like St Mary's that's been washed on too high a temperature. Two tiered stands, one overhanging the other, with fans as close to the pitch as possible are what many fans would ask for when designing their ideal new stadium. Ask the LFW message board regulars to pick out their favourites and Boavista and Sampdoria always feature high on the list. But that seems too much like hard work and expense to English football teams more concerned with getting their base for the next 100 years built quickly and cheaply than creating something to actually be proud of and pleased to call home.
The atmosphere at these places is non-existent, the distance from supporter to pitch vast, and the home teams are rather wheezed on by a mixture of corporates, empty seats, and fans who used to sit or stand together and crank it up at their old place but now find themselves spread out around a vast sloping structure interspersed with the aforementioned corporates and empty seats. There have been more intimidating meetings of the Cleethorpes and District Senior Women's Knitting Circle than this game – hell we even somehow managed to arrive at the ground on some form of Southampton supporters association official coach for the very reasonable cost of a quid each.
I've been in some intimidating football grounds in my time: the sheer hatred in the eyes of the West Brom fans in 1997 when we'd had the temerity to poach their manager Ray Harford from them lived as long in the memory as it took me to go to a Napoli game for example. But I find the self service checkouts at Sainsbury's (what do you mean unexpected item in bagging area, you told me to put it there?) scarier than anything that happened at Southampton. Harry Redknapp was booed – a bit – when he came out of the tunnel, and then booed a bit more when he ventured out to the touchline for the first time. Other than that, and the faint cry of "he's going to twitch in a minute" midway through the second half there was nothing. Only a sudden onset of agoraphobia could frighten anybody in this place.
Nobody could ever doubt that The Dell was no longer fit for purpose and Southampton couldn’t possible have stayed there but I couldn't help thinking that had this game been played at the old place it would have been deeply unpleasant and QPR would no more have won the match than flown to the moon afterwards on the team coach. The generally held, financially based, opinion is that QPR can no longer compete in the modern sport with the 18,000 capacity Loftus Road as their home. But take Rangers out of their cave and place them in one of these Meccano constructions on a brownfield site further down the A40 and you may end up asking whether they can compete without it.
QPR's record at St Mary's – played five, won three, lost none – should come as no real surprise. At Pride Park, another ground stuck out on some waste ground at the end of an industrial park with only the colour of the seats to distinguish it from half a dozen others, Rangers’ record is played six won three and drawn three. At Leicester they've won three and drawn one of six. Hell Marc Nygaard even scored from 35 yards out at the Walkers Stadium/King Power Stadium/Insert Sponsor Name Here Bowl. One of our travelling party was in the toilets when the big Dane let fly and refused to believe the story until she saw it on ITV the following morning. At Cardiff's new ground Rangers have won one and drawn one of two visits; they've won two and drawn one of five visits to the worst of all the new grounds at Coventry and won 3-0 on their last visit to Middlesbrough. They also have a win and a defeat from two trips to Doncaster .
In fact if you add all this up you find that since all these clubs decided a bland, unimaginative, flat-pack, soulless, characterless, silent vacuum was where they wanted to play their home games, QPR have played against six different clubs 31 times in a variety of circumstances winning 14, drawing nine and losing just eight. This is QPR, remember, who have only won five away matches in the last two seasons. In fact if you remove the 2010/11 promotion campaign Rangers have only won 23 away league games in total since 2006 – 23 away wins in 130 games over seven years and yet 14 successes and nine ties in 31 games at the new grounds.
Stadiums like St Mary's were built for financial reasons: more seats, more hospitality lounges and, most crucially of all, finished to a tight budget. Inadvertently, the result is they're built for the away teams. Tony Fernandes take heed.
We could have got the fast train from Waterloo straight to Southampton like everybody else I guess, but when somebody offers you a return ticket for £8 it’s hard to say no. The catch in the deal was that the train actually trundled off towards Brighton for a bit, called at Gatwick Airport, then turned right to Crawley before meandering through all sorts of towns like Chichester, Horsham, Barnham and Havant that you’ve heard of before but could never possibly place on a map. It took the best part of three hours, and didn’t even appear on the timetable at the time we caught it, and there were some mumbled objections from a travelling party of eight.
But this turned out to be something of a masterstroke because although we had enough time on the way there to work out our annual salaries in Chomp bars, on the way home several other Rangers had decided to catch the same rattler and soon the whole thing turned into a travelling pub, trundling steadily through the countryside while QPR fans danced around and sang the ‘Kevin Gallen’s magic’ song for 45 minutes without pausing for breath and generally made prats of themselves.
At Gatwick Airport a party of French tourists arrived and were immediately forced to join in with a prolonged version of Captain Jack. Two of the LFW lot attempted to chat up one of the foreign new comers – one fell by the wayside metaphorically speaking when his “J’habite your mum’s house,” line failed to impress, the other fell quite literally when he got so caught up in his loud, nonsensical pidgin French that he failed to realise quite how many shots of neat Vodka he’d consumed and ended up face down on the floor.
Faced with an onward journey to Oxford the poor unnamed soul made it as far as Paddington before having a fight with himself in the toilet mirror on the stopping service to Didcot and attracting the attention of the British Transport Police who promptly threw him in the back of a van and carted him off to St Mary’s Hospital for some light stomach pumping and then an order to wait on a trolley in the corridor until the morning shift came on and he could be seen by the “alcohol dependency counsellor” who spoke to him about the dangers of peer pressure and gave him some pamphlets to read on the way to Aston Villa.
The rest of us, after some falling over of our own, descended on the Victoria Sports Bar and Grill to watch the fun again on Match of the Day. Sadly, the Sports Bar and Grill in Victoria believes that a sports bar concept is successfully achieved by putting the word ‘sport’ on the door and putting Sky Sports News on 75 different screens around the place and leaving it at that. Match of the Day could not be seen because the three members of bar staff on duty for 13 customers said they were “not senior enough to change the channel.” In the end we went to a pub over the road and interrupted a band’s live set to climb over them and put it on the screen above the drummer.
Part of me thinks it’s a shame QPR don’t win more often, but on reflection perhaps it’s just as well.
On the pitch >>> QPR performance 7/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10 >>> Match 7/10
Off the pitch >>> QPR support 9/10 >>> Home support 5/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 5/10 >>>> Stadium 5/10 >>>> Police and stewards 6/10
In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 9/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 6/10
On the train >>> Journey 10/10 >>> Cost 10/10
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Pictures – Action Images, LoftforWords