QPR drew 0-0 at Cardiff on Boxing Day.
Doors are a big thing back at the original LFW Towers this Christmas. The step-father - who we went out of our way to be beastly to as teenagers because it felt a bit soon and society taught us to do so (Disney is particularly harsh on stepparents), but actually turned out to be a very sound fella indeed — is very keen on them. Now knocking on 80, and with at least two strokes on the slate, he’s very much into the falling down, persistently asking random questions and driving a car when he really shouldn’t be driving a car stage of things. Wherever that line is drawn in life between "fell over” and "had a fall”, he is well past that line now. The line is a dot to him.
And doors. God, he loves doors.
A few for instances. Sleeping alone back in the bed you occupied as a hideously awkward and confused teenage boy, in a house surrounded by pictures of you as a hideously awkward and confused teenage boy, can do strange things to a 38-year-old released from London on leave. You lay there at night and start to reminisce about all the conventionally attractive, nubile classmates you could have brought back here but for all the hideous awkwardness; and all the unconventionally attractive, similarly confused classmates you should have brought back here but for the hideous convention. Sometimes this process can be aided by a stalk of the Facebook, and such scouting missions can often be buoyed by plugging one’s phone in next to the bed — because in normal, non-Premier Inn-themed bedrooms, there is obviously a fucking plug next to the fucking bed. Should you realise in the middle of the following day that said phone charger is still marooned upstairs in said bedroom you might nip up there, just to grab it and, no word of a lie, in the time it takes a reasonably fit and in-shape adult human male to go up those stairs, enter that bedroom, cross it, unplug that charger, and head back towards the exit, prior-mentioned 70-something-year-old, had-a-fall, step father can move, like a fucking ninja, from wherever he is in the house, and close that door behind you.
There’s a utility room in my parents' house - with a fridge and a freezer and a washer and a drier and four hedgehogs my mum felt too weak to survive the winter in the garden and so keeps in little huts and feeds cat biscuits — and should you move, from either the kitchen or the living room, to that utility room, for a beer, or a Diet Coke (other wastes of time are available), or cheese, or milk, or anything else you might want, from the fridge or the freezer, at any given time then, let me tell you, that 70-something-old, had-a-fall step father can sense it and is so quick on his feet that he can close not only the utility room door behind you, but also the door of whatever room it was you came out of in the first place and would like to go back to. At one point this week he closed the kitchen door as I was trying to go through it, jamming my arm in the mechanism. Agggghhhhhmotherfucker.
It very quickly becomes like a round of the Crystal Maze. Can you get from the sofa to the fridge and back again with the sparkling green Peroni in hand before the time runs down and the door is shut? It’s an automatic lock in, and there is no escape. There is no Richard O’Brien on hand to say ‘never mind, let’s play another game, a mystery?’ *HARMONICA SOUNDS*. This is it. This is the game. This is the game all Christmas long. Stuck in a house haunted by the ghosts of regret and missed opportunity, moving between the rooms while an old man shuffles along in your slipstream, closing the doors behind you. Nipped into the garage to get something you left in the car? Bzzzzzzzzzz… the shutters are closed behind you. Ring the landline to get somebody to come and rescue you. Pop to the Nisa corner shop for some coping beer, only 58 yards so no need to take your keys? Expect that front door to be locked as tight as a nuclear submarine when you get back. Ring the landline to get somebody to come and rescue you. Take a post-jog trip into the airing cupboard for a clean, dry, warm towel? Feel that door press into your lower back, forcing you into the airless, spaceless, windowless, two-by-two cloth-dominated blackness. Ring the landline to get somebody to come and rescue you.
This is, ostensibly, because of the cat. The cat, if included (and it wouldn’t be our worst player), wouldn’t be far off the oldest member of the QPR squad. It has outlived all of its teeth, and occasionally now, when it can summon the energy, makes a vague attempt to gum something to death. It has been there, seen that, and done it. Three separate feedings on Christmas Day were ignored, pushed aside with disdain, because the cat knows, and sees, and smells, there is a turkey in the oven. It looks at my mum with a withering pity as a tin of entrails is emptied in its vague direction. ‘Absolutely not. There’s a fucking bird so big you could rent it out as a two bedroom flat in Hammersmith for £2k a month cooking over there why would I eat this shite? I’ll wait cheers.’ This is a wise animal. Wise enough to know it’s not going outside into a northern winter at any point between October and April under any circumstances. This is a cat now so fat its back feet disappear completely when it sits down, and whose daily activity stretches as far as sitting by the wood burner in the kitchen only as long as it takes mum to light the coal fire in the living room at which point it switches between the heat sources and goes back to sleep. I've looked into that animal's eyes, it is not looking to escape. Nevertheless, apparently, the threat of the cat fleeing from cat paradise is omnipresent, and therefore doors are a big thing. Cats (and step sons), must approach each door in turn, with intentions pure and faith true, greet the gatekeeper as keymaster, and answer three questions correctly before they can progress to the next level which, in this case, is often only that bit of the hallway where we leave our shoes and coats.
I want it known, and recorded in the minutes, that I love all of these people and cats dearly, but after six days back at home… I can take the "what are you doing with your life”, I can take the "I think you’re a large in a sweater now”, I can take the repeated playings of Michael Buble’s ‘I Just Haven’t Met You Yet’ with the post-song Q and A about whether this might apply to me… but it’s the doors. It’s the doors. It’s got old. I’ve only so much empathy.
What’s that coming over the hill? It’s Queens Park Rangers. Queens Park Rangers. My escape. My escape for as long as I can remember. My escape from that bed, and this house, and this place, and this life, for as long as I’ve been existing in that bed, that house, that place and that life. No horny little 17-year-old looked forward to trips to Stockport as much as me when I was horny and 17, and no decrepit 38-year-old needed Cardiff away on Boxing Day quite as much as I did.
Then the game started, and if you thought Christmas was dragging before…
In the first half Cardiff’s detail to not let Chris Willock cut in from the left onto his right foot failed once, and Willock was able to maraud into exactly the sort of Millwall-away position from which he was scoring at the start of the season. This time he set a curler away from his right peg without the curl, betraying his current fitness, form and mindset. From the same position with a free kick he dollied one up for Ryan Allsop to catch, and when he let Kenneth Paal have a go from the same spot he beat the keeper, but unfortunately also the post, by several feet. In the first half Cardiff’s only attack of note saw Callum Robinson completely miss the ball when given a free header from 12 yards out. Big Dick Ng liked the look of that so much he repeated the trick in first half stoppage time. They did a little bit more in the second half, and were unfortunate that two good chances fell to Kion Etete, an eye-catching summer capture from Spurs, who displayed all the composure in front of goal of an epileptic gnat. One chance, after a decent touch and turn on the edge of the six-yard box, I’d have scored myself, but he managed to stick it past the post with Seny Dieng out of the picture. Another, from a bit further out, but with even less defensive attention, he skied so high it caused a full-scale brick-shitting on the air traffic control desk at Bristol airport.
That was it. That’s your minute-by-minute. If there’s been a worse game of professional football played anywhere this season then God bless all who sailed in her. Perhaps we did it on purpose, to punish Sky for televising it, in which case I'm right with you. Serves them right. Otherwise, no.
I’m going to be pretty sanguine about it, because if I were coming into this QPR job the first thing I’d want to get to the bottom of is why a team with such good centre backs, full backs and goalkeeper is conceding so many goals — Neil Critchley has very quickly put two clean sheets on the board from two away games with a team that registered seven shut outs in its previous 42 matches. He’s done so while Leon Balogun is still apparently out in the woods pining for his master, and here Jake Clarke-Salter was (colour me shocked, knock me all the way down with a tiny feather, cannot fucking believe it) unavailable again. Jimmy Dunne, after a nightmare against his former club Burnley, has been outstanding in two away games this week where, if the results were the other way around, you’d all be very happy indeed and relishing two home games to come this week.
Let’s face it last week’s game at Deepdale was decided by one Dunne goal off the bar, and a terrific Seny Dieng save. It could easily have been the other way around, and although my job is to go over the top with narrative and flowery prose and graphic sexual imagery, it is important to remember we weren’t incredible last week, nor dreadful this, and both games could have ended up going any of the three available ways.
We could, should, have won this game 1-0 as well. There was, as you’d expect when you invite Keith Stroud to dinner, a moment where the referee returned to the table clutching a small sanitary bag filled with his own shit. A game played at a pace and intensity that would have shamed a pre-season friendly shouldn’t have challenged somebody who is meant to be the most experienced referee at this level too much, and indeed he spent most of the afternoon ambling along not getting much wrong but also being in the way a lot (please, somebody, explain to me why we have to restart a move with Ilias Chair in an attacking position with a drop ball in our own half because it flicked Keithy on the way, but at Birmingham they were allowed to play on through an identical incident with Tim Robinson and score a second goal?). There was one decision to make in the match. It was from a first half corner. Romeo took Dunne somewhere they could be alone. All there was left to do is run. Dunne did so, and the QPR man was pulled back to the point of his shirt tearing at which point he hit the deck, in full view of the referee, and play was waved on.
Stroud, like all Championship referees this season, had made a big performative, exaggerated point of halting the play and wasting yet more time to do a big performative, exaggerated warn of everybody lining up for a set piece not to grab each other. Then, like all Championship referees this season, he does nothing once the ball is delivered. Hand puppet theatre doing a matinée and evening show for Christmas then - standing six yards away from it - watched it happen, and did fuck all about it. Cardiff fans will say this stuff even itself out: the penalty and red card that broke the deadlock in QPR’s favour in the corresponding fixture at Loftus Road was scandalously incompetent refereeing. Rangers fans - who’ve now suffered through 22 games with this referee over the last ten years, resulting in just four victories, in which we’ve had six penalties awarded against us, none for, and had four players sent off to just two opponents - will say it is incredible (literally, on occasions like this, incredible) what counts as a red card and/or a penalty against QPR, as opposed to one or either for, with this official. Please, please (I mean it), watch the penalty Reading were awarded (and missed) against Swansea tonight and tell me how one can be a penalty and one cannot. This bloke couldn’t find his own arse with both hands.
In the Be Kind era, you apparently can’t say "I think that might be the most blatant penalty I’ve ever seen what the fuck are you doing with your life you strange little gnome?” without also acknowledging the 22 professional football players on the pitch were also completely inept. These things are not mutually exclusive, but once the contrary amongst us have been shown the replay of the hand reaching out, and the grasp, and the shirt stretching, and the positioning of the referee, they like to quickly revert to "well it wasn’t Keith Stroud giving the ball away was it?” so let’s go through that rigmarole now, where we acknowledge how shit everybody involved in this festering turd of a football match was, shall we?
Kenneth Paal — borderline player of the season to this point and assister for Jimmy Dunne’s winner last weekend at Deepdale — landed a weird and unprecedented array of free kicks, corners and crosses a million miles away from anybody in QPR colours. He did it so wildly, so often, it became a bit strange. Come on Ken, we’ve all had a drink. Tim Iroegbunam, so superb a week ago, showed every bit of that form in one first half barnstorm through three players that brought a free kick and yellow card, and then never did that again once. I sympathise with Lyndon Dykes a little, because several times he’d made the early run, and pointed for the ball, but whoever was in possession delayed and dithered until it was too late. But last week at Deepdale he was beating people up, and this week in Cardiff he may as well not have been there. I could go through the whole team like this and I want no comments — zero fucking comments - on our match ratings this week, because frankly this was one of the worst games of professional football ever played and if you came out of it with more than a five then it makes you a hirsute God in a land of bald plebs.
The frustration I have with these players, even a week ago in victory, is that they can do it. It is within them. We see it and smell it and feel it in games, and we go to Watford and Sheff Utd and Preston and Millwall and win. Then you sit through them playing like this and wonder whether you were at a fancy dress party the week before.
To stir things up a bit, Neil Crichley made a trio of attacking substitutions in the second half which, somehow, given what had gone before, made things worse. Mide Shodipo was here again — somewhere a park is missing its footballer — and a second drag will surely be enough to convince naïve newby Neil there are better ways to waste away your existence than this. Two attempts to strip a bemused full back for pace without possessing any pace culminated in him accidentally bursting through for QPR’s best sight of goal in the whole half and skying a ball closer to space than any of these tech billionaire nonses are ever going to get.
Shodipo’s longevity at the club, constant contract renewals, fitness, performance while out on loan, and dire 15-minute cameo here have made him the punching bag for QPR social media this Christmas. It’s not without justification, he’s a League One player (at best), thieving a living. But Tyler Roberts was also good enough to grace us with his presence at the same time — a constantly unfit, Premier League player, here on loan and persistently behaving like he’s doing us a favour, who we’re apparently obligated to commit £4.5m to buy on the off chance we get promoted - and he has none of the mitigation Shodipo has for his performance on at least ten times the salary. Roberts immediately spotted Macauley Bonne’s pad in Offsideville on Airbnb and decided to spend Christmas there. When QPR’s best player on the day, Jimmy Dunne, knocked one down the line towards him, Roberts didn’t bother with it and immediately turned around to give him a spray, presumably for not passing to his feet and allowing him to claim the glory of an offside flag. He then gave the ball away three times in quick succession, the final one "recovered” with a grim two footed tackle and thick yellow card — after the Joel Lynch one-way pass out of the New Year games are we? One square ball through an unpopulated six-yard box and a huge, exaggerated shrug to the cameras later and that was Tyler’s latest contribution to our cause. Cheers mate, see you in six weeks. Waste.
Look, QPR haven’t won away on Boxing Day since 1967. They haven’t scored at all on Boxing Day since 2018, and that was against the division’s whipping boys of that season — Ipswich. Look at the table this season and count down from the top the clubs we’ve beaten — Sheff Utd, Watford, Millwall, Reading, Middlesbrough. Count up from the bottom the teams we’ve fucked up against — Huddersfield, Blackpool, Cardiff, Rotherham, Stoke. It’s a division in which Birmingham can potentially start their game against Burnley tonight in sixteenth and finish it in fifth. We are the perfect encapsulation of that, and people like me getting out of my pram about insignificant midseason draws like this, when a week ago I’d absolutely have taken four points and two clean sheets from these two away games, just makes me a typical, internet-era, droning twat. We win some games we’re not supposed to, we lose games we really shouldn’t, the division’s a bit mental. That’s Crufts.
Cardiff are crap though. They are the antidote to the idea there are no easy games in the Championship — that’s nonsense, there are, it’s Cardiff. They’re properly dreadful. They’ll do very well not to be relegated this season. Abysmally and shambolically run by an absent owner, they’re now under a transfer embargo because they’re refusing to shell out the first instalment of a £15m transfer fee they agreed to pay Nantes for Emiliano Sala before trying to short-cut the poor bastard here in a flying death trap. Their stadium is three quarters empty, and their team embodies it completely. A succession of generic, off-the-carousel managerial appointments led to an ageing squad with nothing to commend it being inherited by Steve Morison, who liked to spend very long periods of time talking about where he got all his brilliant ideas. He brought 17 players in here last summer, and shipped 14 the other way, and it made them worse. Let me share with you some of the comments posted on social media under their team announcement yesterday: "Now this is the starting line-up we have been waiting for!! Blooooobirds!!!”; "Merry Christmas, this is our best team by a long run”; "That is fucking sexy”; "Banging team that!”. This, this, is as good as they’ve got.
The great white hope was/is Ruben Colwill, to whom puberty has not been kind in complexion or physical development, and his gangly, awkward, ineffective return to a second start of the season here was mercy killed on 83 minutes, a very generous 30 minutes too late. They tried to play out of the back through Cedric Kipre, which is like trying to do the entire country’s Christmas post using one pony and trap. Goalkeeper Ryan Allsop saw A LOT of the ball. Callum Robinson was the only one among them who looked like he had a vague idea what he was doing. And QPR not only didn’t beat them, but were perhaps lucky to get out with a draw.
I was pleased Neil Critchley dropped the nice guy act as quickly as he did. The post-match interviews were delayed while some standards were laid down in the visiting dressing room. We can talk about clean sheets and baby steps and building and no easy games in the Championship. But QPR annihilated this lot not two months ago and yet could easily have been beaten here. We have to aspire to better than this — as a club, as players, as fans, as a collective.
A crap QPR game on Boxing Day. Quelle surprise. However much I grow, regardless how old I get, wherever my life takes me, whatever my life experience, some things stay the same, and that is certainly one of them. Comforting in a way, because I'm sure I'll miss the click of every sodding door I walk through behind me when he's no longer around to do it. But in others so deeply frustrating, because that cat’s not going anywhere, and neither are we playing like this.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
Cardiff: Allsop 5; Romeo 5, Ng 5, Kipre 5, O’Dowda 5; Wintle 5, Ralls 5, Philogene 4 (Harris 67, 5); Robinson 6, Colwill 4 (Whyte 83, -), Etete 4
Subs not used: Sang, Simpson, Luhtra, Rinomhota, Nkounkou
Bookings: Wintle 32 (foul), Romeo 84 (kicking ball away)
QPR: Dieng 5; Laird 5, Dickie 5, Dunne 6, Paal 5; Dozzell 5, Field 6, Iroegbunam 6 (Amos 80, -); Adomah 5 (Chair 73, 5), Dykes 4 (Roberts 73, 3), Willock 4 (Shodipo 73, 4)
Subs not used: Kakay, Archer, Masterson
Bookings: Iroegbunam 4 (foul), Laird 59 (kicking ball away), Roberts 86 (assault)
QPR Star Man — Jimmy Dunne 6 Completed the basics of the sport proficiently for somebody playing his position on the field. That basically makes him a king in this match.
Referee — Keith Stroud (Toy Town) 5 Standards and expectations have sunk so low with Championship referees, and this plonker in particular, that he can drift through a total non-event like this - with zero competition, aggro, contact or controversy - have one decision to make in the whole thing, stand six yards away from that decision staring straight at it, having issued a warning before it happened, still get it wrong, and I’ve got QPR fans on our message board telling me he did ok. He stood there, and looked directly at this, didn’t give a penalty, but relative to what he’s inflicted on us before, this is ok. This is ok…
… I’m resigned to it now. You have incidents last week, at Preston, where Tim Iroegbunam bursts through the middle of the Preston midfield, Brad Potts attempts to chop him down at the ankle, advantage is waved, nothing comes of it, and the referee doesn’t come back to book him. "He can’t”, says our resident refereeing fraternity, who I try and listen to and learn from, because… "if the advantage is played and it’s not reckless it’s not a booking now”. I then sit and watch Man City Liverpool in the week, a counter attack takes place, Cole Palmer is deliberately pulled back, the attack comes to nothing, when the play eventually stops, a yellow card is issued. "Oh, well, you see…” Well, you see, nothing. This is bullshit. The worst collection of referees there has ever been overseeing the game in this country are making shit up as they go along. I want everybody reading this to watch the penalty Reading were awarded against Swansea tonight, and then watch that Jimmy Dunne incident from yesterday back again, and explain to me how one is a penalty and one is not, other than one involved Keith Stroud and one didn’t.
This is all fine and well. We’ve got Gavin Ward for Luton on Thursday night, what fun. I’ll do Office memes and Simpson crops and we’ll all roll our eyes and jolly along with this utter, utter farce. Until you’re Huddersfield Town, and you’re in a play-off final, and this incompetent shower give it to one of their fat mates to referee as his retirement party, and he botches it to such an extent that you end up trading a Premier League promotion for a spot in League One. Keith Stroud, like Jon Moss before him, has palpably and obviously not been physically or mentally capable of refereeing games at this level for some time now. That he cannot even get through this, this, without botching the only decision he had to make, epitomises that. He’s already horlicksed one play-off semi-final, between Swansea and Brentford three years back, and our League Cup quarter final tilt last season. If the EFL continue to persist with the idea that this bloke is competent at this level, then it is a ticking time bomb before it happens to another team in a big, important game again. Look at where Huddersfield are now compared to where they could have been had a proper referee done that play-off final. Stroud, like Moss, is a liability. He cannot get decisions right for trying. A disaster waiting to happen.
Attendance 18,549 (549 the QPR bit) Respect and sympathies.
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