 Friday, 23rd Nov 2012 19:22 by Clive Whittingham After 11 months, 16 signings, just six league wins, and not a single success in 15 attempts on the road, Mark Hughes has been fired as manager of Queens Park Rangers. LFW reflects on his reign. A loaded trapIf you listen carefully over the din of the W12 traffic this evening you’ll hear the distinctive belly laughs of Fulham chairman Mohammed Al Fayed and his manager Martin Jol wafting across the Hammersmith Broadway. Don’t worry if you live out of town, you’ll probably be able to hear Neil Warnock chuckling away too. Al Fayed, in the ultimate case of takes-one-to-know-one, famously described Hughes as an “odd man”. The Welshman had just walked out on Fulham after 12 months in charge citing a lack of ambition and it seemed that for once Al Fayed had taken a break from erecting statues of deceased paedophiles to actually speak a bit of sense. Fulham had just finished eighth a year after reaching the Europa League final. They’re now ninth in the Premier League playing an attractive brand of football with a mixture of products from an excellent youth set up and canny transfer window signings. Plans for a new stand are afoot, raising the capacity of Craven Cottage to 30,000 as the club surpasses the ten year mark as a top flight club – a feat that has cost the chairman £200m to achieve. If there is a lack of ambition at Fulham, it’s difficult to spot. Hughes cut his managerial teeth – after a decent spell with Wales – at Blackburn Rovers. There he made his name as somebody who could pick up well scouted bargains from Europe like Chris Samba, and other people’s cast offs like David Bentley, and achieve great things with them. At Ewood Park, and later at Fulham, Hughes guided one of the Premier League’s more unfashionable teams and smaller spenders into the top half of the table and Europe. So what, you might wonder, was this ‘ambition’ business all about? Well that all rather depends on your definition of the word I guess. In between those two jobs Hughes had been at Manchester City at the time of the Sheikh Mansour takeover and subsequently had first dibs on the initial expenditure. He signed Vincent Kompany and Pablo Zabaletta for just £6m each, and both were part of the back four that won the Premier League last season. But he also signed Jo for £18m, Robinho for £32.5m, Wayne Bridge for £12m, Nigel De Jong for £18m and so on. Hughes was sacked by City after a win – 4-3 at home to Sunderland. They’d lost just one of the previous 14 matches and the dismissal was said to be harsh, both because the results weren’t that bad and because it had obviously been coming and he’d been left standing out there on the touchline with everybody knowing it was only a matter of time. It lacked dignity. However, of those 14 matches, nine had been drawn, one lost and City have since gone on to win the FA Cup and the Premier League without him. Despite the colossal outlay on players, Hughes’ City were still doing things like conceding three to Sunderland a week after shipping the same amount at Bolton and drawing consecutive home matches with Fulham, Burnley, and Hull conceding six more goals in the process. It could be considered that handing Hughes a book of blank cheques meant the diligence on the training ground that had been required to make Blackburn successful on their smaller budget was neglected. No need to polish up rough diamonds when you can simply head off to Tiffany’s and buy the finished article for big money is there? Why bother coaching the players you have when you can simply replace them with better ones? But despite not performing as well at Eastlands with limitless financing as he did under the more pragmatic regimes at Blackburn and Fulham, Hughes did not consider that. In fact he considered the Craven Cottage job beneath him and walked out on it. Initially he seemed set for Aston Villa, while some said he even thought he might have a chance of taking over at his old club Chelsea. Had either come to fruition – given Chelsea’s recent achievements and Villa’s sleeping giant status – then his complaint about a lack of ambition at Craven Cottage may have stood up to scrutiny. He’d have left a club where, with the best will in the world, he’d probably just taken them as high as he was ever likely to in order to join one of two clubs capable of much more. But what he actually did next showed up the flaw in Mark Hughes’ thinking. By joining the newly minted set up at Queens Park Rangers – new to the Premier League, possessing no infrastructure whatsoever, and threatened by relegation - he showed clearly that he believed ‘ambition’ basically meant ‘spending lots of money’. The trap had been set, and Rangers walked straight into it. Always be closingIn many ways Hughes was a strange choice for QPR, and in others he was absolutely perfect. As a player he’d turned out mostly for Manchester United, with brief spells at Barcelona and Bayern Munich thrown in there, before moving to Rangers’ dearly beloved West London rivals Chelsea who he had supported his whole life. His connection to Loftus Road stretched only as far as turning up once a season to trade elbows with Alan McDonald. The idea that Queens Park Rangers would sack Neil Warnock, after 18 months of mostly miraculous work and a promotion into the Premier League for the first time in 15 years, for somebody with that background is, on the face of it, preposterous. But the modern day QPR is a club that talks the big talk, often without being able to walk the big walk. The club says it’s going to conquer Asia, build a new training ground, and have a 45,000 seat stadium. The players are wheeled out on a daily basis to talk about understanding the importance of matches and how they’re going to give it their all – as if we won’t notice when 3pm on Saturday roles around and they clearly don’t and don’t. It’s a club that thinks everything can be solved with a new signing, and as each new signing arrives attention quickly turns to who the next new signing will be. In that respect Hughes is absolutely ideal, because rarely has there been a manager who has spoken so highly of himself while delivering so little. Here we have two parties with an amazingly misguided opinion of what constitutes ambition or forward planning in football coming together in a glorious union. Hughes got straight to work. He paid Fulham £6m for striker Bobby Zamora who the Whites calmly went out and replaced with Dimitar Berbatov on a free transfer. Later he took another ageing, injury prone player from Craven Cottage in Andy Johnson and Martin Jol smiled and replaced him with Mladen Petric. Hughes paid £4m to Lazio for Djibril Cisse and added Nedum Onuoha from Manchester City on a colossal weekly wage. Only the loan signings of previously unheard of duo Samba Diakite and Taye Taiwo suggested that Hughes was still capable of heading off into Europe and coming back with a Chris Samba, Vincent Kompany or Moussa Dembele equivalent. Sadly Diakite has the discipline, self control and tacking technique of an axe murderer while Taiwo, after taking time to settle, was not retained just at the point when he was finding his feet because Rangers wanted Fabio Da Silva on loan from Man Utd instead. As soon as the summer transfer window opened, Hughes was off again. Ryan Nelsen, Robert Green, Diakite on a permanent deal, Ji-Sung Park and Junior Hoilett all came in at considerable expense. Chairman Tony Fernandes used phrases like “landmark signings” and “watershed moments” as Hughes spent, and spent, and spent. Mark Bowen admitted recently on the Open All R’s Podcast that the coaching staff didn’t know what the best team was, and that if they could field 12 players then Alejandro Faurlin would be in every week, suggesting that they made all these acquisitions without actually planning where they would fit into the team and in the process of doing so brought in several midfield players they didn’t actually need. The new look team lost 5-0 to Swansea on the opening day of the season prompting three more big money acquisitions – Julio Cesar from Inter Milan, Esteban Granero from Real Madrid and Stephane Mbia from Marseille. Hughes insisted these were not panic moves, but given that Mbia is not a recognised centre back but was clearly bought to play there for QPR, and Cesar is a goalkeeper brought in to replace the goalkeeper Hughes had already brought in just six weeks beforehand I think it’s safe to say he was lying. In total Hughes has added 16 new players to the QPR squad since he arrived. The wage bill, according to the press last weekend, is past 90% of the turnover. There’s a hefty dose of hindsight in all of the criticism of both Hughes and his signings, because most QPR fans were delighted at the players we were attracting when they first arrived, but can anybody really say they thought QPR needed 16 new players last January? A board of directors with no football experience led into 16 signings by Mark Hughes and his omnipresent “personal adviser” Kia Joorabchian. This is what the new QPR consider to be ambition. Any given press conferenceBy the end of last season QPR had turned to Al Pacino for inspiration, playing his famous pre-game speech from Any Given Sunday on the big screen before home games. Excellent though the montage was, I couldn’t help but think that in times gone by it would have been interspersed with similarly inspiring, chest-thumping comments from Ian Holloway, Gareth Ainsworth, Neil Warnock or more recently Shaun Derry and Clint Hill. Sadly such characters are few and far between in the Rangers team these days because, from the moment Tony Fernandes arrived, Hughes, and Warnock before him, have never missed an opportunity to replace one of the players that got QPR into the top flight in the first place with a big name who has twice the ability and half the attitude. It’s easy and lazy to say that Rangers miss the days when there was a core of the team that actually supported the club – Marc Bircham, Kevin Gallen, Lee Cook etc – but don’t forget the spirit and connection between the team we had here just 18 months ago. Clint Hill, Shaun Derry, Paddy Kenny, Ale Faurlin, Jamie Mackie, Bradley Orr Heidar Helguson and others had probably never given QPR a moment’s thought in their entire lives before actually joining the club but they came together to form a team that was more than the sum of its parts. That team went unbeaten for the first 19 league matches of 2010/11 and was then able to set aside the chaos of the Faurlin-transfer saga and win promotion regardless. They celebrated with the supporters in the bar at the Player of the Year dinner until gone five in the morning – at previous such events guests were lucky if the players were still there at five in the evening. Talk to me about these players not being good enough for the Premier League if you like, but it comes back to that idea about a team being more than the sum of its parts. Despite the Faurlin controversy those players finished above Norwich and Swansea, who have both wiped the floor with QPR ever since using the nucleus of the teams they had in the first place. Rangers have brought in a colossal 27 different players since promotion and the wise acquisitions among them can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It was only when Hughes, through injury and suspension, was forced to call on Derry, Hill, Mackie and Taarabt at the end of last season that five home wins were suddenly put together. Far from learning his lesson, he spent the summer trying to purge the squad of any players who felt anything for the club in favour of big names all over again. Rangers have done this for the last three transfer windows now and got progressively worse. On Saturday against Southampton it was again Derry, Mackie, Taarabt, and the only new signing who does seem to have bought into the previous ethos, Ryan Nelsen, who actually looked like they wanted to play at all. The response? A story about Clint Hill being loaned to Leeds, while Anton Ferdinand and his ever expanding arse start at centre back. QPR still don’t get it. And we couldn’t exactly have Hughes up there on the big screen could we? Firstly, he often left Mark Bowen and Eddie Niedzwiecki to field the media duties during the week. Those two also went to watch the next opponents play. In fact, sometimes it was hard to know what Mark Hughes was doing other than talking to Kia Joordchian and signing more of his clients on colossal contracts. Compare Hughes’ appearances in director’s boxes up and down the country with sightings of David Moyes – who incidentally went to Norway last night to watch a centre half play. And secondly when he did speak it was either arrogant, or nonsense, or both. When Rangers won just one of their first eight league matches under his charge – and lost crucial six-pointers against fellow strugglers Wolves, Bolton and Blackburn – he said the team would need time to gel. He’s repeated that this season, neglecting to mention that the reason the team needs time to gel is because he keeps spunking money up the wall and adding players to it. He has said, repeatedly, that the preparation for games that he and his coaching staff do is “meticulous” and yet QPR are regularly taken apart tactically. The set up he employed against West Ham at home in particular had to be seen to be believed. Imagine what shoddy preparation would look like if that’s meticulous. By trotting out this line about meticulous preparation he’s effectively shifting the blame for the team’s problems entirely to the door of the players. He has a point – the vast majority of this squad is currently playing well within what it’s capable of and there have been clear, obvious examples where they simply haven’t been trying - but again, he neglects to mention that he signed the majority of these players. Even after an abysmal start to this season Hughes has been talking about midtable finishes, and cream rising to the top. He talks like somebody who hasn’t been at any of the QPR games, and then after the latest defeat says things like “we didn’t see that coming” or “we’ll work hard to get to the bottom of why that has happened.” Amongst all the bluster Hughes, Bowen and Niedzwiecki have never once missed an opportunity to accidentally reveal they have absolutely no clue why this QPR team is as bad as it is, or more to the point what they’re going to do about it. Six league wins – all of them last season – in 30 attempts and Hughes still insisted that the club is in a far better state now than it was when he took over. He’s referring to the improvements he’s overseen in the academy, medical and scouting set ups which was all very necessary and important. But when you’re using the appointment of a new scout, or improvements in the treatment room, to justify your position as a Premier League manager then the time for the sack has probably come. And then there were the two lines that hung over him throughout his reign. Firstly his post Manchester City assertion that QPR would never be in the same position again while he was in charge – delivered in a celebratory cigar smoking tone, rather than the relieved embarrassment he should have felt after seven consecutive away defeats and survival achieved on the strength of a Bolton Wanderers result. And secondly the more concerning idea from Tony Fernandes that Hughes had interviewed him, rather than the other way around, when he was first appointed. Hughes and Joorabchian saw a rich board of a naïve club with pots of money to spend and took full advantage of the situation. The Welshman will surely struggle to ever get a Premier League job again, but given the ridiculous contract he had at Loftus Road I doubt he’ll need one any time soon. Tweet @loftforwords Pictures – Action Images Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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