Relatives fear he’s using that intro from The Thick of It again.
I just wanted to say to you by the way of introductory remarks that I'm extremely miffed about last night’s events and in my quest to try to make you understand the level of my unhappiness, I'm likely to use an awful lot of - what we would call - violent sexual imagery and I just wanted to check that neither of you would be terribly offended by that.
We’ll be starting in midfield. Don’t worry, we’re getting to Hevertton Santos later, but you don’t win many games of football by losing midfield and QPR didn’t so much lose midfield here as abandon the whole concept entirely. We became conscientious objectors to the very idea of midfield – don’t like it, don’t agree with it, won’t be participating in it, and you can’t make us.
With the ball, hiding. Not even trying to hide the hiding either. Hiding in plain sight. Deliberately, through cowardice. Steve Cook gets the ball, Paul Nardi gets the ball, Jimmy Dunne gets the ball, Jonathan Varane and Nicolas Madsen assume the position. Not the position they should be in, not the position you’d want them to be in, but in fact the most inaccessible position they can get themselves into. Finn Azaz presses, Aidan Morris presses, Varane steps behind one of them, Madsen steps behind the other, and they stay there. There’s blocking the passing lanes, and then there’s this. They cannot be found, because they do not want to be found. I’ve seen bigger bollocks on a fucking eunuch. A shameful abdication.
Without the ball, somehow, incredibly, worse. Worse. As wide open as a fat whore’s bone hole. Some numbers for you. Across 95 minutes last night our "midfield” collectively attempted eight tackles and won six of those. That’s not each, that’s all of them. A Championship midfield, in a home match, tackled the opposition less than once every ten minutes. I am closer to Aidan Morris now, sitting here, than any of our players got all night. It was like he had a forcefield round him. It was all QPR could do to point at him, and point at him they did. All night long. You can go and mark him if you like. You can, honestly. It’s allowed.
There has to be, at some point, some element of professional pride in this. I’m not saying break somebody’s leg, get yourself sent off, because had anybody done so I’d have accused them of doing it deliberately so they don’t have to go to Leeds on Saturday with the rest of the captured partisans. But you concede a third goal like this, with Emmanuel Latte Lath running so far clear on the goal he was able to start pissing about with flicks and tricks, humiliating Paul Nardi twice over, before scoring, then there has to be somebody with some standards out there who says we ain’t conceding a fourth, and anybody who tries is going to get snapped. Dan Barlaser added the fourth five minutes later, completely untouched by any one of four QPR players within striking distance of him - Varane and Smyth particularly culpable. It’s not okay this. It is the farthest thing from okay.
A reminder Christian Nourry has said several times, with a straight face, this summer’s intake were "all in the top 50% of our squad physically”, which I didn’t really understand at the time, and definitely don’t now I’ve just watched a midfield that would have been beefed up considerably by the inclusion of Pauline Fowler. Many more performances like this and the sitting room will be getting a full Arthur.
Nicolas Madsen delivered perhaps the more peculiar performance I’ve seen from a QPR player in 30 years of attendance.
Madsen, a 6ft 4in central midfielder, won zero tackles across 95 minutes of football. He won zero tackles, because he attempted zero tackles. 0/0, your central midfielder. He was involved in three ground duels and lost all of them. He was involved in one aerial duel and lost it. Zero successful dribbles from one attempt. Zero accurate crosses from one attempt. At our attacking corners, he stood outside the box. I’m going to mention his height again. At our attacking corners, he stood outside the box. We are through the looking glass here people.
He spent the entire night mooching around, ten yards off to the right of everything watching it go on around him. It seemed to me he was deliberately trying not to get involved. He looked fucking stoned. You’d pull him over if you saw him behind the wheel of a car like this. Baked like a cake. I apologise more than usual to the people sitting around me for my repeated full blown headlosses last night, but I’ve never seen anything like this. What was he doing? What's going on? Is he okay? Talk me through it/down from here.
And now we move on to the liars, because somebody’s been telling porkies somewhere in this Hevertton Santos signing.
Plenty of mitigation here. Firstly, they’ve clearly already decided he’s a bit shit in the right back position we signed him to play, so why on earth we thought he might do an even adequate job on the other side heaven only knows. Liverpool teenager Ben Doak is a prodigious talent, and lightning fast. Our full backs have been exposed all season by the system and wingers in front of them. Santos should never have been put out there in that situation by the manager in the first instance and leaving him on until half time was outright cruelty. Yes, Kenneth Paal and Harrison Ashby are both injured – time for another Zoom call with the "head of performance” perhaps? - but we had a serviceable reserve left back on our bench last season and he’s driven to Dundee in his bare feet. I’m getting GIFs of Ziyad Larkeche goal celebrations from north of the border piped into my phone while I sit and watch the footballing equivalent of a lion trying to fuck a sheep down his side of the pitch. Maybe Paul Nardi fancies a spell at Kilmarnock? Another recruitment and retainment masterclass. Round of applause everybody, truly.
First goal, 30 minutes (astonishing it took this long, it had been coming for hours), Doak gives Santos such a roasting we’ll have to invoice a priest for scattering his remains across a garden of remembrance, whips a cross to the near post and Riley McGree taps in. Second goal, 35, minutes (astonishing it took this long, it had been coming for hours) same side, different cast of characters, Azaz with the cross, Conway with the tap in, Steve Cook with the outstretched arms. Both moves started by Luke Ayling strolling unchallenged through space you could build Heathrow Airport’s third runway on. Pathetic, risible stuff. Unprofessional, and disrespectful.
There then occurred a brief rally of sorts which allowed Seny Dieng to mark his return to Loftus Road with a flurry of eye-catching camera saves from Zan Celar, Kieran Morgan and Nicolas Madsen (GORDON’S ALIVE). We then made two subs at half time when you’d ideally have wanted to make two dozen. This was enough to spook Middlesbrough into thinking they were in some kind of contest.
Instead of just calmly taking the multi-goal away walkover which was so clearly here for them, the visiting side embarked on a period of diabolical shithousing. All the tricks in the book – Dieng moving the goal kicks from side to side, Ayling taking a minute at a time to get throw ins away, George Edmundson rolling back onto the pitch with a fake injury he’d initially "suffered” on the other side of the touchline, Jonny Howson refusing to leave the field at the nearest point when substituted – all watched very closely by referee Oliver Langford who did the square root of fuck all about it. Pointing repeatedly at his wrist before adding the obligatory five minutes anyway. Yes, Oliver, it’s a watch, you use it to tell time.
All so completely and utterly needless as well. You wouldn’t find Man City wasting time in a cup tie with Redditch United, I don’t think, and those were the levels we were talking about here. Carrick’s team effectively talked themselves into a game. Steve Cook bundled the ball and Anfernee Dijksteel into the net from a corner to, remarkably, halve the deficit. The QPR players, hilariously, started whirling their arms around at the crowd. Never mind us, we’ve been doing our bit, how about you try being a bit less shite for a while and see how you get on?
Buoyed by the goal, Rangers used the momentum to collapse completely within themselves all over again. Boro realised the baby was still clutching fistfuls of candy and scored the two further goals so obviously there for them all night. Had they not spent the middle portion of the game pisballing about it’s likely those two late additions to the scoreboard would have been up around the six or seven mark rather than just the third and fourth. Nardi saved well from Azaz and McGree as well as conceding four times.
Loftus Road was almost entirely empty by the time the fourth finally did go in. Nobody even with the energy to stick around and boo them off anymore. Jimmy Dunne decided to have a bit of a shouting match with a few who had stayed behind. QPR have won eight of their last 51 games at Loftus Road, 13 of their last 58 to the start of the 22/23 season, and 15 out of 66 going back to January 2022 – you’re lucky we’re not burning the place down Jimmy, never mind having a bit of a dig.
This absolutely stank. Stank of relegation, mismanagement and malaise. It was Mick Harford v Ipswich levels of horrific. I don’t care if you’ve got injuries (Ilias Chair crocked again here before half time), playing a good side, bit low on confidence, new players settling in… give a shit. You can run around, and you can tackle people. You can tackle people. Two go to press, rest don’t bother, Middlesbrough stroll round and through. Yardage given up freely – 50, 60, 70 yards right down the middle of the field, eaten up in one or two unchallenged passes, over and over and over again. A disgusting shambles.
The amount of times we're trying to play a ball out from the back and the poor bastard in possession is just met with a wall of teammates who actively don't want to take it from him. All of them pointing, pointing for it to go back or sideways, pointing for it to go to somebody else, desperate for it not to be them.
Token efforts. Token efforts all over the park. Celar sort of running but not really, sort of closing down but not really, sort of competing for headers but not really. Going through the motions. Latte Lath comes off the bench, first thing he does is pile over the top of Jimmy Dunne and win a header – setting the tone for his personal performance right away.
The knives will now inevitably be out for Marti Cifuentes but seven of the 11 last night were new signings, at least three of which are the sole options available for their position, or were forced to play out of position. It’s difficult to coach and manage that degree of change, especially when many of these signings seem massively unequipped for the league they're playing in. A shit right back at left back, a midfielder at left centre back, a centre back at right back, a teenager playing his third game as the only midfielder who wants the ball, one new signing alongside him apparently equipped with a shock collar that pumps 30,000 volts up his rectum every time he moves the ball forwards, the other apparently in the midst of a very public nervous breakdown. All of the Championship experience bled out of the team through recruitment decisions and a now chronic injury list, replaced by people that exclusively show up well on a computer. All topped off with Zan Celar. You’ll perhaps recall, also, them saying we’ve got a new data model in our "tech stack” which allows us to compare similar divisions to the Championship, and from that they’ve bought… a centre forward from the Swiss league.
Afterwards Cifuentes said: "The club has a clear model and then my job is to work with the players that we have.” I mean, short of turning around and pointing…
The doomsday scenario now looms that we have taken the biggest chunk of FFP headroom we’ve had, or will have, for several years, and spent it on players who aren’t going to settle and get up to speed, because they’re simply not good enough. We’ve given them all contracts that were designed to tie them down long enough to make a profit on their sales, a plan that only sustains as long as somebody wants to buy them off us. If they don’t – and fuck me this wasn’t even two dollars and a Casio worth of sales pitch – then you’re stuck with them, and their wage, for a period of time you can redact as much as you like but it won’t hide how fucked we are. If these are four- and five-year deals then the next three years in that scenario will make the last two look like a church picnic. The steps we take to avoid our fate are the ones that lead us to it.
"Competitive advantage” won’t wash as an excuse for this behaviour either. Turns out the rest of the Championship isn’t arsed about how long Liam Morrison’s contract is, or how long Michy Frey is going to be out for. Shock. Can’t believe it. They’re too busy handing us our own arse.
You can only talk about competitive advantage for as long as you’re competitive, and QPR are not. Here they literally did not even compete. It was a pathetic showing. A shame. Quite literally a shame.
But apart from that.
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
QPR: Nardi 5; Dunne 3, Cook 4, Field 4, Santos 1 (Andersen 46, 4); Varane 3 (Dixon-Bonner 90+1, -), Morgan 5 (Kolli 75, 4), Madsen 1 (Lloyd 85, -); Saito 5, Celar 3, Chair 4 (Smyth 46, 4)
Subs not used: Aoraha, Bennie, Morrison, Shepperd
Goals: Dijksteel og 69
Boro: Dieng 7; Ayling 7, Edmundson 6, Clarke 7, Borges 6 (Dijksteel 50, 6); Howson 7 (Barlaser 81, -), Morris 8; Doak 8 (Hamilton 89, -), Azaz 8, McGree 7; Conway 7 (Latte Lath 80, -)
Subs not used: Brynn, Burgzorg, Forss, Fry, Jones
Goals: McGree 31 (assisted Doak), Conway 35 (assisted Azaz), Latte Lath 87 (assisted McGree), Barlaser 90+5 (unassisted)
Yellow Cards: Doak 11 (foul), Conway 36 (dissent, we think), Borges 45+3 (foul)
QPR Star Man – Koki Saito 5 Put himself about a bit.
Referee – Oliver Langford (West Midlands) 5 Cannot tell time.
Attendance 14,094 (1,800 Boro approximately) First apology of the season to those unfortunate enough to sit around me for a full on headloss. Mind you, even the normals were melting down last night.
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.