Ahead of the big kick off on Saturday LoftforWords looks ahead and concludes that there is little out there to stand in our way if we really want to push for promotion this season.
Setting sail across the sea of mediocrity
Football supporters are notoriously overly optimistic at this time of the season. None of the new signings are injured yet, none of them have turned out to be useless, the team hasn’t lost a game, anything can happen and just to add to the sense of fervour last season a team tipped for relegation actually ended up promoted to the Premiership. It could be you. It probably won’t be, but it could be.
Nevertheless looking through the Observer’s Championship preview at the weekend only seven of the 24 fans surveyed actually though their team would make the top six this season. And of those seven I’d say that Derby and Preston are living in cloud cuckoo land if they think they’re going to be anywhere close to even the top half of the table, while Sheff Utd may also be in for crushing disappointment.
There is a general air around the Championship this season that nobody really thinks anybody is much good. Of the three teams that have come down from the Premiership two are financially destitute and one is managed by Brian Laws. Of the losing play off contenders last season Billy Davies seems absolutely desperate to have a big falling out with somebody, anybody, at Nottingham Forest, Cardiff have been under a transfer embargo all summer and lost key players and Leicester have seen their manager jump ship. Reading are widely tipped, but their run at the end of last season seemed to be based purely on relief that Brendan Rodgers had left – can his replacement Brian McDermott actually perform over a full season with next to no managerial experience?
Norwich and Leeds stand a good chance, but the Canaries have been patchy in pre-season and Leeds rather collapsed over the line last season, promoted almost by accident as it turned out. All three promoted sides have gambled predominantly on signings from the league they have just come from.
Swansea just missed the top six last season but have lost the manager that took them there, spent most of the summer without a boss, appointed somebody who failed at Reading and have lost a good chunk of the squad that played last season including full back Angel Rangel who is outstanding but set to join Blackpool. Coventry have recruited abysmally, Preston have let their better players leave, Sheffield United have a clueless philistine in charge. Only really Middlesbrough and Bristol City have made serious moves in the transfer market and Strachan is relying on players from the notoriously awful SPL while City will be badly handicapped if Nicky Maynard gets injured or loses form.
And so that leaves QPR. For the past few seasons we have been ruled out of the promotion race for the exact reason that we should have been ruled into it. Flavio Briatore – the man who didn’t do sporting failure, the man who wanted the Premiership and had a five year plan for European football, the multi millionaire we’d always dreamed of. Had he appointed a Billy Davies/Neil Warnock/George Burley type manager with experience of success in the Championship, handed him £10m to spend on transfer fees and left him to it we’d probably either be a Premiership side now, or be gearing up for the top flight from August 14.
Instead the transfer fees were kept low, though they still existed, and while other clubs were willing to push the boat out to sign that striker QPR so desperately need Briatore insisted that kids from his rich mates’ clubs abroad would do the trick. When that, predictably, proved not to be the case he fired one manager after another rendering QPR a laughing stock and about as much threat to the top of the Championship as Scunthorpe United are likely to pose this season.
Stories circulate that despite stepping aside and allowing Bhatia and Mittal to have the controlling interest last season Briatore’s ego is still bearing an unwanted influence over proceedings. Neil Warnock came to QPR because he was attracted by the new found stability under the new regime, and the chance to have a shot at the Premiership. But Briatore was said to be the reason behind the delay of the Bradley Orr transfer, and so far Warnock’s transfer activity has been restricted to Orr, Kenny and Mackie for around £1.5m and three free transfers. Adel Taarabt is a welcome boost today.
QPR are short of a promotable team by two players in my opinion. Even with Taarabt a forward line selected from Heider Helguson, Leon Clarke, Jamie Mackie, Patrick Agyemang and Alessandro Pellicori doesn’t exactly scream promotion. Hogan Ephraim has played a prominent role in pre-season despite showing nothing at the end of the last campaign to suggest he should command a place in a top six Championship side.
On paper at the moment I would say QPR have a competitive side. By that I mean we’re going to hold our own, we’ll win as many as we lose, we’ll upset a few of the bigger names and fall to a few of the smaller ones. We’ll finish, in my opinion, between eighth and 12th. And I’m fine with that. While it would be wonderful to see the likes of Arsenal and Man Utd back down the Bush next season it would also cost me £40 a ticket to be there, my season ticket would rocket, kick off times would range from 11am on Saturday morning to 8pm on Monday evening and anything in between, we’d probably be relegated having won about four times and even if we stayed up we’d probably do so winning seven or maybe eight matches out of 38. Bernie Ecclestone said in a typically offensive and bullish interview recently that getting promoted to the Premiership was the last thing on the board’s mind at QPR at the moment because it would just be more hassle. It was the only point he made in the entire piece that I sort of identified with.
QPR have spent money this summer. Paddy Kenny, Bradley Orr and Jamie Mackie did not come for free, and our outlay on those three and Adel Taarabt outstrips every club in the league this summer apart from Middlesbrough. But the problem at QPR for several seasons now has been strikers and this still hasn’t been addressed. Billy Sharp moved for £1.3m this summer, Gary Hooper for £2.4m, Kris Boydd for £1m+ and these are the sort of players and the sort of prices we will need to look at if we are to win promotion.
Now the board could simply say that on gates of 12,000 people, and season ticket sales under 7000, that they are not willing to plough that amount of their own money into QPR to chase promotion to the Premiership where it would then need £40m to bring our team up to standard. They could simply say that they have got into this as a hobby, as an interest, that QPR are their local club and they just want to walk down Holland Park Avenue on a Saturday afternoon and have some fancy food before the football. They could say that they will put sufficient money in to keep us competitive in this league, which in my opinion is all they’ve done this summer, and maybe if it gets to January and we’re close they might put their hand in their pockets again but they might not.
The problem is that wouldn’t sell many season tickets. We’ve only sold just over six and a half thousand of the things as it is, with the club hyping up a promotion push at every possible opportunity. That’s because, apart from the fact that QPR are expensive to watch, fans have grown weary of being told we’re pushing for promotion and then sitting down to watch Patrick Agyemang lumber around every week. We’re not traditionally well supported and the floating support simply doesn’t believe the club any more.
If the board is serious about promotion, and the Premiership talk is not merely just hype to try and sell tickets, then we really will never have a better chance than this season. Sadly as it stands we remain a midtable side through the lack of a genuine goal threat.
LoftforWords’ final league table prediction:
1 Middlesbrough
2 Forest
3 Burnley
4 Leicester
5 Bristol City
6 Leeds
7 Reading
8 Norwich
9 Doncaster
10 QPR
11 Hull City
12 Sheff Utd
13 Swansea
14 Cardiff
15 Ipswich
16 Derby
17 Palace
18 Preston
19 Barnsley
20 Millwall
21 Coventry
22 Portsmouth
23 Watford
24 Scunthorpe
Repeating past mistakes
One of the many problems with constantly sacking managers is the new ones always have to go through a period of a few months whereby they learn for themselves what their predecessors knew, and what the supporters are all too aware of. I still remember Stewart Houston wasting what turned out to be a crucial six weeks of the season after taking over concluding that we needed a striker, a right back and a midfielder. We already knew that, and had John Spencer arrived a month earlier than he did we may have made the play offs and an immediate return to the top flight. We all know what actually happened.
It’s a frustration we hope we’re not going to have to face now with Warnock apparently here for the long haul but the appointment of Fitz Hall as captain of the side this week seems to be a final example of it. Managers like Fitz Hall – he’s played in the Premiership, gone for some big money in his time and he’s got good football ability for a centre half. On the face of it he’s good enough in the air, and competent enough with the ball at feet to play at a far higher level than he is doing.
So managers come into QPR and they don’t understand why he’s not in the team, and then they slowly find out. I actually rate Fitz Hall quite highly as a player, but his wage at QPR is astronomical and his performance level for us has been poor. Having made him his captain and therefore almost guaranteed his place in the team whenever he is fit Warnock is about to find out two things about Fitz Hall.
Firstly his decision making and reactions are very poor. He’s always on the stretch, reaching out for a ball, or reacting at the very last second to a situation. You rarely see him reading a game in the way that Matt Connolly or even Peter Ramage do when they play centre half – cutting off a move at source and striding confidently away with the ball. He’s always stretching, lunging, flying into last ditch tackles. For a player of his ability and experience it’s very frustrating to watch because he should by now really know where he should be standing and how to read the game. Possibly a slight lack of pace, of a lack of trust in his hamstrings and groin (more on this shortly) forces him to drop deeper than he should be to compensate which results in this poor positioning. It means that while he can play well for 89 minutes, he’s always likely to make that key goal costing mistake. Anyway, you would hope even at Hall’s age this could be coached and managed.
Secondly though, and the reason this move is doomed to failure, is his injury record. Whether he is just injury prone, has a low pain threshold, cannot be bothered or is unwilling to play through any sort of discomfort at all Fitz Hall will miss large chunks of this season with injury. It’s never a six month lay off with a broken bone, it’s always two weeks here or three weeks there with a strain or a pull or a niggle. If he’s playing, we’re never more than three matches away from his next lay off. This caused a problem for Magilton and will do the same for Warnock if he insists that Hall plays whenever he is fit. You see what happens is Hall is picked and plays a couple of games and the defence settles in, then he gets injured and goes out for three matches and Gorkss and Connolly get going as a partnership. Then he returns for a month at probably Connolly’s expense and maybe we move Connolly to right back to accommodate him. Then Hall gets injured again so now we have Connolly at right back and maybe Ramage comes in and plays with Gorkss until five games later Hall returns but breaks down before half time and so on. You never, ever get a settled back four with him, and the back four is the part of the team that needs to be settled the most.
If Hall could actually guarantee 40 matches this season then fine, let’s give him a chance to show what he can do in a stable environment that he’s never had at QPR. Warnock has faith and we wanted a manager in total control so that’s fine. But I just can’t see it, even when he had his big chance to impress and win a contract at Premiership bound Newcastle last season injury restricted him to just seven appearances during a loan spell.
Last season it was unheard of for us to have the same back four and keeper for more than five games running and although Paddy Kenny, Clint Hill and Bradley Orr would seem to be shoo in first choices in positions that were shared around a bit last season we will once again be rotating our centre backs if we’re putting our faith in Fitz Hall.