The third of our four part run down of each individual QPR player’s performance in 2014/15 focuses on the club’s lop-sided, one-paced, unbalanced midfield.
Matt Phillips was always a good signing. The only pity about paying Blackpool £4m for him, other than it going in the Oyston’s pockets, was that we could have had him for a quarter of that had we popped up the road and had a look at him when he’d played for Wycombe before moving to Bloomfield Road. Nevertheless, exactly the sort of player QPR should be buying.
Unfortunately, mainly through injury problems — he had no pre-season and arrived with a broken wrist — he flattered to deceive in his first year. Just as he was getting going he suffered a bad ankle knock in a horrific challenge at home to Nottingham Forest and that was pretty much his lot for the season. That was certainly no reason to give up on a potentially very fine player indeed, and nor was it fair to write him off after the start of this season when he had a couple of bad games, and missed two absolute sitters, at Spurs and Man Utd while playing out of position as a centre forward in a team getting trounced 4-0 on both occasions.
Nevertheless, come January, Harry Redknapp was slinging him in as a makeweight to try and tempt Wigan to let him buy The Boy Callum McManaman who would no doubt have been "fentastic” in all the ways Phillips wasn’t if only "the chairman” could spare a little bit more money for yet another footballer.
Now, six months on, QPR are holding out for £10m from West Brom for Phillips’ services, and Chris Ramsey has been given the head coach job at Loftus Road on a permanent basis due in no small part to the way he turned Phillips around through the miraculous, new-age, hippy approach of working with a player on the training ground and playing him in his correct position. Through the looking glass we go people.
Phillips finished the season with all sorts of stats about him being the leading assister of goals in all the top divisions of Europe floating around. He scored three times in quick succession, one of them a ludicrous thunderbastard at Crystal Palace struck from somewhere the other side of Norwood Junction, and assisted ten of the 18 goals QPR scored in his final 14 appearances.
Nothing that he is doing, or Ramsey has done with him, is rocket science but it’s worked and it sparks hope that one or two of the other dozen or so under achievers at QPR could be revived in a similar fashion. Hope for Junior Hoilett yet perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Stats:
22 starts, 5 sub appearances
Scoring — 3 goals (Palace A, Villa A, Newcastle H), 10 assists (Sunderland A, Sunderland A, Hull A, Arsenal H, West Brom A, West Brom A, West Brom A, Villa A, Villa A, Newcastle H)
Discipline — 1 yellow (foul)
Man of the Match Awards — 3 (Leicester A, Newcastle H, Villa A)
LFW Ratings — 5, 3, 4, 6, 5, 6, 5, 5, -, 5, 5, 6, 6, 8, 6, 6, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 7, 6, 6, 4, 7, 6 = 5.692
There are some common themes running through Joey Barton’s 2014/15 season, and indeed his four long years at QPR as a whole. The first comes in his six Man of the Match awards last season (not bad from a site that apparently criticises him unfairly). All of the summaries of those performances mention him sticking to a simple game, running around, tackling people, fetching and carrying, moving the ball on simply, adding energy and legs to the performance. This, Joey Barton can do, and were he ever to stick to it he’d actually genuinely be the asset many consider him to be anyway. Look at his fantastic, tempo setting performance at home to Chelsea for example.
Unfortunately, be it through ego, be it through a lack of other ball players in the team, or something else, he doesn’t seem to believe that’s his game. The Budget Beckham routine, where he thinks he can spray Hollywood passes this way and that, or indeed complete any pass of greater distance than 15 yards, is where it starts to go wrong. At Burnley away in particular he may as well have pulled on a claret jersey, and at Everton the first goal came from him handing the ball straight to them (the second from a free kick he gave away through petulance) — one of numerous examples.
His supporters, and there are still many, will point to his assists last season — we’ve got him down for five, in a crap side which hardly scored. But for somebody who insists on taking every single corner, every single free kick, every single everything, five is not an impressive total. It’s not even par. Bobby Zamora got five assists last season, Matt Phillips got ten in his last 14 appearances. Worse still, a total of one goal this year and three the previous in the inferior division below, for a supposed box to box midfielder, who takes all the direct free kicks, is poor. In fact, the only free kicks QPR did score from directly this season were the rare ones he passed on to somebody else.
He is, nevertheless, one of the better midfielders at QPR, as the Man of the Match awards and average rating testify to. It looked like Sandro and Karl Henry were the best central midfield combination QPR had, but waiting for them to both be available at the same time was like waiting for Mill Hill trains on the Northern Line so nobody can deny that Barton should have been one of the first names on the team sheet.
But then there’s the other stuff. On the field, his discipline and temper make him a liability. He was booked in seven consecutive games through December and January and then, in the eighth at Hull, he cost his team at least a point (QPR were better than City even with ten men) by getting himself sent off for a childish reaction to minimal provocation.
It was the fourth red card of his career at QPR, and they all have three things in common. Firstly, they’ve always been in big games — crucial relegation matches against Norwich, Man City and Hull and a promotion six-pointer against Leicester. Secondly, none of them have been for a bad tackle. If he’d tripped somebody up to stop them going through on goal, or lunged in recklessly in a fraught match, you could perhaps understand it but we have one limp attempt at a headbutt on Bradley Johnson, the total meltdown at Man City, reacting to Gary Taylor Fletcher and some poor refereeing v Leicester, and flicking Tom Huddlestone in the balls. It’s the charge list of a badly behaved eight-year-old for somebody who professes to be quite intelligent. And thirdly, all of them have been a reaction to some perceived injustice — Johnson, Carlos Tevez, and Taylor Fletcher all dug at Barton first while at Hull the home players were massed around trying to intimidate the referee into sending off Darnell Furlong on debut. But these are not noble acts, nor are they normal reactions. They make Barton a liability, particularly in the big games where opponents know they can wind him up and QPR know he has past form for letting the club and his team mates down. We, and they, have heard the hollow apologies, delivered from his poxy Twitter account naturally, four too many times now.
Off the field he is apparently brilliant on the training ground. Frankie Sutherland and Reece Grego Cox, when interviewed by LFW, both singled him out for praise for the help, advice and coaching he’d offered them as they stepped up from the youth ranks. But his behaviour, and the club’s persistence with him as captain despite it, sends out entirely the wrong message about what QPR is about, and how it’s acceptable for its players to conduct themselves. The TV appearances, the social media output, the radio interview where he called out Adel Taarabt, the Sky interview where he lambasted bad eggs in the dressing room — it’s all individual over team, all ‘look what Joey Barton has said now’. Graeme Souness had it exactly right — if there really were bad eggs in the QPR dressing room last season it’s up to Barton as a senior player and the captain to get stuck in nice and early and sort that out behind closed doors, not come snivelling to Sky Sports two games before the end of the season when the team is already down.
There are few better examples than his pre-game online spat with Rodney Marsh. Whatever you think of Marsh, however much of a wind up merchant he is and always has been, he’s a man who scored 134 goals for this football club as it rose up from the Third Division to the First. Marsh scored as QPR won a major domestic honour for the only time in the club’s history. Even if QPR were safely ensconced in the middle of the Premier League with Joey Barton playing really well he would have had no right to publicly lambast Marsh in the manner he did, disparaging the football of Marsh’s era and comparing earnings. But to do it while playing poorly, in a bad QPR side, the night before a game, the week after relegation was confirmed, showed both a total lack of self-awareness and a complete lack of respect for the club he was supposed to be the captain of. When Barton was criticised for it, he made a remark about people "who work in supermarkets” having a go at him, as if there’s something wrong with getting off your arse and getting a job at the supermarket if that’s what’s available.
The club cannot clamp down on this behaviour, bring in codes of conduct, demand standards of the other players — as Les Ferdinand now seems keen to do - while you have Barton and others around carrying on like this under existing contracts.
When you weight all of that against the positives — one of the better of a mediocre midfield bunch, four goals from central midfield in two years, five assists while taking all the corners — it’s clearly time to be waving him on his way. Thankfully, the club have done exactly that.
Stats:
27 starts and 1 sub appearance
Scoring — 1 goal (West Brom A), 5 assists (Leicester H, West Brom H, West Brom H, Liverpool A, Leicester A)
Discipline — 11 yellows (foul, deliberate handball, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul), 1 red (violent conduct, Hull A)
Man of the Match Awards — 6 (Swansea H, Southampton H, Everton H, West Brom A, Chelsea H, West Ham H)
LFW Ratings — 6, 5, 6, 5, 7, 5, 6, 5, 6, 4, 7, 6, 8, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 3, 8, 8, 7, 8, 6, 6, 4, 6, 4 = 6.00
You can perhaps tell that I’m not going to be as harsh on Leroy Fer as some. You’ll find a queue, on the message boards and in the ground on a matchday, who say the Dutch international is lazy and poor defensively. You won’t find me, or Chris Ramsey for that matter, disagreeing with the latter and you only needed to be at Leicester on the final day, where Ramsey concluded — rightly — that Reece Grego-Cox out of position on his full senior debut was still a better option defensively than Fer despite his experience, ability and price-tag. That’s not forgivable either — for £8m it’s not unreasonable to expect a midfield player, even an attacking one, to defend a lot better than Fer does, or at least look like he’s trying to. But I doubt the former, and he’s a very talented player in my opinion.
QPR saw him at his best twice, oddly both against Sunderland. They were the only times, once under Redknapp and once under Ramsey, that he was played in his correct ‘number ten’ position, through the middle and ahead of the midfield. He rattled the bar from long range in the first game, and scored in the second while winning Man of the Match. Unfortunately, just as Ramsey had arrived and spotted the potential for QPR to pose an attacking threat through somebody other than Charlie Austin by playing Fer there, he was injured at the Stadium of Light and ruled out for three crucial months. With Austin and Matt Phillips in the kind of form they were, one wonders how close Ramsey would have got to keeping us up had he had Fer as well.
For the most part though he was another who suffered from Harry Redknapp’s back-three shemozzle. The summer transfer activity saddled QPR with half a dozen players who all like to play that ‘ten’ role — Fer, Jordan Mutch, Adel Taarabt, Eduardo Vargas, Mauro Zarate later on too — and nobody who could play left wing. Consequently, Fer ended up stuck wide left when a four man midfield was adapted and he was neither effective with the ball, nor any good at defending.
He still managed to score reasonably regularly — six in total, the only one other than Charlie Austin to pose a goal threat — but he’ll not be remembered fondly, or possibly at all, once his inevitable move elsewhere comes this summer. Personally, I think it’s another talented player we didn’t make the most of, first through poor management, and then through an unfortunately timed injury.
Stats:
28 starts, 3 sub appearances
Scoring — 6 goals (Leicester H, Burnley H, Swansea H, Sunderland A, Liverpool A, Newcastle H), 4 assists (Sunderland H, Liverpool H, Chelsea A, West Brom H)
Discipline — 4 yellows (foul, foul, dissent, foul), 0 reds
Man of the Match Awards — 4 (Sunderland H, Stoke A, Sunderland A, Liverpool A)
LFW Ratings — 4, 3, 8, 4, 6, 6, 5, 6, 6, 7, 6, 5, 6, 5, 7, 5, 5, 5, 5, 6, 4, 6, 5, 7, 7, 8, 5, 8, 4, 6, 3 = 5.580
Initially, it was easy to see why. In an early appearance against Middlesbrough he was mesmeric, controlling the game effortlessly without ever breaking stride or sweat. A week later at Millwall he found the top corner from 25 yards and later snapped the crossbar in two from 30. He was a privilege to watch. It was like being at the opening night of some exotic restaurant, where a European chef blows away all the humdrum Nandos and gourmet burgers the city has been gorging itself upon with a selection of ingredients and dishes the likes of which you’ve read about only in books. Kranjcar was magnificent. He looked like the new Taarabt, capable of winning the division by himself.
Kranjcar, though, would score only once more that season and by the end he couldn’t even get in the team. He was, however much his army of female fans protested, overweight to the point of being fat. His heavy leggedness started to cost him bookings - five in the final 12 games after 0 in the first 22 — and should, at Leicester away and Wigan at home in the play-offs, have brought red cards too. Though we should nod to him costing himself a World Cup place by turning out in the play-off final with a hamstring injury, his selection when clearly unfit was a classic bit of Harry Redknapp management and left Rangers a substitution down before half time which would prove a real hindrance in the second half.
More ludicrous still, Redknapp then signed the Croatian on loan again for the 2014/15 Premier League season. A difficult one to fathom, given how off the Championship pace he’d been by the end of the previous season, but then again easy to predict given that it was the fourth time Redknapp had signed the player in his career — one more stamp he gets a free Niko Kranjcar next time.
So off we went again. Kranjcar looked slimmer, lighter on his feet, quicker across the ground. He scored, spectacularly, to snatch a point from a home match with Stoke with one of only two free kicks Joey Barton didn’t duff into the bottom of the wall all season and came within a whisker of repeating the dose at Southampton a week later with the other one. Hope rekindled — Kranjcar, with 81 Croatian caps, is clearly a supremely gifted footballer and perhaps QPR were about to see the best of it.
They weren’t. The weight returned, all round the arse and thighs again. One wondered whether it might be worth working shifts at the West Country Co. Pasty stalls on his route to and from the training ground so he could be refused service and reminded of his obligations. He would, like the previous season, score only once more — a tap in in the return fixture at Stoke — and despite QPR being chronically short of goals and creativity he was once again shrunk back into the shadows, mooching round the training ground. Another one of those Shaun Wright-Phillips, Luke Young-types who have fans of other clubs saying "Christ I’d forgotten he was there” when they notice him on the back of the programme.
One of several players who suffered from Redknapp spending the summer preparing to play a back three and then abandoning it immediately. It left the midfield without a left winger, pressing Krancar into service there once or twice with poor results. At Aston Villa over Easter he was as bad as he’s ever been in that position, and when introduced as a second half sub against Arsenal he did as much as anybody to cost Rangers the game. His lack of action, and rustiness, only partial mitigation for those two showings. His inability to stay sharp, and fit, even when he was playing semi-regularly will be the abiding memory of his two years here.
Stats:
11 starts, 11 sub appearances
Scoring — 2 goals (Stoke H, Stoke A), 3 assists (Stoke H, Leicester H, West Brom A)
Discipline — 2 yellows (foul, foul), 0 reds
Man of the Match Awards — 1 (Stoke H)
LFW Ratings — 5, 8, 7, 6, -, 7, 7, 5, 7, 5, - , 5, 5, 3, 6, 5, 4, -, 7, 4, 6, 4 = 5.631
Few would have given Henry a shout of doing much else this season other than campaign for the Conservative party but as it transpired, once the initial plans for a five man midfield were ditched, and it turned out Sandro couldn’t run and Joey Barton couldn’t maintain possession of the football, Karl Henry turned out to be quite useful. Not excellent, probably not even that good, but decent and useful. Certainly far exceeding expectations.
He was even used to good effect in the problem left wing spot against Chelsea, reducing the threat of Branislav Ivanovic down that side well, although Chris Ramsey rather flogged that to death by subsequently picking him there in other easier, must win games — particularly at home to West Ham.
Unspectacular, but not bad.
Stats:
29 starts, 6 sub appearances, 0 goals, 0 assists
Discipline — 8 yellows (foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul)
Man of the Match Awards — 2 (Southampton A, Hull A)
LFW Ratings — 4, 5, 7, 7, 5, 8, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 6, 6, 5, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 3, 7, 7, 7, 5, 4, 6, 6, 8, 7, 6, 6, 4, 6, 4 = 5.91
There’s not much left to say really. There is a fantastic player in here somewhere, we’ve seen it at Blackburn, but he’ll look back on his time at QPR as a wallet-lining career destroyer. There was hope, after he’d won the penalty against Wigan in the play-off semi-final, and then had a hand in Bobby Zamora’s Wembley winner, that it could be a big season for Hoilett and a chance to finally start fulfilling his potential and showing QPR fans what he could do. Sadly, and it is sad, any confidence he imbued from those play-offs quickly drained away. The jinking runs inside and dangerous shots on goal that were his forte at Ewood Park are long gone, and haven’t been replaced by any sort of ability to take a full back on down the line and deliver a cross. He looks absolutely bereft, totally miserable.
He has the ability to be one of those players who leaves QPR and does better elsewhere, leaving us to ponder again exactly what it is we do to footballers, but it’s getting to the stage where that’s a risk that has to be taken and for the good of the player ties need to be cut. I think it’s a real shame.
Stats:
11 starts, 13 sub appearances
Scoring — 0 goals, 1 assist (Arsenal A)
Discipline — 2 yellows (foul, foul)
Man of the Match Awards — 0
LFW Ratings — 6, 4, 6, 4, 6, 4, 7, 5, -, -, -, 5, 6, 5, 5, -, 2, 6, 4, 5, 6, -, 5, 4 = 5.00
Thus Sandro was added to the list of Harry Redknapp stock excuses, along with only having 12 players to take on the pre-season tour of Ireland and other such fictitious gubbins. "Things would be a lot better if Sandro had played more, and things will be a lot better when Sandro plays more” we were repeatedly told. Except he never did.
Easy to say with hindsight (I thought this was a potentially brilliant signing) but that shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise should it? After December 7, Sandro had only managed nine appearances for Spurs the year before. The previous season, 2012/13, he hadn’t played at all after January 12. In fact, Sandro has never made it to 30 appearances in any of the five seasons he’s been in England, and given Tottenham’s extensive Europa League campaigns in that time it should have rung alarm bells.
Since the money arrived at Loftus Road, QPR have shelled out far too much on players who turn out to be physically shot almost as soon as they get here — Bobby Zamora, Andy Johnson, Rio Ferdinand, Ji-Sung Park and so on. It seems the extent of the QPR medical exam is seeing whether or not a player can fit into a standard size home shirt — and Niko Kranjcar couldn’t even manage that.
Anyway, while we were all wondering how good we’d be with Sandro in the team, and how much better it would all be when he was back, and why so many players pass QPR medicals despite having serious physical ailments, we were blindsided by the news that he was a fucking illegal immigrant anyway. The club, as only QPR could, had allowed his work visa to expire and had been fielding him, and employing him, illegally. Shoot me in the face with a massive gun.
Rangers were never likely to make their money back on Sandro even if they could shift him on this summer, given his injury status, but they’re going to do even worse than that now he’s returned home to Brazil because he’s not allowed back until the issue is resolved. So QPR face a Championship campaign in less than a month with £10m-worth of Brazilian international (with no knees) on the other side of the world messing about on quad bikes and occasionally Tweeting the club to ask what on earth is going on.
Stats:
17 starts, 0 sub appearances
Scoring — 1 goal (Spurs H), 0 assists
Discipline — 6 yellows (foul, foul, foul, foul, foul, foul), 0 reds
Man of the Match Awards — 0
LFW Ratings — 5, -, 4, 6, 6, 8, 7, 6, 7, 5, 4, 5, 7, 6, 7, 6, 7 = 6.00
He is, essentially, everything Harry Redknapp got wrong in his last six months as QPR manager summed up in one player. I wish he was still here, I think he’d be very decent for us this season if he was.
Stats:
7 starts, 4 sub appearances
Scoring — 0 goals, 1 assist (Everton A)
Discipline — 3 yellows (foul, foul, foul), 0 reds
Man of the Match Awards — 0
LFW Ratings — 6, 4, -, 7, 6, 5, 6, 6, 5, 4, 4 = 5.30
Michael Doughty had been waiting a long time for his first team bow, and impressed in cameo appearances at Hull, Sunderland and Villa, but he suffered with injury and Chris Ramsey was unhappy with his physical condition. A big season coming up for him, and Frankie Sutherland who recovered from his Faurlin-style knee injury and enjoyed a decent spell on loan at Wimbledon but really needs to be kicking on or looking elsewhere this year.
Michael Petrasso is also coming back from a knee injury, and Brandan Comley made a debut at Leicester and seems to have caught Chris Ramsey’s eye.
Then there was Shaun Wright-Phillips, but what is there to say that hasn’t already been said? Exemplary around the training ground, he was rewarded for that with a start at Crystal Palace where he promptly hung Darnell Furlong out to dry. Ramsey subsequently burnt a lot of his support by sending him on late in the defeat at Man City, so QPR fans had the indignity of not only seeing their team lose 6-0 but a player who has taken the piss out of the club for so long get a standing ovation from a former love. QPR’s fault for giving him, and others like him, the contract they did, but celebratory barbecues all round now he’s finally, finally, finally slung his hook. Will be added to an ever growing list of ‘dead money’ players that QPR spent a fortune to bring here and maintain, but who were so physically spent and shot they couldn’t even get (and didn’t need) another club on a free transfer when they were finally released.
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