The brickbats for director of football Les Ferdinand continue, but a January transfer window of four high-profile departures and three low key arrivals is one to cherish and praise.
Queens Park Rangers have had more ill-fated revolutions than the Arab Spring in recent years, but a stark image appeared on social media this week to highlight just how empty and hollow the claim by Harry Redknapp that the club would be signing "right sorts” under his watch really was.
Listening to what Redknapp has to say about football is like listening to a serial cheater talking about how faithful they’re being to their current partner, or an alcoholic on how much they’ve cut down on the drink, or a smoker on how they’ll have totally quit by the end of the year but just want to enjoy themselves on this holiday, or a coke head on how it’s actually pretty harmless stuff and they’re not hooked on it at all. If you like being lied to, Redknapp’s your man. And apparently lots of people do, because in the absence of another chairman stupid enough to employ him, he’s absolutely fucking everywhere these days, insulting your intelligence through print, online, radio and television.
#QPR pic.twitter.com/qpuyM6KIww– Elliott Boswell (@ElliottBoswell1) February 1, 2016
Of the QPR team photograph for 2014/15, a season that was supposed to represent us doing the Premier League thing properly, only seven players remain, and had the club got its way this January Robert Green, Matt Phillips, Armand Traore, Karl Henry, Junior Hoilett and Yun Suk-Young would also have blue circles for faces, leaving only Clint Hill, Nedum Onuoha and the unpictured Ale Faurlin. A remarkable turnover in 18 months, even by QPR’s standards.
The ‘right sorts’ included Rio Ferdinand, so physically incapable of playing at the highest level any more he couldn’t get in the Premier League’s worst team despite coming in from Manchester United; Steven Caulker, a footballer of some promise with various flaws of an extra-curricular nature which have completely stalled a career which had taken him to the cusp of the England team; Sandro, a ridiculously priced and paid player with knees like a landmine victim and a passport that looks like it came back through the looking glass with Alice from her adventures in Wonderland; Eduardo Vargas, who refused to come on as a substitute at Crystal Palace; and three players, including Caulker, who’d been relegated the year before.
Full disclosure, this is snarking with hindsight. I thought Caulker, Jordon Mutch, Leroy Fer and Alex McCarthy were "exactly the sort of players QPR should be signing” while Mauricio Isla and Vargas excited me, having played key roles in a successful Chile team I adored watching. "It’s all going unsettlingly well,” I believe I said. Still, picking out things that were said on LFW that turned out to be bollocks is like shooting a hammerhead shark in a mop bucket with a harpoon. You can barely miss. We have fun trying though. Maybe I’m shovelling some more onto the pile here.
Ferdinand smacked of a typical Redknapp move, a vintage QPR disaster waiting to happen, however. And although Sandro looked like an amazing capture for a newly promoted team, and the Spurs supporters reacting on Twitter fumed he’d been let go, his injury record was clear as day when he got here. Signing him and then blaming his frequent absences for the team’s poor performance was rather like spending a whole summer saying you’re switching to a wing back system, selling your settled and successful right back to a rival, then abandoning that idea after a game and a half and spending the next nine months bemoaning the lack of options at right back. But then, ‘Arry did that as well.
They’re all gone now, all of them. In the case of Sandro, and Fer, and Caulker, they’re technically only out on loan. Just like the sheer amount of players who basically drift off into a premature retirement while picking up big money at QPR — Jermaine Jenas, Luke Young, Fitz Hall, Andy Johnson, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Rio Ferdinand, Ji Sung Park — Rangers frequently having to settle for merely lending players out because nobody wants to buy them is medicine in bitter pill form. It shows QPR have signed players when their fitness and injury record dictates they shouldn’t and nobody else would, it shows they frequently pay wages far in excess of what the player is worth or anybody else would pay, and it shows they sign players at ages when there is little prospect of any sell on later on. These players are difficult to shift, because you need to find somebody stupid enough to match their pay/give them a fairly gentle medical.
Plenty of people wanted Charlie Austin of course, and the club has been ridiculed for only getting £4m for him, but he’d turned down contract extension opportunities, and bigger money moves to other clubs, because he wanted what he ended up with. More on that here.
Sandro’s numbers are damning, without getting into how much he’s cost us so far and continues to do so. In 18 months at the club he managed just 26 starts and two sub appearances. He’s never managed more than eight consecutive starts, and he was substituted off in six of those games when he did manage it. He has managed to complete a full 90 minutes for the club on just nine occasions, leaving the field early on 17 of the 26 occasions he’s started — and not late subs either, usually around the hour mark. One withdrawal, at Southampton, came after 11 minutes, after a bit of a bang to the head. His influence across his fleeting appearances has led to a record of W5, D8, L15 and one of those five wins was Bolton at home this year when he played just the final quarter of an hour. So for all the money spent in transfer fees and wages, all the assertions from Redknapp and others that we’d be so much better when he was in the team, we’ve benefitted to the tune of four victories from the thick end of 30 games in a year and a half. That’s almost as ridiculous as the ongoing assertion that he’s 26 years old — come on mate, we’re not on eHarmony now.
Apropos of nothing, I’m just going to leave this jolly interesting piece from The Secret Footballer here.
Fer is particularly frustrating. There’s nothing wrong with a ‘languid’ playing style per se — it’s very British to stand and salute a Jamie Mackie-style of perpetual motion but unless you’re as tireless as Mackie it’s often energy spent accomplishing nothing and is laughed at on the continent. But Fer often took it beyond languid, through lazy into an almost deep, comatose sleep. For somebody who’d played defensive central midfield in his homeland, and earned the nickname ‘The Bouncer’, he appeared to have no defensive brain, or no will to use it if it was there, whatsoever. What he had shown, occasionally, was a fierce shot and eye for goal. At Sunderland last season, when used as a ‘ten’ behind a target man striker by Chris Ramsey, he was our best player on the night. But any hope this would translate into him tearing the Championship a new arse, as he really should have been able to, quickly evaporated. He rarely looked bothered, culminating in a display at Nottingham Forest last week he should be personally embarrassed by. His indication to the away end, midway through the second half, that they should sing up a bit, the ultimate irony/insult.
The problem is, if West Brom, Liverpool and Swansea find what we’ve found, they’ll be back in the summer — even harder to shift still with a further failure under their belts. Sandro managed 69 minutes of his West Brom debut on Tuesday night — what a fucking trooper. Little Tom Carroll has greater claim to the ‘Beast’ nickname the Brazilian who carries it now. For now, the new executive team and management at the club deserve credit for shifting them as far as they have.
Which is why I’m a little perplexed by an opinion I’ve seen bandied around the increasingly vile world of QPR on Twitter and Facebook, that waving farewell to such wasters while shopping for younger, cheaper, rough diamonds in the lower divisions is somehow perceived as a negative thing.
I’ve seen it said that QPR are giving up, doing things on the cheap, building a side of League One players that will inevitably take them to the second tier. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and Lord knows this site means I get to spout mine off often enough, but I find all this so ridiculously warped it makes me wonder whether we’re talking about, following and watching the same club.
Even if we want to try and pursue the logic of it for a moment, it falls down immediately at the balance sheet. I saw somebody suggest to the long-suffering Dave McIntyre on Twitter than Sandro was still a better bet as "back up” than the likes of Karl Henry and so on to which his, and indeed the only, response was to point out that clubs sitting fourteenth in the Championship on 15,000 gates shouldn’t have Brazilian internationals on Brazilian international wages kicking around the place as "back up” even if they are ever fit to play.
Even if these players weren’t being replaced at all, they need to be gone. Partly because you can’t have players like Massimo Luongo, Conor Washington, Grant Hall and so on putting a shift in, turning out for the team every week, playing well, and earning £7,000 a week for it, looking across the room at players trying half as much as they are and barely contributing at all pulling in £40,000. It doesn’t work, in any career. But mainly because the club cannot afford it. The punishment for spending £79m on wages the last time we were at this level is yet to be known, but that doesn’t mean we should be going out of our way to do it again.
There is an element of habit to this criticism. QPR have, for several years, spent big money on big name players. The utterly laughable suggestion, that was made on Twitter apparently in all seriousness, that QPR should swoop in and hijack the Jordan Rhodes deal when Middlesbrough started to cough at the figures a little, completely ignored the current situation at the club, but is probably what we’d have tried to do two years ago when a three month injury to Charlie Austin saw us go out and sign Kevin Doyle. And Will Keane. And Mobido Maiga. To go with the Andy Johnson and Bobby Zamora we already had. We’ve grown used to the club behaving like that, and it’s apparently taking some getting used to that we don’t/can’t any more.
In addition, by not signing known players and big names, it creates a knowledge vacuum. Everybody knows what Chris Samba is and does, the same cannot be said of Grant Hall. Into that vacuum often slips Twitter and Wikipedia - which is a valuable resource in many areas, but football certainly isn’t one of them. Quite apart from the notoriously inaccurate goal stats (treat yourselves to soccerbase.com) the text is often wildly off the mark. As a bit of a giggle, we altered Patrick Agyemang’s Wikipedia profile a while back to say his remarkable eight goals in six game run at the start of his QPR career was later attributed by scientists to a "tear in the fabric of reality” and cited one of our articles — it remained on his page for 18 months. So people look at the Wikipedia profile of Nasser El Khayati after he arrives from Burton, they see he’s listed as a striker (he’s not) and they see his inaccurate goal stats (which are actually quite decent for somebody who plays wide midfield) and they wonder what QPR are playing at and say as much, often very forcefully, often to the club chairman or manager, having never seen him play.
We could pop the Hovis advert music on, kick back in a chair and talk about how ‘during the war’ QPR popped downstairs and came back with Darren Peacock from Hereford, Andy Sinton from Brentford, Rufus Brevett from Doncaster Rovers, Andy Tillson from Grimsby, Les Ferdinand from Hayes, Andy Impey from Yeading and so on. But of more relevance is recent years, when the best signings the club has made - for cost, consistency and quality of performance, and length of service — have been the least heralded at the time.
Grant Hall the latest example, Shaun Derry and Clint Hill before that. Generally it seems that when the club plays it low key, we don’t really know who the player is, we barely even notice his arrival, and sites like this don’t get all moist and hot under the collar about the arrival — that’s when we’re at our most successful in the transfer market. This craving for bigger names, more money spent, more strikers signed etc etc rather ignores that in the vast, vast majority of cases, when we’ve signed name players and spent decent money on them it simply hasn’t worked — Matt Phillips and Charlie Austin rare exceptions.
Which doesn’t mean El Khayati and Conor Washington will succeed at QPR at all. They may both fail completely. Washington took time to get going at Newport, and Peterborough, but certainly looks hard working and dynamic on his brief QPR outings so far. El Khayati, on the couple of occasions I’ve seen him, is a bit maverick, a bit street-footballer, a bit unpredictable. Whether he’s tricky and skilful enough to pull that off against better defenders, or will simply prove to be a luxury player we cannot afford to carry, who knows? Certainly not us, and certainly not Wikipedia.
But these are, actually, the sort of players QPR should be signing. These are the actual right sorts. Better ages, better fitness records, better transfer fees, lower wages, everything to prove, careers ahead of them, potential sell on value. They see QPR as a big move, they’re keen to do well here and prove themselves. Some will hit the ground running immediately, as Hall has. Some will struggle and maybe ultimately fail completely, as Tjaronn Chery could potentially be doing. Some will have to go out on loan to further their development, like Ben Gladwin. Some will be eased into the team, perhaps taken out for a couple of months and then reintroduced, like Massimo Luongo. All will need patience and time.
That QPR, after that mad autumn on the back of Tony Fernandes’ ‘promotion is everything to me’ moment, are now seemingly willing to at least try and sign that sort of player and give him that opportunity is something to be praised and embraced rather than criticised. A January of Sandro, Fer and Caulker leaving while Matt Ingram, El Khayati and Washington arrive feels like a bloody good one to me.
Les Ferdinand, for all his faults and failures, is the first person to actually try and do this at our club since the money arrived, and I wish him, and the boys he’s bringing in, all the luck in the world. If we’re going to fail I’d rather we failed like this, and I suspect the club’s accountants agree.
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures — Action Images