QPR, picking up points and keeping clean sheets, head to Ashton Gate on Saturday, where they've beaten Bristol City four times in a row but have a trio of former charges lying in wait.

Bristol City (6-8-6 WLLWLD 11th) v QPR (4-9-7 LDWDWW 19th)

Sky’s Super Saturday Brunch Spectacular >>> Saturday December 14, 2024 >>> Kick Off 12.30 >>> Weather – Bright but cold >>> Ashton Gate, Bristol

That first half of Wednesday night… WOW.

There are little bits of it keep coming back to me and making me chuckle: the pass down the line that hit Jimmy Dunne in the back of the head and went off; the Nicolas Madsen free kick into (outer) space; the Harrison Ashby double give-away and foul on Matt Phillips... A farcically low quality game of football. I feel like John Candy, standing on the hard shoulder, chuckling “we can laugh about it now, we’re alright” while everyone else there present stares back at me in the deadpan Steve Martin role.

While we can all agree we’d never want to experience nonsense quite that overheated ever again, and we’ll surely not beat anybody else playing like that, it does continue the steady recovery of late, and the run of clean sheets that have driven it. It is also exactly those sorts of games Rangers have struggled with this season – poor team, usually at home, expected to win, expected to dominate possession… usually this means we fall in a hole. Plymouth, Portsmouth and Hull have all taken points from Loftus Road already. In the last fortnight we’ve beaten Cardiff and Oxford both to nil, and while we certainly won’t be shifting many DVD copies of either game I’m not sure how important that is just now in context.

It's not just this season we’ve struggled in such games either. Wednesday night was actually the first time since Mick Beale’s side were top of the Championship table in mid-October 2022 that QPR have beaten one of the sides newly promoted from League One anywhere. Derby and Portsmouth have both beaten the R’s this season, last year there were two dire defeats to Sheff Wed, two draws with Plymouth, and one point and no goals scored in two games with Ipswich. The season before we lost away at Wigan and Rotherham, and at home to Sunderland, drew at home to the Millers and fortuitously at the Stadium of Light thanks to two last minute goals including one from the goalkeeper. The 2-1 at home to Wigan, itself a game that could easily have gone another way, was the last win.

Lest we also forget the collapse of the previous year’s promotion push, and the reign of Mark Warburton as manager, was largely punctuated by three different catastrophic defeats to Peterborough – the first killing the momentum of the spring and summer and promoting several unwelcome moves towards a more cautious playing style, the second which started the horrendous run of results after a good January, and the third really the final nail in the play-off coffin at Loftus Road.

The Oxford result may have snapped that strange QPR trend, but it continued another.

Gareth Ainsworth was roundly criticised and ridiculed for many aspects and elements of his managerial approach and tactics at QPR. So well-liked here as a player it’s perhaps a surprise people, at least online, turned as nasty and spiteful about it as they did, particularly as he’d inherited such a mess and many of the problems with the team were not of his making. Out of his depth, sure, but let’s not humiliate the bloke. Mind you, letting the video of that Haka stunt go out publicly probably brought that on himself a little bit.

One of the reasons for that was his “possession can do one” attitude to playing, particularly at places like West Brom and Leeds, was seen as one that simply didn’t suit us as a club. Thanks to FFP, parachute payments etc we’re always pushing piss uphill in this division to a certain extent, but we’re not Wycombe, Oxford or Rotherham and we’re not just lucky to be at places like Elland Road and The Hawthorns. Going to those grounds with absolutely no desire to hold the ball and create anything of our own wound people up. It would the worst people up - the ones that tread the hard yards up and down the country following the team. When you’ve lost them you really are dead.

Hiring a progressive, Spanish coach with Cruyffian ideals should have been the exact opposite. Results, tactics, organisation, footwear... Marti Cifuentes is the exact opposite, let’s be quite clear. But when it comes to possession, the new coach is finding something very intriguing. Whenever his QPR team try to dominate the ball and play an attractive, expansive style they get ran through more than Lily Phillips. The victories under Cifuentes have come, almost exclusively, without the ball.

The farce of Oxford and QPR give the ball away to each other so they could enact their tactic of choice was barely watchable. It got the result QPR wanted, but it did so from 39% possession. That’s to go with the 37% possession QPR had for the Norwich and Watford games from which they took four points, the 32% they had at Cardiff for another win to nil, and the 25% for a recent 0-0 at Burnley. I can’t imagine this is what Cifuentes ideally wants, but it bizarrely seems to work for his side.

Andrew Scherer has been in touch to point out since Cifuentes took charge we’ve won 14 league games and in only three of those have we had more of the ball than the opponent – Stoke who played for most of the second half with ten men, Rotherham who were relegated, and Birmingham who were also relegated. By way of comparison, two-thirds of Warbs' wins (36/54) came with 50+% possession (very simple Nick, take care of the football).

Tomorrow is the clash of two other trends – an away ground QPR have a strangely good record on vs QPR playing away game three in a three game week.

The Cifuentes and Warburton styles both won at Ashton Gate. Mick Beale won here too. Rangers have been victorious on their last four visits to a ground that used to represent one of our more hostile days out in the Second Division days. But, as we discussed pre-Watford, QPR’s away win percentage declines 30% from an already low base when that away game is game three in a three game week. It’s the biggest fall off, the worst record, of anybody in the Championship over the last ten years.

It feels to me like tomorrow might be a little bit much for us. Then again, when we travelled here in February it was also game 3/3 that week, we’d been utterly abysmal at Stoke on the Tuesday, and we put on a very credible performance indeed against Liam Manning’s side to win 1-0.

There has been that lingering feeling since Manning moved here from Oxford that an inability to break down set ups like the one that works so well for Cifuentes at QPR is his undoing. Fail again tomorrow, with the obvious Typical QPR cheat sheets of Wells, Armstrong and Dickie among the potential goalscorers, and he’ll start to come under serious pressure.

Rangers fans, meanwhile, know that an almost identical run of recovery results this time last year derailed in calamitous circumstances at Sheff Wed, with two last minute goals, having led 1-0 throughout. The R’s then didn’t win again for eight games.

Ours is again a fragile recovery, built with a threadbare team.

Links >>> The most mid-table of all – Oppo Profile >>> Late, late show – History >>> On the fast track – Referee >>> Bristol City official website >>> The Exiled Robin — Blog >>> One Team In Bristol — Message Board >>> Bristol Post — Local Paper >>> One Stream In Bristol — Podcast >>> Fevs Football Analytics - Contributor's page

Below the fold

Team News: Rayan Kolli played through illness on Wednesday night, but Ilias Chair got five minutes in off the bench. Kenneth Paal should be fit for this one. We’re still anticipating Michy Frey and Jake Clarke-Salter to be back for either this game or Preston. Jack Colbak lies a little further beyond that. Jonathan Varane has successfully dodged the five-card suspension past last week’s amnesty. Nicolas Madsen picked up a very heavy knock in the Oxford game.

The prospect of a Sinclair Armstrong goal against us appears to have been ruled out by an injury. George Tanner and Mark Sykes are medium term absentees but Ross McCrorie and Posh Scott Twine are back and available for this one.

Elsewhere: A game of significant interest to QPR fans tonight, though quite who else would want to spend their Friday watching it is known only to the schedulers at our Sky Overlords, as fellow strugglers Derby (17th) and Portsmouth (21st) renew their hostilities from last year’s League One at Pride Park.

I’ve got to be honest I’d become so disconsolate about our fast fading season I’d stopped looking at who else was around us on the Championship table so it’s nice to have progressed as far as at least looking who we might catch. Obviously I knew Wazza Rooney’s Plymouth (23rd) would be down there because, well, Wazza Rooney and you wouldn’t expect them to notch a first away win of the season up at Sheffield Red Stripe on Saturday.

Hull (24th) have manager Ruben Selles getting his feet under the table with a trip to Frank Lampard’s Coventry (16th). The bottom three is completed by fast-falling Cardiff (22nd) who face a trip to Stoke (18th). Oxford (20th), who looked very low on self-belief to me during the week ahead of a weekend visit from Sheff Wed.

As well as ourselves and the Cov v Hull game, the other unfortunate victims of the lunchtime scheduling is Preston Knob End v Red Bull Leeds. The three games in the afternoon we’re yet to mention see Blackburn going for six wins in a row at home to Luton, Neil Harris signing off from his latest stint as Millwall manager at Boro, and an improving Swanselona hosting a fading Sunderland.

Two games on Sunday, just because. Udinese B host West Brom, while Scott Parker’s glory tour of goalless draws reaches Norwich.

Referee: Wigan season ticket holder Lewis Smith went from National League to Premier League referee in just ten months earlier this year when he made his top flight debut at Fulham v Villa in February. At 30 he’s the youngest referee in the prem since Michael Oliver. QPR previously had him for last season’s 2-0 home success against Millwall. Details.

Form

Bristol City: It’s been another season of frustrating mid-table inconsistency from Bristol City who are currently 11th on a very typical 6-8-6 record. They have 26 points, the exact same amount they had this week last year. The Robins come into this game on the back of a 4-0 home win against Plymouth, a 3-0 away defeat at Portsmouth, and a 1-1 draw at promotion chasing Sunderland where the hosts scored with the last kick of stoppage time. That’s, again, utterly typical. City haven’t won two games in a row since March and haven’t won three in a row for a year. Their longest sequence of defeats this season is two, and you have to go back to February when they lost four on the spin for a longer run than that. They win, they lose, they draw. And they do it in that sequence. Over and over. Over and over again. They come into this one WLWLLWLD. They have scored 25, and let 25 in. This is what midtable looks like. And they look like it every season.

It doesn’t get much more encouraging, or any more consistent, at Ashton Gate. That hammering of Wayne Karno’s Green Army is their only home victory in six, although that has been a tough run of fixtures in which Burnley, Leeds and Sheff Utd have all come here and understandably taken points. Still, Cardiff, Sheff Wed and Coventry have all also gone away from here with positive results leaving City with a 3-4-2 home record – Plymouth (23rd), Cardiff (22nd), Oxford (20th), Derby (17th), Luton (15th), Millwall (13th) have all won more on their own patch. Spun another way, they've only lost twoo of 14 games here and kept seven clean sheets in that period. Bristol City and Millwall (ten each) are the only teams in the league to have hit the woodwork more than QPR (nine). Anis Mehmeti (six) and Nahki Wells (five) are the top scorers here.

Back in the Ian Holloway, Second Division days, at QPR, a trip to Ashton Gate used to be a fearsome thing. QPR lost here in 2001/02, and again in 2003/04 on the way to pipping the Robins to automatic promotion in hilarious POPing circumstances. More recently this has been a happy hunting ground. Rangers have won the last four visits here under three different managers (Cifuentes, Beale, Warburton twice but once in lockdown). Bristol City had won four meetings in a row themselves before that, as part of an unbeaten run of ten, since Karl Connolly and Kevin Gallen combined for a 3-1 win here in September 2002.

QPR: Rangers have gone from a run of 13 games without a win to three wins from four and unbeaten in six. Only Leeds and Blackburn have taken more points from the last half dozen games. The R's started the season with one win and eight draws from their first 16 games for 11 points. They’ve now got 11 from the last possible 18. It’s all quite weirdly familiar to the start of last season where the R’s won two of their first 17 matches, drawing four others, for ten points from those games. They then won three and drew one of four to stick ten points on the board from a possible 12. The trick now is to avoid what happened last December 16 when a 1-0 lead, and chance to go 2-0 up in the 89th minute, was turned into a 2-1 loss at Hillsborough and another eight matches without victory followed.

The recovery has been built on clean sheets. From none in the first 14 games, QPR have now kept six in the last nine and haven’t conceded a goal at all in their last four and a half games. It’s their best run since three in a row against Preston, Hull and Plymouth in this week last year. Burnley, Sunderland, Watford and Norwich, all top half teams, have failed to score against Rangers in this sequence. That wait for a clean sheet was harsh on Paul Nardi, who is clearly our player of the year to this point, but the Frenchman is now starting to stack the numbers. His four consecutive shut outs is the first time a QPR keeper has done that since Rob Green more than a decade ago. He’ll do well to match that record though – Rangers didn’t concede for eight league games between August and October 2013, beating Ipswich, Birmingham, Bolton, Leeds, Yeovil (all 1-0), Boro and Barnsley (both 2-0) and drawing 0-0 with Brighton.

Only Derby (12) and Luton (10) have scored more goals from set plays than QPR this season (eight). Sam Field has now scored seven times in 2024, more than any other QPR player. Six of those have come at home and all of them at night. Rayan Kolli now has two goals and two assists from two starts and four sub appearances this season, two goals and three assists from two starts and 14 sub appearances for the club overall. Sinclair Armstrong left QPR with four goals and five assists from 23 starts and 43 sub appearances.

Prediction: Just three games to go before we hand out Prediction League prizes from The Art of Football - sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here - for leading the league at Christmas. We currently have a two-way tie at the top between QPRHibs and NoelMC. Last year’s joint winners SimplyNico and WestonsuperR say...

Nico’s Call: “After two wins to nil in a week, at home, and with breathing space to the relegation zone (albeit with Cardiff and Plymouth having a game in hand), we are on the road to Bristol for an early kick off on Saturday. We are back to being difficult to score against, albeit we are still without a recognised centre forward, relying as we are on Rayan Kolli and Alfie Lloyd (with Michy Frey due back soon). Bristol’s recent record is patchy, and they both score and concede goals in equal measures. I think we are on for a draw here.”

Weston’s Call “Living close to Bristol this is always the first fixture I look out for so it’s been a brilliant and thoroughly enjoyable four away wins over the last few seasons, excited and nervous for this one in equal measure. My City supporting friends are reporting the crowd have turned on Armstrong so it’s almost certain that he scores on Saturday then. With an extra day’s rest for Bristol and with our severe lack of striker options I’d take a draw just hope we have enough to get at least that.”

Nico’s Prediction: Bristol City 1-1 QPR. Scorer – Steve Cook

WestonSuperR’s Prediction: Bristol City 1-1 QPR. Scorer – Koki Saito

LFW’s Prediction: Bristol City 2-0 QPR. No scorer.

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Pictures - Reuters Connect

TacticalR added 23:18 - Dec 13 Thanks for your preview. I am not surprised that Cifuentes went defensive as we had nothing up front (until, out of the blue, Celar, Kolli and Field stepped up to score in recent weeks). On top of that we were also missing key players in defence and midfield. I am a little bit surprised by Andrew Scherer's observation of our low possession statistics in games we have won when you include last season, but I guess this shows that Cifuentes has been firefighting since the day he got here, so maybe we were naïve to think that things were suddenly going to change after a single pre-season. The world looks like a different place after a few wins, although I suspect our goal-scoring problems haven't gone away. It would be good if we can keep anything of our momentum going.

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062259 added 04:10 - Dec 14 Unpredictable
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