Table-toppers to mid-table-floppers — Knee Jerks Monday, 22nd Aug 2016 17:23 by Antti Heinola Antti Heinola reflects on a difficult afternoon all round for QPR as Preston win 2-0 at Loftus Road. FirstsWhat a game of firsts for the Championship season: first match without a penalty; first time Chery hasn’t scored; first time the team hasn’t scored; first time we conceded at home; first time we lost at home; first time our plan didn’t work at all; first time an opposition has been flagged offside more than 87 times in a game. A lot firsts, most of them not very good firsts. Would be good to have less firsts in our next game, although I suspect ‘first time we’re humiliated this season by lower league opposition’ is only hours away… Alex SmithiesAlso the first time I’ve seen him play and been disappointed. I saw some criticism for him for the free kick against Barnsley, but that looked like a pretty special free kick to me, just dipping under the bar, but he was undoubtedly at fault for the first on Saturday. His first big blooper for the Hoops. He knew it too. The mitigating factor was the wind, which was swirling and whirling and causing all kinds of issues, but, still, it was a powder puff punch that he should have caught. He seemed to decide to punch a few times on Saturday, which caused great consternation in a crowd that was very short on patience (more of which later), and I can only think that was because he was struggling to judge the flight of the ball in the wind. And, yet, in the ten minutes after the first goal, Smithies caught two far more challenging crosses than the one he’d elected to fist away. Overall he looked less confident than he has done since he broke into the team, which perhaps was a symptom of the ten players in front of him under-performing, but then, if the team is doing badly, that’s when you really want your keeper to be at his best. Hopefully, just a blip and he’ll go back to doing what he does very well — catching crosses, not flapping at them.
Conor WashingtonYou could watch that game ten times and struggle to find the positives, but perhaps Washington was one. He changed the game when he came on with his energy, a bit of speed and a willingness to shoot, and actually, with a bit more luck, he might have dragged us to within a chance of an undeserved draw. He had three chances of note. The first, following a brilliant bit of movement and a Taarabt-esque pass of quality from Chery, should certainly have brought a goal, especially once he controlled it on the run… but somehow it got caught in his feet and the ball was smuggled clear. The second was from a cross and he hit it well enough, only for two deflections to take it wide. And the third was a fierce shot from the edge of the box that the keeper did well to save. Some really good signs there, although the problem remains that he’s essentially being kept out the team by Chery, our most dangerous player. At the moment, my view is that he’s a good player and with a goal or two under his belt he could become first choice… but yet I can’t see where he fits in — unless, potentially, we switch to more of a 4-3-3 with him and Chery buzzing around Polter. A tough one to crack. Steven CaulkerI was a little disappointed with Caulker on Saturday. I thought we saw a return to the worst of his defending too often, when his headers are a little soft with not enough distance. Two or three times he opted to try and head away a long ball to one of our players, but got it wrong and gifted them possession. Clint Hill, in the same position, would have been heading it into the crowd, Warnock’s words about them not being able to score from the stands echoing in his head. He didn’t have a terrible game, but I felt he should have been more aggressive, more dominating than he was and could have been a little more decisive in his play. Hopefully the return of Hall will allow us to re-build this defence that looked so strong for the first two games.
Jordan CousinsNot going to dig him out as he clearly has a great attitude and great application, but it wasn’t his best day on Saturday. Playing on the right as we have so few options there, he never offered the width we needed, particularly in the first half. He tucked in a lot, perhaps trying to make us compact, but it made us very one dimensional going forward. We never really got the ball wide until Nasser came on and only then did we really start to threaten on the flanks. With Yeni needing a bit of time to get used to the English game, a new team and a new environment, our lack of width was painfully obvious throughout the game. Phillips and Hoilett were not everyone’s cup of tea, but they could make things happen. Not easy to replace. BooingYep, you pay your money, you can do what you want. But I’ve got to say I’m getting a bit pissed off with the attitude of a group of QPR fans now. On Saturday, the first boos came after about half an hour. There were more at half time, more in the second half and more at full time. Don’t bother replying to me saying you didn’t hear them or there weren’t many — they were there and they were loud enough. I don’t get it. I’m not a happy clapper. I certainly wouldn’t class the performance on Saturday as anything other than poor. But I can’t get my head round this. At half time we were still well in the game. It was only 1-0, Preston hadn’t exactly been laying siege to the goal and the goal they did score was down to an individual error. I understood the frustration with players earning huge money at QPR clearly not giving much of a toss. But with this team? Have they really got so little in the bank with us fans that at 1-0 on a blustery day in their fifth game in 14 days that we’re going to boo them off? Really? The lack of patience baffles me. When I started going to football in the 80s, booing was much rarer. It might have come during an absolute pasting. It usually only came after a series of poor results and, perhaps, if this had been the fifth game in a row where we had played badly and were heading for yet another defeat I could understand the frustration, but this was on another level. And in amongst the boos came the wearisome, dull shouts of ‘forward!’ every time someone dared not to lob the ball into a channel and decided to play it sideways, or, under pressure, knock it backwards to keep possession. Always a favourite. And the reaction to Chery trying to swing a corner in from a different angle was ridiculous. I saw the post on here today: ‘short corners don’t work’. Here’s a newsflash: long corners don’t work either. The most comprehensive study on corners in the English game taken a couple of years back looked at 13000 corners. Less than 3 in 100 were scored. It’s not that short corners don’t work — statistically they’re probably just as likely to succeed as long corners — it’s that fans hold bizarrely high expectations of a goal from a corner, when in fact they are pretty rare. In fact, the two best balls put in to the box came from Chery crossing from a different angle after a short one. Someone else on here gave the entire team 0/10. I’m not going to argue that anyone even merited 6/10, but what exactly is going on here? What I saw on Saturday was a bad display. It looked like we thought their central defenders were slow to turn and had a gameplan to get balls beyond them because we fancied Polter would out-pace them. A mixture of poor balls and a difficult wind put paid to that and we failed to adjust, but what I didn’t see was a lack of effort. I didn’t see anyone pulling out of challenges, or not chasing back, or giving up hope. Someone else has described this as one of the worst three QPR performances he’s *ever seen*. I mean, it was not good, but, seriously? This sort of reaction is a consequence of how fans have been treated over the last 20 years or so and how they have correspondingly reacted. Treat them like customers and they’ll behave like customers and get pissed off when they pay big money to watch well-paid players arse about for 90 minutes and not give a stuff about the result. They’ll sit with arms folded waiting to be entertained rather than putting their hands together and encouraging the players to entertain them. That culture is, it seems, pretty difficult to turn round, even when wages and transfer fees have been yanked down to more acceptable levels. Similarly, once you decide the best route to success is to have about a dozen managers over a five or six year period, fans become addicted to the cycle of change and hope. Impatience is ingrained within them and the one thing that will make everything better is yet another new manager (even though, these days, Pep Guardiola is labelled a fraud, van Gaal is laughed at and Pellegrini patronised — just who is a ‘good manager’ anymore?). It’s profoundly depressing this — I found the booing and impatience, in fact, far more depressing than the actual performance of a team that has had, yet again, another big turnover of staff this summer (as it has done every summer for years). Reading the board this summer, I thought things had changed. We would be patient. We understand this will take time. We’re not expecting to win every game. To head off the inevitable complaints: No, I don’t think we played well. No, I don’t think it was acceptable. Yes, JFH could have done things differently. No, I’m not saying you don’t have free speech or that you don’t have a right to boo your little heart out if you want to. I just don’t understand it and think the reaction to a single early season defeat was shocking on Saturday and has been shocking since. Pictures — Action Images Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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