QPR’s traumatic 2022/23 finally comes to an end at Loftus Road on Monday, with Championship safety secured but little to celebrate and much to ponder ahead of the summer.
Lancashire and District Senior League >>> Monday May 8, 2023 >>> Kick Off 15.00 >>> Weather — Damp >>> Loftus Road, London, W12
Looks like we made it, sang Shania Twain. Thank fuck that’s over, the lesser-played B-side.
The genuine peril Queens Park Rangers played themselves into this season can be laid bare simply by adding Reading’s six-point deduction back to the league table. Without it this would be a preview of a final round of fixtures beginning with QPR, Reading and Huddersfield on 50 points, Rotherham and Cardiff on 49, one of them having to drop, and Rangers with by far and away the worst goal difference. Rotherham at already-relegated Wigan, Cardiff at already-promoted Burnley, Huddersfield and Reading capable of shaking hands on a draw as long as one of the other three lost. The unmistakable Lego hair of one Nahki Wells, no goals in 13 appearances, hovering down the M4 towards us. If you’d have backed us in those circumstances you’ve got a lot more faith than I have.
It's been one of the least enjoyable seasons following Rangers that I’ve personally experienced in 30 years of support. A club record-equalling 11 defeats at Loftus Road, just one victory in our last 14 home games, tells a story of turning up to a place that’s meant to be an escape, a sanctuary, an enjoyable pastime, and having your arse torn out and shown to you once a fortnight for six months. There have been away games I’ve attended this season purely to cover them for LFW rather than because I wanted to go — there’s already way too much "fan media” provided by people who never/rarely go to the actual fucking games without me opining on QPR from my sofa, and if so many of you are willing to contribute to a Patreon to keep this site going the least I can do is go to the game I’m reporting on. On the plus side that meant I was at Burnley when I almost certainly otherwise wouldn’t have bothered, but for every one of those there have been half a dozen Tuesday nights in Blackpool and that 6-1 will forever be etched into my soul as a real genuine, all-time low of a moment with this club. This team, and performances like that, have, for the first time since I started doing this site 20 years ago, made this feel like a job, and a chore of a job at that, rather than something done for pleasure. There have been several weeks it’s actually been nice to go back to actual work on Monday, to get away from the horrors of the weekend.
If you’d told me I’d have felt that way a couple of years ago, when the government had locked us in our homes and football was only allowed to be consumed via an internet stream, live from empty stadiums, I’d have not thought it possible. I, we, would have done anything to get back to the main passion in our lives, and with every ridiculous change, shift or relaxation in the rules about Scotch eggs, six to a table, beer gardens, closing times and what not, we decamped to the Crown and Sceptre and timed our iPads collectively for the kick off, just to be back together and feel part of it all once more.
You don’t go to QPR for the winning because, well, QPR never win, but even the social side and collective belonging that we found so hard to live without during the pandemic has been eroded terribly this season. A Championship with only one other London club, and five different iterations of what is essentially Preston away, was always going to be an expensive, drawn-out slog, even if the country’s infrastructure, economy and our team had remained in good health. As it turned out, all three collapsed, and the whole thing has been a complete ball ache.
The season began on a biblically overcrowded, delayed, extortionately expensive Avanti train to Blackburn via Preston, and the news that the one we were booked on to return had already been cancelled. The hassle, expense, strikes and poor results have only stacked up steadily since then. On the occasions you can get a train the collective "fuck you” attitude so many people seem to have emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns with means more often than not it’s full of people playing their music out loud, or filling the carriage with cigarette smoke, or doing enough cocaine to kill a small horse, and if there aren’t enough police around these days to respond to "somebody is burgling my house”, you can sure as hell know that nobody is coming to point out that perhaps not everybody wants to listen to your Spotify playlist, or breathe your vile second hand smoke. Maybe I should start carrying a "Prince Andrew’s a Nonse” placard around with me, police seem to turn up double lively then.
I have driven to more matches this season than the previous ten years combined — mile after horribly sober mile of irritating, death-trap smart motorway travel to Bristol, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, and over and over and over and over again to, from, near or around fucking, bastard Preston. Trying to muster collective enthusiasm and corral any sort of LFW crew to travel to watch this team, in this league, in this economic climate, where one pint of beer is now rocketing towards £7, has been the toughest of hard sells. FA Cup third round… Fleetwood away. Preston again. You couldn’t write it. I think it genuinely would have worked out cheaper to do this season by buying a terraced house in Preston back in July and doing it from there. It’s like some dark French artistic noir where an emotionless and expressionless bald man is pursued through life by a single town, every time he steps off a train, out of a car, off a bus, every time he wakes up and opens his curtains, there is Preston waiting to greet him, and he just stands there and stares blankly back into that abyss. They say we're young and we don't know, we won't find out until we grow…
Of course, if we were winning, so much of this melts away into irrelevance. For a brief moment, we were doing just that. Performances at Millwall, Sheff Utd and Bristol City (first half), in particular, had my cynical, been-hurt-before, guards down and belief started to creep in. Those were proper performances and results from what we dared to hope might be a proper team. But, admittedly from a biased position of liking Mark Warburton and thinking his dismissal was a mistake, I think there were reasons to be wary of Mick Beale before the team started to temporarily take off. He’d said several things on tape in our summer interview, specifically around not signing players in their 30s and relying on loans, that quickly turned out to be untrue and were always going to be untrue even when he said them. Look at the way several of those loans and the signing of Leon Balogun have turned out. Whenever a QPR manager is boasting in interviews about all the agents he’s talking to about players it’s time to sound the alarm. In a meeting with supporter groups at the training ground in August he spoke in a manner, about subjects, and with a level of detail that I felt bordered on being unprofessional that I’m sure would have alarmed the CEO, CFO and board members had they been in the room. A week later, in a BBC interview after a win against Hull, he then repeated sentences from that meeting the other way around, saying the exact polar opposite on mic to what he’d said to us in the room not seven days prior. This was another Harry Redknapp character, unable to lie straight in bed, relying on a faux everyman public persona to move him to the next rung on his own personal ladder. After already speaking with Stoke in August, the only thing more disappointing than his obvious, blatant lie about turning the Wolves job down "without speaking to them” was just how many QPR fans were ready and willing to swallow it. That flag in the away end at Birmingham deserves its place in infamy, and the team’s complete collapse began that night.
It would have likely ended in relegation but for Reading’s points deduction. Now, of course, if grandma had wheels, she’d be a bike. Reading have repeatedly, deliberately ignored the league’s FFP rules and financially mismanaged their club over a long period of time. The only thing undeserved about the six-point penalty that has relegated them is that it wasn’t added to last season’s six to relegate them then, just as Derby should have gone down a year earlier than they did and saved Wycombe - both given a temporary stay by the EFL’s blithering incompetence and snail’s pace approach to applying its own rules. But, if you win two of 28 matches in a 46-game league season, you’re singularly fortunate not to be relegated, and QPR are certainly that today.
The two surprise away victories, at Burnley and Stoke, that have arrived just in the nick of time to save us, came despite some eye-watering stats on passing and possession. QPR had 19% of the ball at Burnley, where Tim Iroegbunam played more than an hour in the middle of midfield without completing a single pass, and then 20% of it at Stoke, where Rob Dickie managed four successful passes and Jimmy Dunne just two all afternoon. It has sparked a fierce debate on our message board, pro- and anti- this approach, and Gareth Ainsworth’s general style of football at Wycombe, that will rage all through the summer and into next season.
This was inevitable. It’s the reason QPR hadn’t hired Gareth Ainsworth on any of the multiple occasions they could have done before, it’s the reason a lot of QPR fans didn’t want him to come here despite the mutual love between us and him, and as I wrote when we did hire him the success and failure of his tenure here will hinge on exactly how much the Wycombe style was a horse for a difficult financial course and how much it is simply how Gareth Ainsworth thinks football should be played/how he thinks he’ll be best able to get results. There is a huge turnover in players coming here this summer, anything not tied down will be sold or released, much like Mark Warburton’s first summer of 16 moving in each direction, and just like that summer it’ll be done on a budget that will be greatly reduced and, like Wycombe's, small relative to most of the rest of the league. In that context I think it’s pretty fanciful to think we’re going to look a lot different to how we did at Stoke last week, and Ainsworth’s heavy hints about spending what money we do have retaining people like Albert Adomah and Chris Martin, who we absolutely should not, tells you the direction of travel from here.
Like wrestling with Avanti West Coast, if QPR are winning, this stuff melts away to some degree. Ian Holloway’s team here first time around played direct football, with a big-man-little-man strike force, lots of wingers and crosses, and frequently two destroyers in midfield — Matthew Rose and Steve Palmer both played out of position in there constantly. There was some criticism of this at the time, but I don’t think many of us look back on 2001-2004 as a time of poor football and clogging midfielders. When results dried up for that team, so too did Olly’s credit with the supporters. Mark Warburton, on the other hand, retained support over and above what his results at times might have warranted and deserved because "at least he’s trying to play football the right way”. What criticism he did get mainly came towards the end when the football became too passive, cautious and boring, with so much sideways and backwards in neutral areas of the pitch. His reign started with another win at Stoke, and a goal from Ebere Eze that is, I think, how many would idealise the sort of football they want to see QPR play. One of those spooky football coincidences that Ainsworth’s reign also has an early win at Stoke to celebrate, but one with a goal from literally the only time the team put five passes together successfully all afternoon.
There will, inevitably, be much on that to come but, for me, to a degree it’s running before we can walk. Talking about what style of football we want QPR to play next season isn’t so much a castle built on sand, as a discussion about what wallpaper you’re going to put in said doomed construction before you’ve even laid the first brick. Style, ethos, a philosophy running through the club’s teams, is indeed vital these days — and regular watchers of the B Team were fairly alarmed at the sudden Ainsworthfication of their recent performance in a home loss to Hull, relative to what they were doing before. But if this does go badly, and we do sack him next season, then his replacement will face all the same problems above, to the side, and below that he and all of his predecessors had. Our favourite phrase — if you keep sacking the manager and things don’t change then the manager is not your problem.
The base here, that you’re trying to build on, doesn’t exist. Every manager we’ve had since our last relegation from the Premier League, bar Neil Critchley who had a dozen games in the middle of a fucktastrophe, has had roughly the same fortunes with this team. There are moments when you think they, and we, have cracked it. These often come around September-October time, just before the fans forum, when the team has bedded in but injuries, suspensions, weather and fixture pile-up is yet to really take effect. Mick Beale had us top in October; Mark Warburton had us in the play-off spots then during his first and third seasons; Steve McClaren beat Reading, Ipswich, Sheff Wed, Villa and Brentford in October/November; Ian Holloway beat Diogo Jota and Ruben Neves’ Wolves and their fellow promoted team Sheff Utd in a week; Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink started with wins against Leeds, Cardiff and Wigan…
None of them were able to maintain that. All of them had at least one six match losing streak — JFH had two, one of which went to eight; Olly had three; Schteve one win in 13; Warburton a six, two sevens and a ten. What has been consistently the case since we returned to the Championship, through several managers and different groups of players, is that QPR get into losing runs from which they cannot escape. This year’s was the worst yet, but I see no indications it will be the last.
Partly this is economics — though, as Luton and Millwall show, this isn’t an insurmountable problem. Nevertheless, QPR are paying less in fees and wages than much of the rest of the division and therefore inevitably the quality and quantity of player they have here isn’t the same standard as it is elsewhere — wins are hard fought, and any slight drop in any number of metrics means they lose. This could be helped by a regular pipeline of academy and B Team graduates coming in to supplement the first team. Ian Holloway snapped his first six-match losing streak with the surprise inclusion of Ryan Manning for an away win at Wolves over Christmas — but that hasn’t happened enough, particularly of late. Eight years into Les Ferdinand’s tenure as director of football, which has been built around the stated aim of being a development club for young players that is able to advance by receiving big transfer fees for selling them on, there have been some damning indictments this season. I didn’t think you could get a more stark example than Bristol City being able to release 34-year-old Chris Martin in January because of progress of academy graduates like Antoine Semenyo, Tommy Conway, Alex Scott and Sam Bell, and then us having to pick him up off contract because one Lyndon Dykes got poorly, but then we released the shortlist for our young player of the season award. Sinclair Armstrong, Elijah Dixon-Bonner, Andre Dozzell, Aaron Drewe, Tim Iroegbunam, Ethan Laird, Taylor Richards and Tyler Roberts; a striker who hasn’t scored a goal yet, a Liverpool cast-off who hasn’t played, Andre the friendly ghost, a 22-year-old who’s started five games in his life and only got in this year because one of the other candidates on the list was being a knob, and four loan players of which three have been varying degrees of problematic. Quite apart from the fact we shouldn’t be handing him anything other than a one-way ticket back to Leeds, Tyler Roberts is 24 years old for goodness sake. It’s named after Daphne Biggs that award, they should have withdrawn it this year out of respect to her memory. That list, for a "development club”, is horrendous.
And this is what I’m talking about (yeh, yeh, get to the point Clive) when I say the base isn’t there. Our squad - and by this I mean the players who are realistically good enough for the Championship so not all this Owens, Shodipo, Masterson coagulant we keep hanging around the place for some reason — is small. It is made up of a lots and lots of similar kinds of players, people and personalities. Everybody who comes here talks about how quiet the group is. They’ve almost all been brought here under this idea that they’re going to develop and move on to "bigger clubs” — that our beloved club is some sort of stepping stone in their career to better things. They’re supplemented by the occasional addition of an experienced name - and the success of the team tends to go up or down based on whether that turns out to be Charlie Austin or Tomer Hemed - and loans. None of these groups are what you need when you get in the shit. The loans start thinking about what their next loan/move/season is going to look like, the oldies start drifting into retirement and struggle with the schedule, the players who thought they were coming here as a career step see that tanking and get disillusioned with it. You saw that this season - they thought they were coming here to compete for promotion with Mick Beale, all bought into that, when it turned out not to be the case... not arsed. There isn’t anything in the B team or academy that you can use to inject a bit of life, momentum or enthusiasm back into it in that situation. There isn’t a spine to the team, either of people with QPR close to their heart, or hardened professionals who’ve been around and experienced whatever the problem is now before — what old pros we do have are in fact too old to stand the Championship schedule. There isn’t a Marc Bircham type, or a Steve Palmer. It’s why McClaren blew smoke up the arse of his loaned "team of men”, why Warbs was so attached to Geoff Cameron, why Ainsworth is currently bowing down at the feet of Chris Martin.
Consequently, we’re often easy to play against, easy to beat, and easy to beat up. That glorious moment when Swansea decided not to put the ball out of play for an injury and so Angel Rangel, against the club he’d played for across an incredible decade, steamed across the pitch and booted somebody up in the air, is a rarity. Even a few games ago under Ainsworth, at home to Preston and Coventry, I was talking again about how complete lack of game-smarts, the total lack of football brain in the team to realise momentum is building against us, the game is running away, a goal is coming shortly, slow it down, disrupt it, go down injured, make a substitution, catch breath, regroup. The second momentum swings and adversity rears its head, we cave in immediately, and don’t recover sometimes for weeks.
What we have at least done in the last two games is been difficult to beat. Now, again, are we going to get a version of that from Ainsworth so extreme that we find it unpalatable? The mass, repeated collapse of our players with pretend head injuries — Jimmy Dunne even Instagrammed a picture of him on the floor at Stoke with a little winky Emoji during the week — is particularly poor. But, make no mistake, we were bleeding out this season, we were going down without a fight, and we have - very belatedly, and with no small degree of good luck — found a way to survive.
It's this base that needs sorting first and foremost. Whether we’re going to be a passing team, a long ball team, an attacking team, a defensive team, or whatever else, we have to be stronger physically and mentally and more difficult to play against. You cannot be easy to beat, you cannot fold at the first sign of adversity, you cannot be bullied, and you cannot repeatedly collapse into losing runs of six games or more. You have to have a spine, a voice, some muscle, some street smarts. You have to have a team that is, first and foremost, here to play for QPR and has a bit of pride and investment in and about that. It’s football, and Championship football at that. It’s this, more than any style of play, which needs sorting with this team first, and given that, and the tight budget it will be done on this summer, Gareth Ainsworth and Richard Dobson might be good choices to do it. As with the style of play though, their success or failure here may hinge on that baby and bathwater balance of just how far in that direction they’re intending to swing the team, and how much of that QPR fans will stand if results don’t follow immediately.
For now though, let us creak the lid of the lockbox containing the missing 1986 League Cup final just enough to squeeze the 2022/23 season in alongside it, and never speak of the bloody thing again.
Links >>> Out of possession evolution — Analysis >>> Bristol’s big summer — Interview >>> A good Hart those days was hard to find — History >>> Chuckles Woolmer — 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
Team News: Other than the ones we’re all well aware of, Gareth Ainsworth’s only clue prior to this one was a suggestion that some of the out-of-contract players he wants to have a look at, and one or two younger faces, may get some gametime here.
Another Bristol City academy graduate, Ayman Benarous, suffered a second ACL rupture of his young career already back in December — he returned to light training this week. First team centre back Rob Atkinson has long since been ruled out for the season with the same injury, and he won’t now play again until November. Fellow defender Tomas Kalas has only managed eight appearances with knee and groin problems, and the March 8 game at Cardiff turned out to be his last of the campaign. Joe Williams has come on as a sub in the last two games after suffering a hamstring injury in that same match.
Elsewhere: Automatic promotion, two of the four play-off spots, and mercifully the relegation battle, are all decided already. It means that our game along with Birmingham v Sheffield Red Stripe, Champions Burnley v Cardiff, the final date of the Fifteenth Annual Neil Warnock Farewell Tour v Reading, Luton v Hull, Borussia Norwich v Blackpool, Udinese Reserves v Stoke and Wigan Warriors v Rotherham all go ahead with nothing at stake.
Five teams remain in contention for the final two spots in the end-of-season knockout. Two of those, Millwall and Blackburn, meet at a sold out Den. Wawll, currently in possession of sixth on 68 points, are guaranteed to be in the semi-finals with a win. Coventry, who are fifth on 69 points, only need a draw away at Middlesbrough to cement their spot after another remarkable managerial job by Mark Robins. Sunderland are one of three teams on 66 points and with a +10 goal difference are first in line to take advantage of any Millwall slip, but they must win at Preston Knob End to do so. If both Millwall and Sunderland slip up, then West Brom can still get in with a win at Swanselona — they can also technically catch Coventry but they’re three points and five goals worse off at the start of play. Given their -3 goal difference, Blackburn not only need to win at Millwall but also better the results of Sunderland and West Brom if they’re to squeeze in.
Referee: Reasons to be grateful there’s nothing riding on this game for us no.238 in the series - here comes Chuckles Woolmer.
QPR: Rangers have seven points from nine — a three-game unbeaten run their longest since consecutive victories against Bristol City, Sheff Utd and Reading at the end of September. They’ve won their last two games, at Burnley and Stoke, having only won two of the previous 28. It’s the first time they’ve won two games in a row since going top of the table with victories over Cardiff and Wigan at Loftus Road in October. The 69 goals conceded so far is the division’s worst defensive record bar Blackpool, who have been relegated conceding 72. If Rangers concede once more in this game it will be the fourth time in six seasons they have shipped 70 goals or more across the 46 games. Lyndon Dykes is QPR’s top scorer this season with eight — unless he scores twice in this game it will be the first time since 2018/19 we finish without a player reaching double figures (Nahki Wells top scored that year with nine) and only the second time it’s happened in the last ten years. QPR have lost 11 times at home for the second time in four years — one more here would be the club record. The R’s have won just one of the last 14 games on their own ground. The result at Stoke was achieved with just 20% of the possession, following a win at Turf Moor the previous week with 19%. These are the lowest figures registered under Gareth Ainsworth so far. The third lowest was the 32% we had for the draw with Norwich and the fourth is the 40% we used to beat Watford 1-0. This is all three of his wins and ten of the 11 points we’ve won under his stewardship. By contrast, the three games we’ve had most of the ball in since he arrived here were Blackpool A (62%, L6-1), Birmingham H (60%, L1-0) and Blackburn H (54% L3-1).
Bristol City: It’s been another thick mid-table season at Ashton Gate. Bristol City are 14-14-17 overall, 9-7-7 at home and 5-7-10 away. Their longest winning sequence in the league is two, which they’ve managed three times. Their longest losing sequence in the league is three, of which QPR’s 2-1 win at Ashton Gate in September was the final part. Season long since over, they arrive into this game with one win from five, two from nine and three from 12. Away from home they’ve won one of their last eight road trips, losing five of the last six including the last two. Only Luton (27) have lost more points from winning positions than Bristol City’s 24. You’re probably expecting Nahki Wells to score in this game — the generous decision to award him what looked like a Leon Balogun own goal in the first meeting means he’s now bagged six times in 11 matches against Rangers for Bristol City and Huddersfield and twice in the last three — and that feeling will only grow when I tell you he’s without a goal in 13 appearances going back to February 25. He is the top scorer here this season with 11. Andy Weimann bagged four in four games for the Robins back in August but has only managed three in 42 games since — he’s another who loves playing QPR though, five goals in 13 appearances for three different clubs (Villa, Derby, Bristol City). Chris Martin scored one goal in three starts and 14 sub appearances prior to his departure in January - QPR have scored 12 goals in 15 games since he debuted for us on February 11, and he has four of those himself from 11 starts and four sub appearances.
Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. This year’s title is a straight shoot-out between Aston Hoop and WestonSuperR who’s in the running despite missing four games. Victory comes with the double-edged sword of writing this bit of the preview each game next year so for the final time here’s last year’s champion Cheesy, and a massive thanks to him for fulfilling that bit of the obligation so diligently over the past nine tough months…
"I'm glad it’s all over. In one way I am looking forward to what's going to happen during the transfer window but on the other hand I'm not. I am worried with the direction we are going. We seem to be left behind and next season’s Championship I feel will be one of the strongest for many a year. I am the first to admit I am very uneducated in the way Wycombe played under Gareth. Give him credit, he's done the job he was asked to do. I for one thought we were doomed. Hopefully we will have more than 20% possession on Monday with flying wingers time after time putting in crosses for Lyndon.”
Cheesy’s Prediction: QPR 1-1 Nahki Wells. Scorer — Lyndon Dykes
LFW’s Prediction: QPR 1-1 Bristol City. Scorer — Chris Martin
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