QPR made it eight defeats from nine, and now just two wins from 24 games, sinking to within three points of the relegation places, with a 1-0 defeat at bottom-of-the-table Wigan on Saturday despite the return of many of their ‘big hitters’.
Well, now you have got a problem.
It’s been clear for some time the Queens Park Rangers outfit in the guise it took to the field last week against Birmingham is not competitive at this level of football. A 1-0 defeat to the Blues, sealed the moment the ball hit the net for the first and only goal after two minutes, to go with the 6-1 humping at Blackpool that was done as soon as Rangers conceded a penalty after 45 seconds. Two wins in 23 games, seven defeats from eight, out-of-their-depth youth team full backs swapping and changing sides to try and keep them out of the firing line, your best midfielder playing left centre back, a makeshift wing back who should now be retiring but you signed and then extended because he did nice kick-ups in his conservatory wearing your colours for the Gram, a player who was actually retired but you hauled him in back from Mykonos and made him the captain… It’s the weakest QPR team there has been in the best part of 25 years. No debate.
Not that you would really know it to listen to anybody within the club talk. It feels very much to me like there’s a prevailing attitude this is merely a blip, a trying moment, a bad run of form, the sort of thing every club goes through from time to time. FiveThirtyEight.com says there’s only a 15% chance we’ll go down, and only one team has ever gone from top of the league in the autumn to relegated by the end, so it’s probably going to be fine. Like Homer’s flying pig - it’s just a little airborne, it’s still good, it’s still good. There’s little indication in any interview or interaction with anybody at the club in any capacity presently that they’re even aware just how deep in the shit they are. Probably worth a mention at this point that in the infamous 1995/96 Millwall example we’re now in grave danger of replicating the only time they spent in the bottom three all season was the final ten minutes of the final game. That’s all it took. That’s all it will take.
We know Gareth Ainsworth’s been dealt a bad hand, and we know his shtick is to be relentlessly and unfailingly positive about everything in public, but there’s a fine line between positivity and delusion and he’s already started to stray over that. Are we protecting the players, or gaslighting the supporters? This week he used his pre-match chats to talk about "when” we get out of this, finishing mid-table, getting his teeth stuck into next season, building something special here… At one point he felt emboldened enough to say that if you took the reprehensible defending of set plays out of the equation, even the 6-1 defeat at Blackpool wasn’t quite as bad as it looked on the night — I mean, yeh, once you take all the old codgers he killed in their own armchairs out of it, Harold Shipman really wasn’t that bad of a GP. It’s like he, and we, don’t really believe it’s happening.
You best start believing in ghost stories lads, you’re in one. The belief/complacency seems to stem largely from the amount of players that have been missing through injury, who are now mostly due back in action. "The cavalry are coming” Ainsworth said three or four weeks back, and I guess if you were him then you would say and think that wouldn’t you? Just lately Rangers have been missing Ethan Laird, Leon Balogun, Jake Clarke-Salter, Kenneth Paal, Chris Willock, Luke Amos, Taylor Richards, Ilias Chair, Lyndon Dykes and Tyler Roberts — it’s an entire outfield line-up, one substantially better on paper than the patched up horror show that lost to Birmingham, including our entire first choice back four from the hot streak under Mick Beale, and representing a huge chunk of our salary bill. Any team in the league would struggle if you took ten first teamers away from its manager, but particularly one that is operating on a constrained budget which, as we’ve said for some time, has allowed us to have a competitive starting 11 and absolutely nothing beyond that by way of depth. Get the majority of those players back in and it potentially stands to reason that the team will become capable of picking up the points required for safety.
As I said in the preview though, we’re not just reliant on these players coming back, we’re reliant on them being interested in what they’re doing and being able to make an impact. That’s no guarantee at all. This appalling run of results did not start when these players got injured any more than it started because Mick Beale left, because Neil Critchley was a bad appointment, because Gareth has selected power drive over feather touch, or any of the other pet theories. This team has been losing for more than a year now. It was losing under Mark Warburton, it started its current losing run under Mick Beale, it was losing under Critchley and it’s losing under Ainsworth — if you keep sacking managers and nothing changes, the manager isn’t your problem. It was losing when Beale was the manager; when Laird, Balogun, Clarke-Salter and Paal were the back four; when Willock and Chair were playing (Birmingham A, West Brom H, Huddersfield H). QPR, Gareth Ainsworth, and us lot in the stand, desperately need this lot to come back fit, firing, motivated and committed to digging us out of an ever-deepening hole, but to assume that’s going to happen and rely on it is very risky indeed. It’s a substantial re-writing of this team’s recent history and behaviour. This team has lost 32 and won just 15 of its last 60 games, over more than a year, under four different managers. The 1978 Dutch World Cup squad is not waiting in the wings here gagging to put Coventry City to the sword.
Let us look first, by way of a case study, at Leon Balogun. A ridiculous signing to begin with - committing money we don’t really have to a 34-year-old player in a position we were relatively well stocked in because the manager of that moment knew him and wanted him - he’s been out for five months timed almost to the second of Mick Beale’s departure. He could be, though, on the face of it, a very useful and timely short term fix at this point. Jimmy Dunne’s form has cratered, Rob Dickie looks like the sort of haunted fairground they set Scooby Doo mysteries in, there are posters up all over the parish offering a reward for a sighting of Jake Clarke-Salter, and the decision to loan Conor Masterson to Gillingham’s ascent up the League Two table in January looks like another absolute masterstroke from the Big Ladybird Book of How To Fuck Up Your Football Club. The team desperately needs a commanding, confident, experienced centre back, who’s going to stand there and stem the tide of a league-leading 18 goals conceded from set pieces, be a voice and leader on the field, and try and add a bit of spine, resistance and resilience to this group of broken boys. Rangers have only kept eight clean sheets this season, and five of them were in Balogun’s 13 appearances earlier in the campaign. So, the news somebody at the club, possibly as an April fools gag, had convinced Leon that, actually, this Saturday’s trip to Wigan was some sort of Mick Beale benefit game ("and Mick is really going to be in Wigan? And he says he wants to see me”) and got him not only onto the bus but out onto the pitch as well was ostensibly very welcome. Thank God for that, he’ll surely be able to shore us u-
-five minutes in and one huge great big long punt down the right side of the pitch took Jimmy Dunne completely out of the game and moved the home side from one penalty box to the other in one fell wallop. Balogun came across, a heavy odds-on favourite to reach the ball first, and had two enormous great stands in front of him crying out to be hit with a routine clearance. Having conceded after one minute at Blackpool, and two minutes against Birmingham, keeping it tight early here, and not taking any silly risks against one of the few teams still left below us in the league would, one would have thought, been something of a priority. Balgoun started by running past the ball entirely, taking a situation well within his control to one fraught with danger with Daniel Sinani now goalside and inside rather than out of the picture completely. Like when you realise you’re really drunk, and yet there’s still more drunk to come, turning back and recovering from there tends to only be achievable by doing a large sick. That took the form of a ludicrous tackle, fully airborne, from behind, from the wrong side, right at the moment Sinani entered the penalty box. School for the gifted. When you talk about the best footballers visualising a "picture in their mind” of how it’s meant to look, this was a lesser spotted Roger Hargreaves sketch of Mr Tickle caught having a wank in a public toilet. Obviously totally fucking ridiculous, and a penalty so blatant even Gavin Ward could spot it.
You don’t need to be that good to beat Seny Dieng from the penalty spot but Max Power put it into the top corner just to be safe. One nil. I guess having made it to five minutes without shitting the bed this week you could at least say we’re progressing. Maybe we’ll get the time into double figures next week.
After that, Balogun was one of our better players — though we’re definitely counting strands of hair in the land of the bald there. His flicked header from a wide free kick in the second half, saved in needlessly extravagant manner by Ben Amos in the home goal, about as close as Rangers came to an equaliser. But, frankly, I don’t care how calm, composed and dominant you managed to be in the eighty eight minutes you weren’t royally shafting your own team up the shitter, against a Wigan team bottom of the league, with the Championship’s worst defence, two wins in 27 games, three managers of their own, deducted points, unpaid wages, a player strike in the lead up to the game… I care that one of these so called "cavalry” that we’re relying on to get us out of this mess came back and did something so egregiously stupid as that five minutes into a massive game. Came back, did something so egregiously stupid as that five minutes into a massive game, and then at full time decided to front up the away end, starting arguments at the front of the stand with QPR supporters who have finally (finally) had enough of watching this nonsense, physically resisting Albert Adomah’s shrewd attempts to remove him from the situation, cupping his ear at people who were already angry and unlikely to be placated by either that or the ‘calm down’ gestures.
Read the room chap: rightly or wrongly you’re seen as Beale’s chief boy, we haven’t seen you for five fucking months, we’ve just lost a crucial relegation six pointer one nil from an outrageously shit penalty that you gave away, and now you’re coming over to give it the biggun to the 730 poor suckers who’ve been traipsing around the country all winter watching two wins in now 24 games while you’ve been sat on your arse?
There’s that lack of self-awareness I’m talking about again. Right there in microcosm. They just don’t get it. They don’t get that they’re in as much bother as they are, that it’s their fault, that this isn’t guaranteed to end well, that we’re angry, or why we’re angry. At full time at Rotherham Taylor Richards got involved with some in the away end because he initially couldn’t believe they were angry with him. "Are you yelling that at me?!”. Yes. Yes they are Taylor. You’ve been here all season, you’ve started one game, you played like a tart in that, absent yet again here, yes they are yelling that at you.
Unfortunately, you could run through the team like this. Ainsworth had, clearly, sought to use the international break to get as many of the absentees back all at once as he could, presumably to try and surprise and then overwhelm a Wigan side with just one win from 19 prior to kick off. Balogun, Ethan Laird and Chris Willock had been trailed as potential returners in the pre-match, but they were also joined by Kenneth Paal from the start, Lyndon Dykes despite his Scotland exertions, and Ilias Chair from the bench at half time. This was, however, a cavalry charge played on a kazoo.
Laird looked entirely disinterested throughout. He turned a routine first half bouncing ball weighted 70:30 in his favour into a Wigan free kick on the corner of the box and a yellow card. After walking under a crossfield ball ten minutes from time, and then standing off his man just long enough for a cross to come over and narrowly elude Thelo Aasgaard in the six-yard box, he did that thing again where he sat down, signalled to the bench, pissed away another two minutes of time that we absolutely didn’t have at this stage, and then trudged off. Honestly, he’s spends more time on his arse than Brian Potter this lad. More "tightness” we presume. As quick as the cavalry return they go away again — Sinclair Armstrong and Tim Iroegbunam both sidelined by knocks on international duty. Boos ringing out from the away end as Laird went another sign that this support base, so unbelievably passive and tolerant of what they’ve been served up this season, is now very belatedly on the turn.
Paal came as close as anybody to equalising. A late corner, with Seny Dieng up to attack it, was cleared out to the edge of the box where he executed a technically excellent dipping volley which Amos scrambled across and just about kept out of the bottom corner. Still, it’s hard not to think back to that Kenneth Paal performance at The Den in September and wonder where that little guy went.
Rob Dickie’s similar personal decline continued apace here, frequently shifting the ball out of his feet on the right side of the three centre backs and then very determinedly walloping it high into the side stand for a Wigan throw before standing there with that sort of stupefied look on his face, as if this were the only possible course of action available to him. Like a brick with two eyes drawn on it in marker pen. In the second half, after one such incident, he stood there admiring the work so long Wigan were able to take the throw, get in behind him, and draw a deliberate foul and obvious yellow card. Within two minutes he’d reached out and grabbed Aasgaard’s shirt as he ran past him in back play and while the free kick appeared incredibly soft, and not one Ward was initially going to even award, having belatedly blown the whistle and given it we’re perhaps lucky he didn’t issue an immediate second yellow card and subsequent red. Particularly the mood the referee was in on Saturday which at times was only a blue t-shirt away from just dropping the pretence and playing as Wigan’s twelfth man.
Several chances fell the way of Chris Willock. One of countless wasted free kicks straight through to Amos on 13 minutes almost brought us a goal anyway when the keeper suffered some sort of massive brain haemorrhage and kicked the ball straight to Lyndon Dykes in the area. Amidst the resulting panic, from both teams, Laird eventually cut the ball back to Willock but he shot straight at the relieved keeper. His trick, and turn, and cross from the byline on the quarter hour was actually good, but Chris Martin headed over the bar. We got a glimpse of where a modicum of purpose, drive and effort might be able to take us against such limited opposition midway through the second half when first Stef Johansen closed down and won a 50/50 tackle over by the dug outs, and then sub Jamal Lowe got into top gear to keep the ball from going out for a throw in allowing him a clear run and crossing opportunity — that fell to Willock once more, and again the finish was weak, snatched at, and wide of the post. This guy’s going to save you is he? Playing like this? Playing like he was before his injury?
I guess we don’t have a choice but to find out. When you’ve placed so much stock and hope in the returning players rescuing you, and then they play like this, where does it leave you to go, other than trips to Shrewsbury Town? Like I say, now you’ve got a big problem.
Some of the stuff we did was so stupid it had to be seen to be believed. The first corner of the day - the first chance to put Wigan under some pressure, the first chance to push for an equaliser, the first chance to send the big lads up from the back against a side we’d scored two corners against in the first meeting — was played short to Willock who then drew his foot back and drilled it straight into the stand behind the goal. Thanks for saving us the time Chris. From a later free kick, presentably placed midway inside the Wigan half and slightly right of centre, Johansen succeeded in belting it straight into the chest of the token one-man "wall” Wigan had put up in front of him. He looks absolutely done. A late first half corner was preceded with not one, but two of Gavin Ward’s exaggerated performance theatre routines about holding in the six yard box and so when the delivery eventually came in what did we do? … Wigan free kick, almost the second the ball was back in play. You could make a fortune on in-play betting with these chumps. Lyndon Dykes, it seemed, was played wide rather than through the middle, even when Albert Adomah — living up to his Uncle Albert monicker a little too much in his speed and movement these days for my liking — came on as a late sub. The long balls we played went exclusively to Chris Martin, really rather embarrassingly off the pace of even a game this poor, and his ongoing attempts to make something of these by planting his substantial frame and attempting to manoeuvre opponents out of the way were dealt with comfortably by Jack Whatmough and co. Never once did we even vary this tactic as much as going long to Dykes instead, just to see. It was a gruelling watch. A Championship match in name only. It was my privilege to watch Plymouth v Derby in the league below recently, and it was lightyears ahead of this.
There was, at least, occasional, goal threat from QPR, though it still felt largely like the game was done the moment the first goal went in, and you have to bear in mind at all times the quality, league position and circumstances surrounding the opposition. Two of the better efforts on goal actually came from defenders almost scoring own goals — Dieng equal to one in the first half, Amos to one late in the second. This was a game of biblically low quality. It was difficult to even get too upset with Gavin Ward’s typically abject failure to police egregious second half time wasting — once more, all hand action, no actual action, which one suspects mirrors his home life — because, really, what would QPR do with the time anyway? Six minutes added to the end, eight played, did you really think we’d score? The sad thing is, it was probably a bit better — certainly than the Blackpool and Birmingham games.
No doubt we’ll be treated to interviews leading up to a daunting Easter double header with Preston and West Brom attesting to all these supposed steps in the right direction. In reality, free falling QPR pulled the rip cord on the parachute they thought they had on their back, and it turned out to be a length of lead flashing. Now what?
Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread
Wigan: Amos 6; Hughes 7, Whatmough 7, Rekik 6; Darikwa 6, Power 6, Tiehi 7 (Nyambe 90, -), McClean 6; Sinani 6 (Aarsgaard 33, 6), Fletcher 5, Lang 6 (Naylor 66, 6)
Goals: Power 5 (penalty, won Sinani)
Bookings: Power 82 (foul), Rekik 90+3 (kicking ball away)
QPR: Dieng 5; Dickie 3, Balogun 4, Dunne 4 (Chair 45, 5); Laird 3 (Drewe 80, -), Johansen 4 (Adomah 75, 4), Field 5, Paal 4; Dykes 5 (Lowe 66, 4), Martin 3, Willock 4 (Dozzell 75, 4)
Subs not used: Archer, Amos
Bookings: Laird 19 (foul) Dickie 50 (foul)
QPR Star Man — Clive Wilson
Referee — Gavin Ward (Surrey) 4 Got the penalty right, and that was about it. Brought the biggest cheer of the day from the away end by fucking off near the end with an injury apparently so horrendous he couldn’t possibly do another couple of minutes and injury time — maybe we should sign him up, he’d fit in well. Only in a country that his invested so little in the recruitment, training and retention of referees, all while the sport is awash with cash like nowhere else on the planet, would somebody of this standard be refereeing games this high up its league system.
Attendance — 12,608 (732 QPR) The Balogun incident at the end has, online and in the stand at the time, turned QPR fans who wonder what abusing the players will do to help against those who’ve spent their money and time following this team around and now feel entitled to tell them a little bit about what they think and how they’re feeling. I see both sides: here in the sober light of Sunday afternoon I can calmly rationalise that we’re not going to boo these wasters into a performance at this point; but in the alcohol-fuelled anger of ten to five on Saturday it’s very difficult to stand there after two wins in 24 games and say "never mind lads maybe next time”, particularly this far from home at this expense against the worst team in the league. I think I tilt slightly more towards the angry mob when it’s a Mick Beale signing, who hasn’t played for five months while we’ve been traipsing around the country, who’s given away the penalty that ultimately cost us the game, giving it the biggun to the most die-hard 730 fans we’ve got left. You should expect to be called a wanker in those circumstances, I think, and you should probably just stand there and take it as a very minor drawback of a ridiculously privileged and luxurious lifestyle. Here’s the incident filmed from the Wigan end, and his explanation of it for what it’s worth…
Either way, I’m staggered it has taken this long to turn vaguely nasty. Even here, during this most turgid of 1-0 defeats to the bottom placed side in the league, the crowd remained steadfastly behind the team and noisy throughout, doing their best to rouse the lads and drive them on to something (anything) better than what they were doing. Only when Ethan Laird went through his latest, frankly pathetic, sit down and tap out routine did things start to turn slightly, and then again at full time. The number of supporters still going to QPR matches, many of them up here in the north west on the country’s least reliable and most expensive train line, the tolerance and understanding the majority of them have shown this team through this extraordinary run, right up to applauding them off after a 6-1 loss at Blackpool, has been remarkable really, entirely out of the ordinary in the modern game and a lot more than the players and everybody involved at the club at the moment deserves. Without turning violent, causing aggro, stepping over the line, breaking the law, throwing things, attacking anybody, fighting, causing injury or anything in that vague vicinity, I think at this point if you want to call a couple of these players a wanker at full time, you’ve probably earned that right now, and whether it’ll help or not is largely irrelevant.
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