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Beale elects to take his ‘loyalty and integrity’ elsewhere after all — Col on 19:29 - Dec 2 by GloryHunter
Can someone copy-and-paste the text?
There you go GloryHunter.
Matt Dickinson Senior Sports Writer Thursday December 01 2022, 6.00pm, The Times
Michael Beale’s greatest betrayal? Making fools of fans for believing integrity and loyalty meant something.
I suspended my worldly cynicism when the QPR coach rejected Wolves’ money. But his move to Glasgow shows you can only fake sincerity for so long in football
This column comes to you from the heart rather than the head. It may be irrational. It will stray, unapologetically, into bitterness and resentment. In other words it is about football and fandom.
Or, to put it another way, Michael Beale is a duplicitous git guilty of a terrible betrayal. At home, we call him much worse.
The byline at the top says “senior sports writer” but it should probably read: by the man who sits in row Q, block R of the Stanley Bowles Stand at Loftus Road simmering with rage at finding his club without a head coach.
Beale was unveiled as the Rangers manager shortly after insisting that he would not leave QPR in the lurch.
With a World Cup going on, you may not be closely following how Beale, the aforementioned git, has left Queens Park Rangers to head elsewhere. I believe they are called Glasgow Rangers. Scottish, apparently. I won’t be rooting for them any time soon.
Should I care? Should you? Managers come and go. They look after themselves, knowing that the game eventually chews up all but the very best.
I should know better than most how managers say one thing and do another. After three decades of covering football I have been told enough times that player X is fit when he is in a treatment room down the corridor with a broken leg, and that manager Y has no intention of moving while his agent is completing the deal and hammering out the bonus structure.
I take that as a reporter, and it is part of the job to see through the bullshit. But, of course, as a fan – especially a paying fan – it is different. It is personal. It is, as Nick Hornby wrote peerlessly in Fever Pitch, the stuff that gets into our blood and our bones.
“Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic,” as he wrote of one particularly bad day as a supporter. A righteous anger seethes through fans of QPR because we feel used, fooled, betrayed – and, perhaps worst of all, because of the nagging hope-turned-dread that Beale might actually be very good. Too good for us, the bastard, unless his treachery is evidence that overweening ambition is a flaw that, Macbeth-like, could undermine his abilities.
Beale had us believing. He had us refreshing the Sky Bet Championship table on our phones in astonishment that we were top. Promotion? We were giddy at the thought.
And then Wolverhampton Wanderers came calling for him in October. Chatting with Giles Coren – The Times has its own QPR section – when news of an official approach from Wolves broke as we battered Cardiff City and Lyndon Dykes played like Hot Shot Hamish, I mustered all my worldly cynicism to explain sadly that a club like Wolves would not initiate formalities unless the deal was already done. Because that would make them look stupid.
But then something truly astonishing happened. Beale turned down their money. He talked about weird stuff like integrity and loyalty. “If those are the things you live by . . . you have to be strong by them,” he said.
He explained that he had persuaded so many players to join his project at Loftus Road that he could not just abandon them.
“I have been all-in here and I have asked other people to be all-in so I can’t be the first person to run away from the ship,” he said. And, stupid fools, we dared to imagine that he might have meant it. Or meant it for more than 36 days, anyway.
We could ignore inconvenient contradictions – Beale claiming that he did not have direct talks with Wolves even though a Midlands correspondent with impeccable contacts reported that Beale was seen two times and made an outstanding presentation, whoops – because he had told us he was staying. He was building a career, a team, a reputation. He was patient. A man of loyalty and integrity. His words.
“The only reasons for leaving QPR right now would be selfish ones around ego, status or finance. And that’s not really me,” Beale told The Daily Telegraph. Oh, Michael. The worst of it all is you had us fooled.
A pot-bellied man in an ill-fitting tracksuit, Beale initially won hearts and minds at Loftus Road. Yes, I know, foolish him for saying it, and even more foolish us for thinking that he might have meant it. “Loyalty will always be rewarded,” as the banner, bearing his face, said at the next match away to Birmingham City. Someone should put it in a museum: it says more about the messy realities of life than Tracey Emin's dishevelled bed. Especially given that the following day Beale turned up at Rangers and sat in the directors’ box which, in hindsight, seems a strange coincidence.
Of course we should have known that football always kicks you in the teeth but supporting a club is also an act of faith, hope and optimism. QPR was not the club I first followed but – to cut a long story short – my wife worked there, my children took it up and, almost ten years of season tickets later, it is mine even on those days when I really wish it wasn’t.
I have grown to love it and we quickly loved Beale: a pot-bellied man in an ill-fitting tracksuit who looked as though he walked off your local rec but could be a rising star.
Giles’s son was so elated when Beale turned down Wolves that he cried. I thought that it at least showed someone who had the sense to see that staying for a season, minimum, was good for Brand Beale.
So forgive us, after all this, for not being seduced by the narrative that Rangers was the one club he could never turn down, and that he could not know the job would come up so quickly. There are some rejections that are not going to be understood, even if your wife has run off with George Clooney.
And Rangers are not Brad Pitt, even if Beale has a house by Loch Lomond and his family loved it there during his time working as assistant to Steven Gerrard, and he loves nothing better than a pint in a Glaswegian pub.
Hurt is not going to be assuaged by knowing that he was always desperately ambitious and amply convinced of his own abilities, even from his days at Chelsea and Liverpool academy, and when he moved boldly to work at São Paulo in Brazil in 2017, before joining Gerrard at Rangers and Aston Villa.
That Villa sank, and Gerrard was sacked, after Beale moved to QPR in the summer has done wonders for a reputation that he must believe can withstand any amount of opprobrium.
He has been left in no doubt how this has gone down with QPR fans, which may explain why he has deleted his Twitter account. It is a bruising world out there.
The excellent QPR blogger, @LoftForWords, wrote an eviscerating piece quoting Groucho Marx: “The two most important words in the world are honesty and sincerity. If you can fake these, you’ve got it made.”
Except I am not sure you can fake sincerity for long in elite football or leadership of any high-level sport. Flaws tend to be exposed over time by the relentless scrutiny, the pressures and strains.
Is this one single act of capriciousness or revealing of some characteristic in Beale? Was he just too eager to please, to say the right thing? Or guilty of something worse?
Or, most depressingly, is it not even seen as a flaw in football? Say one thing, do another. Loyalty, integrity, blah blah blah.
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Beale elects to take his ‘loyalty and integrity’ elsewhere after all — Col on 13:36 - Dec 3 with 2831 views
Must have been posted already but I haven’t got the motivation to trawl through the plethora of threads about p1ss-boy. Put a big fat smile on my face. Ange Postecoglou. I like the cut of his jib
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Beale elects to take his ‘loyalty and integrity’ elsewhere after all — Col on 23:30 - Dec 10 with 1477 views
Beale elects to take his ‘loyalty and integrity’ elsewhere after all — Col on 13:36 - Dec 3 by DannyPaddox
Must have been posted already but I haven’t got the motivation to trawl through the plethora of threads about p1ss-boy. Put a big fat smile on my face. Ange Postecoglou. I like the cut of his jib
Beale elects to take his ‘loyalty and integrity’ elsewhere after all — Col on 23:41 - Dec 10 by ed_83
Oh god, Giles Coren supports QPR? Between him, Toby Young and Michael Gove I feel like we could identify where all the bad karma’s coming from.
we're collecting c*nts like they're pokemon
also I don't watch i'm a celeb but I don't think Seann Walsh ingratiated himself with a lot of people particularly! not that he is in the same strata as the aforementioned
“The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.â€
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