The confrontation between supporters and players at Euston station after last weekend’s defeat at Bolton has divided opinion. LFW wades in…
It seems that football supporters have had enough. Tired of paying upwards of £40 for a ticket to a poor match played by mediocre footballers on astronomical money they have decided to strike back in a variety of forms.
Joey Barton’s persistent attempts to reinvent himself as some sort of people’s poet via Twitter are now met with a constant stream of weary pleas for him to stop giving the ball away in his own half instead. Then at Euston Station last week a pocket of QPR fans had their say in a more direct and personal way on the platform as the team disembarked from their first class accommodation into some forthright criticism from those who’d paid good money to watch them again fail to fulfil their potential in a crucial match. Meanwhile in Wolverhampton another very rich, very average footballer Jamie O’Hara was confronted by his club’s supporters in the Molineux car park. Revolution is afoot.
On the face of it this is no bad thing, it’s about time some of these footballers got a little taste of the real world. About time, too, they started to realise the commitment some people make to their football clubs, a commitment far in excess of anything some here-today-gone-tomorrow footballer can offer. In this game a four year contract is seen as a long term commitment, and the player rarely stays for the duration of it anyway. In the stands if you decide after 25 years of support that you’ve had enough you’re branded a fair weather fan or ‘Aunt Nellie’ as the modern day parlance is in W12. If you decide after 25 years that you quite fancy following Arsenal instead expect to be ostracised from friendship groups.
But reaction to last weekend’s incidents has been mixed. Jamie O’Hara has led the condemnation of his own treatment, pointing out that perhaps outside the ground, in the dark, when he’s trying to put his one-year-old son into the back seat of his car is not the time even for a conversation about the 2-0 home defeat to Blackburn, never mind a volley of abuse about it. He’s right of course.
The ‘Euston incident’ has divided QPR fans right down the middle if our message board thread on it is anything to go by. The LFW crew were too busy “drinking to forget” in Preston at the time so I cannot comment on what happened first hand, instead the This Is My England blog seemed to offer the most thorough, sensible and balanced account of it all. There are those who say our players deserve a piece of a few of our minds given their recent performance levels and I agree with them. There are those that question whether a team clearly bereft of confidence and belief is going to be improved greatly by fans accosting them at a railway station and telling them what they surely know themselves already and I agree with them too. Like so much of our season so far it’s a complex, messy and ultimately sad situation.
I’ve been critical of our supporters a few times on LoftforWords this season. The insistence of a section of the QPR support that a boo boy must be found in every Rangers team has been very prevalent this term and it mystifies me. Even last season in the midst of a wonderful campaign people around me in F Block seemed to relish their weekly opportunity to persecute Rob Hulse. This season before Christmas it was Jay Bothroyd and since then it’s been Joey Barton. Fine, you’ve paid your money, you can do as you like within the rules of the ground, but what is this achieving? I still shake my head when I think back to the New Year game at Arsenal when, during the pre-match handshakes, the numbskull in front of me launched a foul mouthed tirade about how “fucking useless” Bothroyd was. Useless at what? Shaking hands? At least let him make a mistake first. Or wait for the game to start perhaps.
And QPR fan are by no means alone in the abysmal behaviour stakes. Sadly what once was a tiny and easily ignored minority now has a social media platform to spread their bile. Rarely a week goes by now without some poor black or mixed race footballer somewhere being called some vile insults or other – Shola Ameobi and others have been targeted. Last Monday night Jack Wilshere, excellent footballer and seemingly likeable lad, Tweeted about the Tim Krul and Robin Van Persie argument in the Newcastle v Arsenal match and within 30 seconds somebody had replied to him saying that his recently born son Archie wasn’t his and his girlfriend had been playing away. Later in the week somebody posting as Joshua Paladini (since deleted account) mocked Robbie Savage over the recent death of his father. This was swiftly followed by Derby County fans believing a local rivalry with Nottingham Forest was excuse enough to mock the recent death of Nigel Doughty, Forest chairman and father of our own Michael Doughty currently on loan at Aldershot.
Then this weekend we have the delightful case of Swansea University student Liam Stacey who, while Fabrice Muamba was still laid on the field at Spurs being treated for a massive heart attack, Tweeted about how funny it was and then responded to abuse by black people by telling them to “go and pick cotton”, which is probably the nly printable thing he said during a two hour diatribe that landed him in court this morning.
My good God there’s some scum about. It’s hard not to sympathise with the footballers.
Having said all of that there are some very honest, decent, salt of the earth people who follow QPR and other clubs up and down the country every week and thankfully they’re still in the majority. But whether you’re in the camp that wants to give the players some stick at the train station, the camp that wants to abuse them on Twitter, or the camps that thinks we’d be best served by offering our support regardless of the diminishing returns I don’t think anybody would contest that the current level of performance and results from QPR are unacceptable.
I wonder what you would have thought if I said to you at this point last year: “Relax. We’re going to be promoted as champions. This time next year the starting 11 will be Paddy Kenny, Luke Young, Nedum Onuoha, Anton Ferdinand, Armand Traore, Adel Taarabt, Joey Barton, Alejandro Faurlin, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Bobby Zamora and Djibril Cisse.” Probably immediate relegation back to the Championship wouldn’t have been foremost in your mind. Possibly you may even have been so bold to dream of a Europa League campaign in 2012/13.
A dreadful summer of preparation, an astonishing turnover in players, a league leading 35 different players used, a degree of bad luck and poor refereeing, a season ending injury for our best player at the worst possible time and other factors besides have all contributed to poor on field performance this season. Nevertheless it’s impossible for either the window lickers or the reasonable supporters to look at that QPR team and not think it should be seven or eight places higher in the league table. The players are not performing as well as they can, or as well as they have for other clubs.
Following QPR is not cheap. We estimate that the average LFW Awayday sets us back between £120 and £150 each once train and match tickets are taken into account. That means four of us going to Bolton last week probably did in the region of £600 in 12 hours. At the centre of that day is 90 minutes of football which, at the moment, is the worst bit of the whole experience.
Now nobody is forcing us to either go to the matches or spend that much when we do go. I haven’t asked but I don’t believe anybody in our group believes it gives us the right to do and say whatever the hell we like on our way to and from the matches of in the stadium itself. If we don’t like what we’re getting we could always, radically, not go to the game.
But, at the same time, I do think we’re entitled to certain things from our players. Commitment to the cause for example, which I do believe is lacking despite the modern trend of saying that footballers do all care passionately about their work regardless of what supporters think. For Joey Barton to be repeatedly Tweeting about his “tidy Saturday night” hours after the home defeat to Fulham backs my viewpoint. He has thankfully since engaged with QPR fans in a more positive way and assured them that the players really are doing everything they can. I don’t believe him, but I preferred hearing that to his horse racing tips.
Do I expect them to live like monks? No. Do I expect them to train nine to five every day? No. Do I expect them to hurt as much as I do when we lose at home to Fulham? No. Do I expect them to spend all their spare time sitting in a dark room considering how they can improve themselves as players and men? No. But I expect more than I’m getting from them now which currently seems to be mediocre performances followed by a week of sycophantic articles about righting the wrongs mixed with Tweets about afternoons of golf and horse racing. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask for.
There’s been a lot of worthiness knocking around since the Bolton game. People telling other supporters that our job is to support the team not abuse it, and that remaining positive and keeping the faith is now more important than ever. Probably true, but we’ve been supporting this lot all season and it’s made no difference. In fact probably our best travelling support of the season, in number and volume, was at Fulham where we lost 6-0. It’s quite difficult to clap and shout “never mind Shaun maybe next time” as he hacks another presentable chance into the stand and I certainly don’t agree that we should all just happily sit and clap along to the increasing amount of rubbish we’re being served for fear of upsetting the poor molly coddled footballers and making them even worse than they already are. In one or two cases I struggle to see how they could get any worse even if they tried.
But clearly there’s a time and a place – abusing them during a match is certainly counter productive for example. That said, I cannot honestly say hand on heart that had I been at Euston last week I wouldn’t have said one or two things to the players myself.
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Pictures – Action Images