QPR’s mercurial Hungarian international midfielder Akos Buzsaky has left the club after failing to agree terms on a new deal. LFW looks back at his time in W12, and laments a criminal waste of potential.
In 1997 QPR, and the thick end of 10,000 of their fans, travelled to Selhurst Park for an FA Cup fifth round tie against Wimbledon.
Rangers had beaten Huddersfield in round three thanks to a last minute goal from Alan McDonald in a replay at the McAlpine Stadium and then knocked out Barnsley largely thanks to Trevor Sinclair’s goal-of-all-time effort at the School End. They took the lead against the Dons as well, terminally unpopular striker Mark Hateley heading home just before half time, but failed to hang onto that advantage until the break against their Premiership opponents and eventually lost 2-1 to goals from Marcus Gayle and Robbie Earle.
It felt like an opportunity missed. Optimism was high around the club at the beginning of Chris Wright’s chairmanship and new £2.5m striker John Spencer was tearing the First Division apart. A cup run and immediate promotion back to the Premiership didn’t seem all that unrealistic. Sadly that cup tie turned out to be something of an early warning for the next five years: early promise giving way to complete collapse. QPR, as it turned out, would visit the third tier before they made it back to the first.
It’s been said that there is no bigger crime than wasted potential. If that’s true then everybody at Queens Park Rangers at that time should have done a long stretch. They kept the likes of Kevin Gallen, Danny Dichio, Alan McDonald and Trevor Sinclair following relegation, they added the excellent Spencer and Gavin Peacock to them, they spent more than twice as much as anybody else in the league – a small fortune at the time – and they finished eighth and lost to Wimbledon in the FA Cup in front of a travelling support that had to be seen to be believed.
I bring up the Wimbledon game because of a discussion between my father and another Rangers fan in The Falcon at Clapham Junction prior to that match. These were the days when QPR would play their reserve fixtures at Hayes and my dad’s friend had popped down to see the second string during the week prior to our cup tie. He reported back about a leggy, black trialist who’d played up front for Rangers against Chelsea’s waifs and strays and knocked in four goals on his own. The week previous, apparently, he’d scored a hat trick against somebody else.
QPR passed up the chance to sign him permanently. Manager Stewart Houston said that players of his calibre were ten-a-penny in non-league circles and promptly went out and spent £2.6m on Mike Sheron instead. Paulo Wanchope, meanwhile, found a rather more appreciative Jim Smith observing his next trial with Derby County who immediately snapped him up and watched on as he scored in a memorable 3-2 win at Old Trafford later that season. Wanchope, a Costa Rican international who had been desperate to sign for QPR, bagged 23 goals in 72 appearances for Derby in the division above while Rangers pissed about with first Sheron and later Iain Dowie.
If wasted potential truly was a crime, Stewart Houston would have been taken outside and shot.
This sort of near miss with a player was not a new phenomenon at QPR at this point. They’d already released John Barnes and Paul Furlong from their youth set ups in the 1980s, and Rio Ferdinand a decade later. Dougie Freedman plagued First Division defences for years after being released by QPR for whom he would have been the star man for eight of the 12 seasons following his departure.
What makes Akos Buzsaky’s departure from Loftus Road this week more frustrating than these cases is that QPR actually recognised his ability and potential, spent money to get him through the door, and then never really knew what to do with him.
Akos Buzsaky was a rare thing at QPR when he arrived. First of all, he was a footballer with some ability which - for a team that had failed to win its first ten matches of the season and was calling on the likes of Stefan Moore, John Curtis and Chris Barker to try and keep them in the Championship - was nothing short of a revelation. In an early fixture at fellow relegation strugglers Scunthorpe United he scored two fabulous goals to salvage a point for an otherwise woefully inadequate QPR team. That game was also notable for Flavio Briatore, who’d arrived in a private helicopter, being refused admission to the director’s box at Glanford Park for turning up in jeans. Sometimes life really is that funny.
Secondly, he was a player the QPR fans had seen before, liked, admired and wanted. Not since Spencer and Sheron walked through the door a decade earlier had Rangers been able to go out and buy the best players in their position in the division and yet here was Buzsaky holding up Hoops for the cameras a couple of years after lashing in a fabulous long range goal in a 1-1 draw for Plymouth at Loftus Road. Even after this, despite the influx of money, Rangers were always more likely to go out and buy what Monty Burns may have described as the “non-union Mexican equivalent” of the player they actually needed at the time. Alessandro Pellicori, Matteo Alberti, Emmanuel Ledesma, Samuel Di Carmine… prosecution rests.
He arrived on loan initially, firming up the transfer in January. At Plymouth he’d been part of a midfield that also included David Norris, Lilian Nalis and Peter Halmosi feeding a formidable strike force of Barry Hayles and Sylvain Ebanks Blake. Manager Ian Holloway had the Greens on the cusp of the play offs – not surprisingly looking at that line up – and had more than 10,000 people turned up to watch them each week he may have got them there too. They could have been Blackpool before Blackpool even knew they were Blackpool. But attendances remained low, the talented team drained the club’s bank account, a fire sale took place, Argyle were relegated twice and placed into administration once and now they’re lucky not to be playing Conference football. By the by really, but another sign of how good Buzsaky and the other departing players from Home Park really were.
There was plenty of evidence that Buzsaky – an early student of Jose Mourinho’s at Porto - was a fine player on the pitch down at Loftus Road as well. Manager Luigi De Canio didn’t speak much English, and probably wouldn’t have really known what to make of the terms ‘polishing a turd’ or ‘making a purse from a sow’s ear’, but despite the language barrier he proved very adept at both. Hell, never mind Bob Paisley, Mourinho and Alex Ferguson, De Canio turning Bob Malcolm, Zesh Rehman, Damion Stewart and Chris Barker into something resembling a Championship defence for two months before proper reinforcements arrived in the transfer window ranks as one of the sport’s greatest ever managerial achievements in my eyes. But with Buzsaky there was no polishing, no patching up, no short cuts and no cheat sheets required. De Canio simply placed him in the centre of a forward thinking midfield behind his strikers, worked on a few counter attacking patterns in training, and let his natural ability do the talking. He wound Buzsaky up and let him go, like a beautiful, ceaseless, graceful spinning top.
It used to be said that Steve Staunton never scored simple goals, and there weren’t many tap ins among Buzsaky’s collection either. The brace at Scunthorpe was followed by another two goal salvo at home to Colchester – the first curled in from range, the second finishing off a fabulous flowing move through the centre of the field during which he successfully executed the lesser seen double one-two. A two-four perhaps? He scored similarly high quality goals in thumping televised home wins against Stoke and Bristol City before executing an outrageous lobbed finish in a home win against Blackpool.
QPR were fun to watch back then. Wildly inconsistent, and like the world’s most irresponsible dog owner when it came to leads, but fantastically entertaining. A 3-2 win at Southampton was followed by a 4-2 home defeat by Burnley, a 3-0 win against Stoke, a 3-2 win against Blackpool and a 3-3 draw at Wolves. It was breathless, free flowing stuff, and Buzsaky was at the heart of it all. A Premiership quality player for the apparently soon Premiership bound Queens Park Rangers club.
But things soured for the team and its Hungarian play maker. Managers came and went – none of them capable of recognising, as De Canio had done, the impact Buzsaky could have if played in an advanced position through the middle of the field. Iain Dowie used him as a wide midfielder, and his fellow Northern Irishman Jim Magilton did a number of things with him with only moderate success. A vintage long range goal in a 5-2 home win against Barnsley showed the potential, but Magilton grew frustrated with Buzsaky’s inconsistency and tried to solve it by headbutting him after a 3-1 defeat at Watford – an incident which cost yet another manager his job.
In between came Paulo Sousa, who never got to use Buzsaky during his brief stay at the club. The Hungarian destroyed his ankle ligaments in a cup game against Manchester United after getting his studs caught in the turf, and not long after coming back did the same thing to his knee in not dissimilar circumstances. It was this dastardly combination of constantly rotating managers and frequent trips to the surgeon’s table that meant Buzsaky was destined to leave QPR this week with his potential largely unfulfilled.
Perhaps his best chance to re-establish himself at Loftus Road was at the beginning of the 2010/11 season. The R’s started against weak opposition – Barnsley were beaten 4-0 on day one, Sheffield United 3-0 a week later – and Buzsaky had been detailed to start both games alongside Alejandro Faurlin in a deep lying midfield providing support to a more advanced trio of Jamie Mackie, Hogan Ephraim and Adel Taarabt behind Heidar Helguson. New manager Neil Warnock had used Buzsaky the previous season, and been rewarded with a crucial and typically spectacular goal in a 2-0 six-pointer at Crystal Palace, so knew all about his ability.
Personally I’m not sure Warnock’s idea for a Buzsaky and Faurlin combination in that area of the field would have worked. Fate meant that Shaun Derry started there instead of the Hungarian, and come May the veteran midfielder was in with a shout of being named Player of the Year with fans keen to recognise the vital role he’d played mopping up for Adel Taarabt when his cunning plans and grand schemes had blown up in his face. But injury meant we never got to find out. Buzsaky was used infrequently when fit, and an incident in a 3-0 win at Ipswich in September rather summed up his luck. Already leading 2-0, Rangers thought they’d made it three when Buzsaky drew back his right foot and pinged an absolute ripper into the top corner of the Ipswich net from 25 yards. The referee disallowed it, instead choosing to bring the R’s back for a penalty they didn’t want. Heidar Helguson scored, but that was hardly the point.
Buzsaky accused Warnock of freezing him out after promotion to the Premier League, even though a fleeting glimpse at Everton brought an intelligent assist for the only goal of the game scored by Tommy Smith to show that football brain was still in working order. Warnock responded, rather unkindly, by telling readers of his column in The Independent that Buzsaky could hardly talk having requested compassionate leave during the busy Christmas period.
Warnock’s replacement, Mark Hughes, found more use for Buz, and used him in the centre of the park as well. He was rewarded with a beautifully executed free kick in a home win against Wigan and similarly eye catching effort in a home win against Swansea. But fitness was an issue. Either through lack of games or some sort of death by a thousand knee operations Buzsaky struggled to put two good performances together consecutively and the Wigan Man of the Match display was swiftly followed by one of the worst midfield performances in the Premiership’s history at Blackburn. He looked lost against the league’s better teams as well. QPR fans, desperate to sing their Kate Nash-style White Pele ditty at any opportunity, frequently gave Buzsaky a free ride where other players would have been slated, because they knew the player he could be. Nevertheless, a single year extension to his contract was a reasonable offer this summer. Buzsaky chose to refuse it and will now play in the Championship next season, for Blackpool possibly.
In doing so he becomes the footballing equivalent of the girl that got away for QPR. Occasionally we’ll see her – hair blowing, breasts heaving, smile glinting – in a bar somewhere, or on the Football League Show belting one in from 25 yards as Steve Claridge mistakes him for somebody else and makes some incisive comment along the lines of “well Manish, we know he is capable of this.” Whether it’s Blackpool or somebody else, a club somewhere out there is about to land potentially the best free transfer completed anywhere in the country this summer at any level of the game and they probably don’t even know it. There’s that word again: potential.
Bloody injuries. Bloody constantly changing managers. Bloody stupid idiots playing him out of position. Occasionally delightful, all too frequently absent, ultimately ball acheingly frustrating: Akos Buzsaky, a criminal waste of a potentially wonderful QPR midfield player.
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Pictures – Action Images