End of Term Report 15/16 — Attack Monday, 27th Jun 2016 10:11 by Clive Whittingham The final part of our end of season round up focuses on QPR’s often misfiring attack. 7 — Matt Phillips C/DMatt Phillips is the first player I get messages about. Every Saturday, straight after the match, they begin. Even when we’ve won any praise or positive opinion Tweeted to the LFW account is often followed with “(except Phillips who is shite)”. Then on Sunday, when the match report goes up, we almost always get a broad agreement on everything said other than Phillips’ mark. As you can see below I’m not exactly generous with his scores out of ten, but according to the baying mob he rarely deserves any more than a one or a two and has often turned in “the worst QPR performance I can remember” every single week. Still, at least it’s giving Karl Henry a break. Some numbers for you — eight goals, nine assists, making Phillips second top scorer still at the club and the team’s leading provider of goals. Junior Hoilett, as we’ll come onto shortly, got one assist all season and fewer goals and people are desperate for him to stay. Phillips scored important goals too — games with Wolves, Ipswich and Charlton won because of him and a point salvaged at Bolton. He missed just two league games all season — more appearances than anybody else. No indefinite absences with indeterminate knocks and pulls and strains because he couldn’t be bothered to turn out for us. I wonder if, not for the first time, we’re just going after one of our own players because it’s what we do. But then I also find Phillips very frustrating. Firstly, because I think he’s largely flattered to deceive throughout his time with the club. The speed, ability, shot, cross and pedigree of the man should be absolutely terrorising defences in this division and providing him a lucrative career in the division above. And yet in three years here he’s pissballed about through the first few months due to some sort of wrist injury — the wrist obviously a vital component to wing play in association football — then missed the second half of the season thanks to a horrendous smack on his ankle against Nottingham Forest. In the Premier League Harry Redknapp used him as a centre forward — another of his bright ideas. Then he was brilliant for a while under Chris Ramsey, and then this season he’s gone back to wild inconsistency again. Built like Tarzan, runs like Jane. So is he just an inconsistent player? Is he haunted by a lack of self-belief and confidence? Is all that allied with poor luck with injuries? Is that why he’s here in the first place? Let’s be honest, the final few months of the 2014/15 Premier League season when he scored some ridiculous goals and had more assists than anybody else in Europe bar Lionel Messi isn’t the sort of form that should see you stuck at QPR. If he could produce it regularly, he wouldn’t be here. But he can’t, so he is. So don’t have a go at him for it. Where this sympathetic bullshit all falls down is the Blackburn away match last season. Only about 300 QPR fans were there so he largely got away with it but that night, at the start of the transfer window, Phillips turned in one of the most bone-idle winger displays I’ve ever seen in my life. Had I been James Perch that night, constantly facing a Blackburn winger and full back in a two on one situation with a kid goalkeeper behind me and Phillips making no attempt whatsoever to hide his walking-paced token effort to come and help, I’d have struggled not to have a go at belting him in the tunnel afterwards. Later, against Fulham at home, Phillips’ abysmal positioning — too high, too far in field, too square to the ball, too static - enabled Luke Garbutt to wander in from the opposing left back spot and have a hand in all three first half goals for the visitors. Phillips made Garbutt look like the bastard love child of Roberto Carlos and Nilton Santos that day. Yet you look at that mesmeric left-footed cross for Charlie Austin’s goal at Wolves, and that smack at Crystal Palace last season, and his numbers this season achieved in second gear, and you know there’s a decent player in there. Incredibly frustrating. If he’s disappointed about not getting his move, if he’s angry about the club asking for too much money, if it’s knocked his confidence that nobody thought he was worth the risk… there are two courses of action now. Either tear it up for QPR in the hope that nobody can possibly leave him in the Championship and he gets a move in January, or tear it up for QPR anyway because it’s his job and he’s well capable. This current sulky, half-arsed, head-down, bumbling mumbling rubbish is achieving nothing for anybody, least of all Phillips himself. In Numbers:
9 — Conor Washington N/A“You know a town with money is a little like a mule with a spinning wheel. Nobody knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it.” Change ‘town with money’ to ‘QPR with one of League One’s hottest striking properties’ and The Simpsons’ purveyor of malfunctioning monorails Lyle Lanley has it just about spot on. I have, after some thought, decided not to mark Conor at all for his half season at QPR so far and will reserve judgement until next season. After all, if somebody read this article, decided that I could string words together fairly well, and therefore hired me to come round and rewire their house on the basis that my computer is electrical and therefore it’s much the same thing I wouldn’t want to be graded for the results either. QPR have seen Washington scoring freely in a notoriously attacking, attractive Peterborough side in League One and decided he can play as a lone striker target man in a much slower, more conservative, more direct team in the Championship. Couple of things to bear in mind. Firstly, as we knew when we signed him, Washington has always started very slowly, goalscoring wise at least, after changing clubs: one in his first 16 for Newport, one in his first 15 for Peterborough. None in 15 for QPR so far is pretty much par for his course even if Rangers were giving him good ball, which they’re not. Secondly, two goals and some very decent performances for Northern Ireland prior to the European Championships show that he does have something about him, and reassures that QPR haven’t spent £2.5m on a player based on a couple of months of flash in the pan in the division below. As Paul Finney from the QPR Podcast, a Northern Ireland regular (he’s from Belfast you know), said: “Northern Ireland are trying this crazy thing called giving him the ball”. When he has started for QPR, which hasn’t been often, he’s often been utilised as a lone striker when he’s clearly, physically, somebody that needs to play off or behind a proper target man. The starts have often been away from home, where Rangers have been particularly poor this season — winning only four times — starving him of chances and possession still further. A lot of his goals for Peterborough seemed to come from him running into the left channel, cutting inside, moving the ball out of his feet and seeking out the far corner. For that reason, and his obvious struggles playing as the one in a 4-2-3-1, I would like to have seen him given a run in the wide left attacking position occupied by Junior Hoilett for the second half of the season. Especially considering Hoilett is unlikely to stay this summer. But then, despite three and a half years of inactivity, we’re all apparently dry bumming Hoilett again now so that never happened. At the moment it’s an easy one for the critics of Les Ferdinand, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and the club. Look, you’ve spent big money on a striker who doesn’t fit in your team and you don’t know how to use him. Fools. That may be the case, but I suspect Washington, like a good portion of the team at both ends of the field in fact, will look a lot better if/when we sort out the centre of the midfield. As discussed in the previous piece, the players QPR have to select in the middle of midfield at the moment aren’t quick enough, aren’t strong enough, don’t score enough goals, can’t protect a back four properly or (in Karl Henry’s case) are actually way too defensive. We get nothing positive from that area of the field. We don’t have energetic, box-to-box midfielders or a physical presence there, which means that when we try and play a flat midfield four in a 4-4-2 teams as bad as Fulham find it easy to stroll through. That means you always have to pick three there, which in turn means you can only pick one striker — which doesn’t help Washington one bit as it leaves him in a lone striker role he's ill-suited to or not in the team at all. The effects of that could be minimised if the three central midfielders were capable of getting forward, driving at opponents, closing the gap between the QPR attack and midfield, and working with him to feet in the final third. But they’re not, which means to get the ball forward it either has be worked wide and crossed in, or punted long down the field — again, neither of which really suit Washington. So I’m reserving judgement. Fix that midfield up so we can start playing the 4-4-2 or 4-3-3 set ups that might suit Washington better and then let’s see how he does. Don’t fix that midfield up, and we’ll have bigger problems to worry about than him. In Numbers:
12 — Jamie Mackie C/DI nearly offered no grade here, but I can’t very well pan Sandro and co for their constant unavailability and then excuse somebody else can I? Except to say that Jamie Mackie wants to play for QPR more than I do and Sandro cares less about QPR than my mum. Actually that joke would work better if you all knew my mum. She hates QPR, she says it ruined her first marriage and bankrupted the family. Anyway. Obviously every football season is made up of what ifs and maybes. What if Tommy Williams had squared that ball? What if Jamie Pollock hadn’t done that? But there are three moments last season that I wonder about in particular. Firstly, against Cardiff at Loftus Road in August, had the referee awarded a free kick for a foul on Michael Doughty in injury time when he easily could have done, instead of allowing play to go on and the visitors to equaliser, what would the impact of a 2-1 win there been as opposed to the fall out of a 2-2 draw having lead 2-0? Secondly, had a competent, confident goalkeeper been dealing with Nedum Onuoha’s back pass against Nottingham Forest with fourth-placed Rangers 1-0 up and absolutely cruising against a poor opponent, how would we have kicked on as an early pace-setter? And thirdly, had Jamie Mackie been able to play regularly as he did at Charlton on day one, what difference would that have made? Because make no mistake, Mackie was exceptional at The Valley despite the result. I always rated him a good deal more than many others in his first spell, but at Charlton in August he was better than he’d ever been before. So much of Chris Ramsey’s style and plan revolved around him, he was so much of what Ramsey and Les Ferdinand wanted from their new era QPR, and yet he was a write off after that and barely played again. His style, his energy, his speed, his puppy-like enthusiasm — none of this is suited to a long term hamstring problem. It’s not like he has the ability of somebody like Kevin Gallen, allowing him to modify his game and play a deeper lying playmaker role if he can no longer lead the attack. Mackie is all action, or nothing. I’m not buying into the idea he was a bad signing — because he’d been great in typical Mackie style for Reading the season before — but I am deeply concerned about exactly how much football he has left in him and how much impact he’s going to be able to make for us moving forwards. In Numbers:
14 -Jay Emmanuel Thomas C/DProblem with modern football #356 in the series. Twenty years ago, Jay-Emmanuel Thomas was the guy at your work with the back story. He was the one shifting boxes in your warehouse with you, or answering the phones in your IT helpline call centre, or working the bins with you, or tending to council gardens with you, or flogging insurance with you. Whatever job any of us do, there always used to be somebody there with the back story in football. Somebody who had a trial for Orient, somebody who was going to be taken on by Man Utd until he broke his leg, somebody who was on the books at Millwall that fell out with the coach. And when the office five-a-side team took to the astroturf on Thursday night that guy was there tearing the place apart, and afterwards he’d stand with you with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other and tell you that it never quite worked out because he didn’t behave properly, or liked the lifestyle too much, or was too argumentative, but he didn’t regret it because he had a good time and enjoys his life sitting at his desk with you, or manning the phones with you, or emptying the bins with you. Modern day football is a little bit different. Any teenager talented enough to be snapped up by a Tottenham or Arsenal or Chelsea is now immediately placed on a contract of obscene value, often far in excess of what their parents earn combined, and they drive round in flash cars and flashier watches playing against all the other excellent young rich boys on pristine pitches in meaningless academy matches. Some clubs, Chelsea and Man City in particular, are serial hoarders of this talent, and never have any intention of using any of it. John Terry is still the last player to graduate from Chelsea’s lavishly funded, massively over-populated academy into regular first team action. They win, or go close to winning, the academy league and cup every year, and if they don’t win it Man City take the trophy back to their Disney Land set up instead, but you never see or hear from any of these players again except for their various, constant, never-ending, loan spells. Chelsea loaned out 33 players last season. They’re there to stop other people having them, first and foremost. Chelsea don’t want to spend years developing Harry Kane, they want to go out and sign Costa or Oscar or Hazard. But they don’t want Tottenham to have Kane either, otherwise they have to pay £45m to take him away. So any 14-year-old who looks a bit like they might turn out to be decent is immediately blank chequed, hoovered up, bunged into the academy, loaned out to Stevenage or Lens or Royal Antwerp, kept until they’re 23 or 24 with the development and experience of the average 16-year-old, and then bombed out. Patrick Bamford, absolute prime case in point. Certainly won't ever become a leading striker at Chelsea, but won't be a leading striker for anybody else either by the time they've finished with him and that's the real quiz. For the players themselves, it means they don’t have to succeed. It actually means they don’t have to play any football. They just become rich, while doing nothing. There is no consequence for them not making it, or not behaving properly, or not giving a shit. I use this example a lot but in 2008 Jordan Robertson was changing the songs on his MP3 player while speeding down the outside lane of the M1 in Leicestershire. He lost control, ploughed into another car and killed father of five Omar Mohamed. He was subsequently jailed for 32 months, because in this country if you hit somebody over the head with a lead pipe you get 12 years to life but if you run them over with two tonnes of high performance, petrol powered metal you’re unlucky if you don’t get let off with a suspended sentence. The relevant detail of all this for this piece though, is that Robertson was a relative nobody — a Sheff Utd youth academy player not good enough to play for Sheff Utd, loaned out down the leagues to Torquay, Northampton, Bury and so on. Yet at the time he was driving a Mercedes CLC 180. Some kid, who’d achieved nothing, and wasn’t good enough to ever achieve anything, flying around in a machine like that. Which brings us to Jay Emmanuel-Thomas. How do you like your centre forwards built physically? How do you like their shooting ability from 20 yards? How did you like that wonderful touch, flick and finish to break an acrimonious deadlock against MK Dons at Loftus Road? How did you like that ridiculous double against Bolton to rescue another dire situation in W12? This guy potentially has everything. QPR fans saw it, fleetingly, briefly. In fact, for a little while when Chris Ramsey got him going as the lone striker, QPR actually looked better with him leading the line than when Charlie Austin did. Everything, that is, but the brain. Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, or JET as he refers to himself in a Twitter presence dominated by the use of a word “swazzy” they he invented to describe himself and everything he does, has been bombed out of every club he’s ever been at. Arsenal, Cardiff, Ipswich, Bristol City… they’ve all allowed him to leave — or in the case of Arsenal and Ipswich actively marched him to the exit door — without much of a transfer fee being paid if one was paid at all. It doesn’t matter to him of course — you can still be massively rich, and live the footballer’s lifestyle, without actually playing any football for anybody, as we’ve already discussed. Jay Emmanuel-Thomas could buy and sell me and you several times over, and yet he’s never achieved anything in the sport that’s put him in that position, nor even played it that often. Where's the incentive to knuckle down, behave properly, train properly and play regularly? He's getting rich anyway. When moved away from centre forward to wide areas, he looked like he didn’t want to know. At Newport in pre-season, he trudged up and down the wing in front of us in the main stand and contributed absolutely nothing while bitching and moaning to the team mates within earshot about what they were doing wrong. And then there’s the “long” throw, which he insists on tossing onto the head of the nearest centre back every time he’s on the field, even though he’s the biggest player on the pitch himself and you’d ideally like him in the area showing some bravery for once and sticking his head on it. Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink pulled few punches at the mid-season fans’ forum when asked about “JET” saying “Jay Emmanuel-Thomas very, very clearly didn't fit into my plans.” “JET’s” “Swazzy” Christmas/Birthday party at the turn of the year, attended by a number of the younger QPR squad members, did not go down well. He was subsequently loaned to MK Dons, who’d no doubt remembered him dismantling them at Loftus Road by himself, but they only found use for him in two starts and two sub appearances despite their struggles at the bottom of the league. But rich. But rich. Obscenely rich. As much as I praise the work of Les Ferdinand as director of football, a three-year contract for a guy like Jay Emmanuel-Thomas is a rookie mistake. No football will be played, no potential will be realised, no consistent end product will be provided for the money he is paid, but he won’t be working any tube driving shift next to you any time soon. In Numbers:
19 — Nasser El Khayati CSo how can I award El Khayati a mark for three starts and 13 sub appearances, but back away from grading Conor Washington who made more starts having signed at the same time? Well, because I don’t think we’ve ever once used Washington as we intended when we bought him, whereas the Moroccan/Dutch winger who signed from Burton Albion in January has seen some action in his preferred role and position. There have been some notable highlights — fabulous winning goal against Charlton, excellent second half performance at Bolton in conditions even Poseidon the Greek God of seas and waters might have found a bit much, and a late assist for a Matt Phillips winner v Ipswich (though I strongly suspect it was a shot). And then there have been other instances, most frustratingly at MK Dons away, where he was given a chance to shine against limited opposition and disappeared out of the game altogether. In fact, the MK Dons thing was worse, because the killer first goal was in part due to his defensive negligence. I’ll make firmer judgements as time goes on but at the moment he feels like a useful substitute. A bit of a maverick, taste for the unusual, difficult to read and therefore difficult to deal with, ideal to bring on for the final 10/15/20 minutes of games where a goal or a spark or something a bit different is required. I’ll take some convincing that he’s any more than that. In Numbers:
23 — Junior Hoilett BI think it’s Hoilett that annoys me the most you know. Out of the whole sorry, sordid, ruinously expensive episode of QPR 2011-2015 it’s the Canadian winger that keeps me awake at night the most. Ji Sung-Park, Rio Ferdinand, Shuan Wright-Phillips… one could reasonably have forseen these were spent forces coming to the end of their careers looking for a gullible pile of free money to top themselves up. Jose Bosingwa, Julio Cesar, Chris Samba… the more pessimistic and cynical could easily have suggested that such players on such wages wouldn’t really give much of a shit about little old QPR. Luke Young, Jermaine Jenas, Andy Johnson, Bobby Zamora… these players’ fitness issues were known long before they ended up here on lucrative deals. And all of them were too fucking old to be landing multi-year, multi-million pound deals from a club like QPR. Junior Hoilett was the one: young, fit, talented, sought after. Canadian by birth but playing well enough for Blackburn to hold off appearing for his country in case an England call arrived — fool, should have moved to Liverpool and turned in half a dozen mediocre performances for them and then he’d have been captaining our national side. He turned down Borussia Monchengladbach, a Champions League side at the time, to sign for Rangers instead. He was the real statement of intent, among all the other big names. This was a quality player in his prime coming to Queens Park Rangers. I can rarely recall being as happy and excited about a signing. So you’ll forgive me for not lighting the candles and running the bath and spreading rose petals around the joint now that he has, three and half years of total inactivity and ineffectiveness into a four year stay, suddenly started to look a little bit more like a footballer while playing for a Championship team with little to play for. I’m sure these sudden signs of life have nothing at all to do with him either needing a new contract from QPR or a new one from somewhere else. And that’s all it is too — a bit more like it. Yes, it was a wonderful goal against a dreadful Brentford team, thank you Junior for gracing us with that (I didn’t vote for it as Goal of the Season out of principal). But this is our main left winger, that we’re apparently desperate to keep, and we’re all suddenly fawning over, and he managed the sum total of one assist last season. One assist. The left winger. One assist. “Don’t forget it was Hoilett who got the assist for the Wembley winner,” says somebody looking to become the first person I’ve ever punched in the face. That cross, like all of his others, was hurried and technically poor and totally misdirected. Only a typical Richard Keogh intervention diverted it the six yards further back it needed to be to find a QPR player. And so yes, Junior Hoilett played quite well in the second half of the season. Yes, he scored some decent and important goals for us. Yes, on an affordable contract and playing more like this and less like the giant grey expanse of fuck all he’s offered us during the previous three and a half years he’d be a very good option for us to have at our disposal next season. But I won’t be rolling out any Canadian bunting just yet, nor do I trust players — think Matthew Rose — who are injured, unavailable or crap for the entire duration of their contract only to suddenly hit form and fitness six months before it’s about to end. Persuade him to sign a three-year deal and we probably won’t see him again until early 2019. In Numbers:
33 — Seb Polter A/BNot that you could tell very much from a match played on a rugby pitch with grass past your ankles in a monsoon but Seb Polter’s appearance and performance at Newport last July gave cause for some alarm. Obviously out of shape, he looked heavy of leg and arse and first touch. Soon those with connections to the camp were telling people “we’ve bought a pup” and sure enough the German was nowhere to be seen for the first couple of months of the season, leading to an angry Tweet when he was left out of the squad altogether for Sheff Wed at home. But, it seems, somebody somewhere had obviously seen loads of him because by the time he got a fleeting five minutes as a substitute at Birmingham large sections of an already hostile away following had decided he was a “shit fucking German” and “fucking useless Kraut” and told him as much, at volume — actually screaming and shrieking at him in one particularly gobby female’s case. I must have missed the dozen or so appearances he’d made somewhere for people to reach these views, for I’m sure nobody would stoop so low as to harangue a relatively young player trying to settle down and make his way in a new country and notoriously difficult lead just because they don’t like Les Ferdinand, Chris Ramsey or German people. There’s an F Block regular who still says Polter is “useless” and when he miscontrols the ball or falls over it or lashes a shot miles wide — which he does quite a bit — there’s plenty of evidence to support that. He is not the best technical footballer you’re ever going to see. But he’s the exact opposite of useless at this level, and QPR were a far better team with him in it this season than they ever were without. I like his physicality. He gives the centre halves some proper, old-fashioned abuse. I was particularly impressed with him at Blackburn away, against Hanley and Duffy who are two of the division’s bigger and better centre backs, where he booted them from pillar to post all evening, providing a real presence for Rangers in attack. Duffy had to go off in the end, couldn’t take it any more. Polter does always pick them up off the floor though, so he’s been well brought up. He’s tireless and very hard working, a real team player, and seems like a bit of a character too with his six-hour open top bus journeys round London, ridiculous hair cuts and often unintentionally hilarious Tweets. He’s scored some very decent goals too — particularly his header against Hull which was sadly rendered irrelevant by Green’s calamity a moment later. That move he does where he turns the ball round the corner to free a winger, then spins and arrives late in the box to meet the cross is a dangerous one — it brought us the goal at Blackburn too, though it was Fer rather than Polter on the end of it. His comments about the poor quality of pre-season last summer compared to what he was used to in Germany were interesting, and assuming we do a better job of preparing ourselves this summer it’ll be intriguing to see how he performs given a full season. You suspect he’s never going to be a 20-goal a season man but his numbers (seven goals, five assists from just 20 starts) are more impressive than he gets credit for. I’m a fan, and I’m enjoying seeing him prove the vile, ignorant people sitting behind us at Birmingham wrong. In Numbers:
Others Charlie Austin’s write up and numbers can be found here. Really disappointed to see so little game time for Reece Grego-Cox after he’d started to make a breakthrough at the end of the previous Premier League season. Not so surprised that Tyler Blackwood didn’t quite make the grade. The Twitter @loftforwords Pictures — Action Images Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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