Beale elects to take his ‘loyalty and integrity’ elsewhere after all — Column Monday, 28th Nov 2022 17:47 by Clive Whittingham Just 21 games and five months into his QPR career, and 36 days after he rebuffed an offer from Wolves out of a sense of “duty” to the club that gave him his managerial break, Mick Beale is off after all, rejoining Glasgow Rangers. The old has passed, there's a new beginningThe year is 1988, it’s December, Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine is embarking on a four-week stint at number one. We still put lead in our petrol, cigarette smoke in our pubs, and Jim ‘The Bald Eagle’ Smith is about to jump from the good ship Queens Park Rangers and join struggling Newcastle to try (and fail) to keep them in the First Division. A three-year contract worth £300,000 is required to tempt him, and it makes him one of the best paid managers in the country — those really were the days. It was the second time in four years another club has come calling for Rangers’ manager after Terry Venables move to Barcelona (!!), but until today it remained the last time this happened. Gerry Francis jumped straight in at Tottenham after the tension between himself and chairman Richard Thompson reached breaking point in 1994. Ian Holloway was heavily linked with Wolves after the 2003/04 promotion, and then booted for apparently asking for permission to speak to Leicester about their job 18 months later, but as so much of that came through, via and because of Gianni Paladini it’s always difficult to ascertain which bits, if any, were true — and neither move happened in the end anyway, Olly ended up at Plymouth after his sacking here.
QPR managers, for the last 30 years at least, do not get poached. They get put on gardening leave, they headbutt their star player, they win five games out of 41, they reveal eye-opening details about the chaos behind the scenes for people to helpfully post on message boards, they end up splashed across the front of The Daily Telegraph, they become the only team in the country to lose a home game to Rotherham United in two years, they get hounded out by the supporters, they fall out with the owners, they get their car smashed up at The Manor Ground… sure, all of that. But never poached, because for the vast majority of the last three decades they, and therefore we, haven’t been very good. Nobody is beating the door down for Ray Harford’s signature after his team has been annihilated 4-1 at Oxford United. Since Smith went to St James’ Park, 21 of QPR’s 22 permanent managers have been sacked, and Gerry was forced into resigning. That stat is always worth remembering when we start accusing managers of disloyalty to us for looking after their own best interests. Another three or four defeats people would have been talking about making Beale number 22 of 23. That a club the size of Glasgow Rangers, with European football aspirations, and of course Premier League Wolves before them, have come sniffing after our boss is, ostensibly, a good thing. It means that he, and therefore we, are doing well. One of the big positives of the Mick Beale appointment in the first place, for me, was it’s exactly the sort of ‘forward thinking’ move I usually see other clubs make and get envious of. Finally, it seemed, QPR had got with the programme. The clubs at our level, on our sort of budgets, that are punching above their weight, are not the ones appointing the same old soaks off the Championship merry-go-round. They’re the ones doing clever things in coaching, player development, recruitment, scouting, managerial appointments — not the ones taking Andre Gray on loan. It’s the managers like Neil Critchley at Blackpool, Graham Potter at first Swansea and then Brighton, Rob Edwards at Forest Green, Carlos Corberan at Huddersfield, Nathan Jones at Luton, Liam Manning at MK Dons, Russell Martin at MK Dons and then Swansea, Ryan Lowe at Plymouth and now Preston, Steven Schumacher his former assistant still at Plymouth, Kieran McKenna at Ipswich who are coming through with new, exciting, innovative ideas to solving the problem of ‘they’ve got £x and we’ve got £y’ other than “we’ll have to get a loan in”. Frequently these are people with unremarkable playing careers, or no playing career at all, who have dedicated their lives to coaching from a young age. At the other end of the scale you have a club with a good squad and decent resources at this level, West Brom, tanking down into the relegation zone because they went down the tired old Steve Bruce track. You take on ambitious progressives like that full in the knowledge that if it goes well they’re going to be in demand from clubs higher up the ladder, and they’re probably going to want to go when that happens. Seven of the ten managers I’ve named there got poached from their clubs by ‘bigger’ rivals (Potter twice), and while Manning has faltered without his deadly Parrott-Twine striking duo from last season, Schumacher and McKenna surely won’t be shy of offers in the near future — potentially from us later this week. The benefit is mutual: your team gets better and climbs the league, possibly to a promotion; your players get better for the coaching and development, possibly ending in a lucrative sale that can stabilise your club and be reinvested in several new players; the manager improves his reputation and gets to progress his career. It’s not ideal when they leave, but it’s a much happier situation than having to find seven figures to pay off Iain Dowie. It's rather Queens Park Rangers’ luck, however, that the moment has come quite so soon. Beale has never made any secret of his desire to get on in the game, with a particular ambition to manage abroad and lead a new wave of British coaches doing big things outside the UK. He’s carefully curated a career at some of the biggest clubs in the world, building up an impressive CV. I accept we’re a stepping stone, but we’re nobody’s mugs either and all of those managers I mentioned previously at least gave their first club a season. Just 21 games into this one, the Loftus Road faithful are within their rights to expect a little bit more. Get the bullshit detector, the good one from the safeExpect a little bit more, in general, because like the market for Championship players, the demand for second tier managers from higher up simply isn’t there. Between Potter leaving Swansea for Brighton in 2019 and Nathan Jones’ recent defection from Luton to the Southampton club his entire family have supported all their lives, there hasn’t been one. If you’re a second-tier manager with Premier League aspirations then - like Steve Cooper, Dean Smith, Thomas Frank and others - the best way to achieve that is to promote your own team and keep it there. Expect a little bit more, specifically, because Mick Beale told them they could. "Integrity and loyalty are big things for me, and if they are the values you live by you have to be strong. 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 after rejecting the chance to join Wolves. "The only reasons for leaving QPR right now would be selfish ones around ego, status or finance. And that's not really me," Beale mused. Not my words Carol, the words of Top Gear Magazine. To go from that, to today resigning his position and heading up to takeover at Glasgow Rangers, in just 36 days, is quite the change of heart. That said, it was telling, for all Beale’s noble words, that talk of QPR offering a new contract in the immediate aftermath of the Wolves bid - with an outlandishly high release clause designed to deter other clubs this season that would then revert back to its current level of around £1.5m from 2023/24 onwards - quietly died away and no such deal was signed. Hmmmm, as Marge Simpson might have said. Perhaps we should have nailed him down on exactly how big these “big things” are to him, like Father Dougal and the model cows. Even in his short time at Loftus Road we had to become accustomed to Mick Beale saying one thing, and then completely contradicting that either in words or actions, sometimes within days. Take two examples from our interview with him in the summer. “It's quite exciting. They lack a few grey hairs but how many Championship games do you have to play to be classed as ‘experienced’? Jimmy Dunne played 40 games last year. Does he need 40 more to know how to play in the Championship, or does he know now? If I bring somebody, another Yoann, in to hold his hand and Rob’s hand, yeh we’ve got experience, but when do I let these kids grow up? As a father when do you let go of your kid’s hand to allow them to grow up with a bit of independence. That’s what I’m emphasising to the players.” Does that sound like somebody who’s about to sign 34-year-old free agent Leon Balogun? “My preference is to do permanents and not loans. If I can avoid loans I will. For our club, where we are, we need players who want to be at QPR, not escape in 15 games time because the water’s a bit hot and the heat is too much for them in the Championship. I want people who want to be here to grow.” Does that sound like somebody who’s about to sign Tyler Roberts, Taylor Richards, Ethan Laird and Tim Iroegbunam? At least two of whom this club has no prayer at all of ever getting near to signing permanently, but are now all nevertheless playing first team football ahead of players we own. Roberts’ input to this point has proven Beale’s original point so fulsomely I almost hope we don’t get promoted just so we don’t have to sign him permanently. It doesn’t stop there. When QPR destroyed Hull City at Loftus Road in September, just days after a seriously impressive 3-2 win at Watford, Beale’s post-match comments included the line: “It's what I've always wanted to do, it's what I've been building to for 21 years”, which would have sounded very familiar indeed to the podcasters, fan sites and supporter group reps who’d been at Heston for a lunch meeting with Beale a week prior, immediately after a poor result and performance against Blackpool and before things had started clicking for the team. There he’d said exactly the same thing word for word — except post-Hull and Watford it was accompanied by "I'm really enjoying the job. It's what I've always wanted to do, it's what I've been building to for 21 years so now I'm going to enjoy it, the highs and the lows, and keep growing with this young group…” whereas when we sat down with him it had been in a markedly grumpier context. Post Hull I got a WhatsApp message from somebody I’d spoken to about that meeting asking “who exactly was it you met last week?” It was like two different people.
Beale is clearly one of those people who can take others with him. In football it’s often grandiosely expressed as “a leader of men”. With his Bromley accent and beer belly he both sounds and looks like somebody you could have a good pint with (off mic he’s a prolific swearer), while also burgeoning an extraordinary reputation for being able to get results and responses out of young footballers from a range of backgrounds on the training field. Post Middlesbrough home win a couple of QPR fans passing through Borough Market that sunny summer evening found him happy to chat and pose for Instagram shots with his beer. Everybody who’s ever worked with him before raves about him, never a bad word said. He looks you in the eye when he talks, and pushes all the right buttons. Comparing interactions with him with those we had with Steve McClaren, somebody whose reputation still somehow gets him the assistant manager gig at Man Utd even now, it’s bright white chalk and particularly mouldy cheese. One of the other managers courted by QPR last summer knew Beale and upon hearing that he was in for the job as well remarked to a colleague who’d been working on video clips for his presentation “we won’t be getting that one then, once Mick gets them in the room that’ll be that”. And it was. Whatever it is about him, his powers of persuasion once he’s ‘got you in the room’ seem to border on the hypnotic. After several years of Warbs’ “first contact, second ball” soundbites, QPR fans and the club’s media team were quickly talking about how much they loved Beale’s “honesty” in his early interviews. Particularly after the League Cup defeat at Charlton where, rather than play down the importance of the competition and earliness in the season as his predecessor almost certainly would have done, Beale made plain his disappointment at the penalty shoot-out loss in the context of the large travelling support behind the goal. You’d expect that of fans and PRs, but even grizzled and experienced journalists on the QPR beat who’ve heard everything all before would tell me how much they loved his apparently blunt, up-front nature in a sport of media trained robots. (Incidentally, there’s been a bit of pining for Warburton’s calm, guarded professionalism in the wake of all this, so probably worth chucking in here that he had a flirt with Bristol City at the end of his first QPR season…) I personally couldn’t shake the feeling Beale’s actually a bit of a bullshitter, even by football’s notoriously abysmal standards on such things. Just saying exactly whatever it needed to get him to the next square on the board in his version of The Game of Life. You could say that’s been confirmed today with him walking away so soon after giving it the big ‘un about integrity and honesty, but for me it had already been cemented by the Wolves debacle. After turning the job down Beale repeatedly said he’d done so without speaking to them (untrue), and felt that was important because of loyalty and integrity and duty and this and that and the other. If anybody who bought that then still believes it now then there’s little wonder so many people in this economy get rich by selling used cars. Let me tell you why. Firstly, I think QPR’s start to the season, and summer transfer window, really brought home to Beale how difficult the job here is. You inherit a team with a reasonably good starting 11, albeit highly dependent on two or three players being fit, one of whom (Stefan Johansen) never is. There is very little beyond that by way of depth. Beale has been criticised lately for not using his bench proactively but, he is well aware, if you’re getting your arse handed to you by Coventry City, there isn’t much among Kakay, Adomah, Armstrong, Thomas, Archer and Trävelmän that’s going to make a great deal of difference. When you’re pissing into a furnace, substituting one pencil dick for another isn’t going to help. This problem is exacerbated by pressure to involve academy kids who are miles off the level required. Sinclair Armstrong is the best they’ve produced for some time, and he is — patently — raw. We desperately need to be developing our own Championship standard players without having to pay for them, and need to be running big profits on player sales seriously quickly if we’re not to incur the wrath of the league’s FFP restrictions. We have no choice. QPR commit considerable resources and personnel to this: a technical director who was previously first team manager, and has been coaching first team’s strikers; an academy manager; and a full blown international manager as head of professional development. Warburton’s relationship with that side of the business had disintegrated to such an extent last season that we launched a B Team primarily to give them, and the Joe Gubbins-type players they oversee, something to do. Every new QPR manager comes in making noises about integration, pathways, academy, yadda yadda, because they know it plays well with the fans, the owners, Les, people who run the club day to day, and more importantly it’s what we have to do. Then they see the players. Beale name-dropped Arkell Jude-Boyd into our pre-season deep dive - “I love him as a boy”. One go out of position at Wealdstone in pre-season and never seen again. Last summer, buoyed by a terrific end to 2020/21 played out in neutral empty stadiums with a booster shot of signings from Andy Belk and his recruitment team, Mark Warburton was backed despite those escalating politics and divides behind the scenes. Sam Field, Charlie Austin, Andre Gray, Sam McCallum, Jimmy Dunne, Stefan Johansen, Jordy De Wijs, Moses Odubajo, Jordan Archer… this was not cheap, and no sales were made. The Eze money doesn’t last forever. For Beale now, and whoever follows him, precious little FFP headroom remains to do anything about the problems we know exist with the team. QPR did more business this summer than I thought they would be able to, but only Kenneth Paal and Jake Clarke-Salter were signed permanently, with the rest on loan or a short-term deal in Balogun’s case. To do more would have required sales, and one of Beale’s red lines when taking the job was he’d only come if the club hung onto Ilias Chair, Chris Willock and Seny Dieng for this season — the three most sellable assets. You can see how tight the headroom situation is with the Taylor Richards deal — an obligation to buy next summer unless we’re relegated, essentially kicking a pretty tame transfer fee down the road 12 months, not one I’ve ever heard of before. Beale said in interview with us in July, after signing Clarke-Salter and Paal, that “we need one or two more… like… yesterday” and even in the final week before the transfer deadline was talking up the prospects of up to five more arrivals. Only Iroegbunam and Balogun materialised. Bottom line, there is a significant FFP/P&S headroom gap at this club that needs plugging with player sales in the next two transfer windows before we start risking points deductions. The club thought they could clear some FFP headroom on deadline day by agreeing a lump sum pay off with Macauley Bonne for money left on his contract, which they intended to use for a loan of Jamal Lowe from Bournemouth (another we could have had for a pittance from a local non-league team if only we’d bothered with scouting and such sorcery at that time — Lowe starred at Hampton and Richmond 2015-2017). Bonne’s agent knew he had them over a bit of a barrel that late in the window, started haggling over a petty amount of the cash on the deal and was (rightly) told where to stick it. Meanwhile on the south coast, Bournemouth’s move for their own new signing fell through so Lowe had a shot at their 25-man squad after all. There’ll be no Jamal Lowe then, I’ll tell the children. I’ve heard Beale stress to supporters that the financial situation “isn’t tight, it’s non-existent”. I felt this was partly in an effort to make the ‘sign a fucking striker’ brigade understand what he was up against, but also to express his own frustrations at not being able to strengthen the squad as much as he’d have liked. Before the results turned, starting with that Watford win, he lamented to us that several excellent players who he'd targeted, and had wanted to come, had gone elsewhere in the Championship for financial reasons and had started the season in great form — “damn”. The club did indeed keep Dieng, Chair and Willock (not that they were inundated with offers for any of them) as he’d stipulated when joining, but he knew players would have to be sold soon. So impatient for a win against Middlesbrough to “get this thing moving”, Beale took a chance on several players earlier in their injury recoveries than they ideally would have been, and left them in the game longer than he’d been advised to — Luke Amos subsequently missed another six weeks and Chris Willock sat out the next three games. Beale seemed frustrated to me when we met between the Blackpool and Rotherham games. Had results not been going as well as they were at the point Wolves came in, had Wolves come in that Rotherham-Blackpool week, I think he might have been glad of the ‘out’.
Secondly, as I’ve written previously, even in his short time here, I’m led to believe Wolves was not the first club he’d spoken to about a job. Per two sources, a story did the rounds among agents that he met with representatives from Stoke City at a hotel in London in the week between our Rotherham and Watford games, for a chat about their vacancy. They subsequently appointed Alex Neil, having tempted him with the sort of weird, cosmic, FFP-dodging spending promises that are apparently out of reach to idiot scum like QPR and Sunderland for reasons neither of us can fathom. And third, I just don’t believe it/him. I didn’t believe it before this week’s developments for the reasons above, and I certainly don’t now. In the land of sugar plum fairies and make believe, Wolverhampton Wanderers, a Premier League club, that rarely stray outside the stable of Jorge Mendes for their signings or managers, decide completely of their own volition (without having a conversation with Mick Beale or his representatives who don't exist), that their new manager is going to be a bloke from the Championship (from which the Premier League has taken two managers in five years), who's only managed 16 first team games in his life. Having come to that conclusion all by themselves they then (without having a conversation with Mick Beale or his representatives who don't exist) start briefing the media this is a done deal, the appointment will be really quick, just waiting until the QPR Cardiff match is out of the way before they make the approach out of courtesy (yeh, cheers lads), but once that's in it'll all be done in time for him to do the Leicester match at the weekend. Beale, who has never spoken to Wolves and is staying with QPR out of duty and integrity and loyalty but has neglected to mention this at any of the numerous chances he had to do so in interviews over the previous four days, then rejects the official approach out of hand without ever speaking to them about it. I’m sorry, call me cynical, but football doesn’t work like that. Even allowing for half a dozen of their first choices turning them down, them having to cast the net wider, and Beale speaking Portuguese after his spell in Brazil, that’s somewhere closer to complete fantasy than wishful thinking. If it was the case, why not say it to begin with, instead of mealy mouthing on about “honest conversations with Les”? The events of the last week show this up for the bollocks it obviously was anyway. When the Rangers rumours inevitably bubbled up post Giovanni van Bronckhorst departure QPR offered Beale the chance to quickly deny it publicly and shut the whole thing down, and he declined. I didn’t think QPR fans would swallow it to be honest with you, but then I got to Birmingham City that Friday night and there was a fuck-off great banner with his face on it saying “loyalty will always be rewarded”. Like taking a shit with your trousers on. Maybe they could use the other side for that Marx quote: ‘The two most important words in the world are honesty and sincerity. If you can fake these, you’ve got it made.’ Still, I guess it’ll make a nice (if slightly expensive) bedspread for somebody’s spare room. But, look, that’s just my opinion. Don’t just take my word for it. When the Old Gold subsequently went back a second, successful time for Julen Lopetegui, The Athletic’s well-connected Wolves correspondent reported Beale had risen to be their preferred choice after meeting with the club twice and wowing them with “an outstanding presentation”. Oh, look, there’s that ‘once Beale gets you in the room…’ thing. I’m in danger of getting the finger puppets out again. I’m not going to pretend to know is why he eventually turned it down. My personal theory at the time was QPR were playing so well by that stage, and ran the rounds of the kitchen through Cardiff City that night with exquisite timing to go top of the league, that he was persuaded there was an opportunity here to get a club into serious promotion contention, despite its financial restrictions, and that would look far better on a CV to potential future employers than jumping ship after just 16 matches to join a Wolves side anybody would struggle to keep up this season on account of their total lack of goal threat. Lee Hoos described him at the always immaculately timed fans forum as “a gem of a manager who can face those restrictions and overcome them”, and that’s what every other club would think of him next summer too if he achieved things with this team on this budget. This is a manager who knows how to play the modern game around image, reputation, social media and press coverage. He’s thought very carefully about the jobs he’s taken, he’s written books, he's written blogs, he’s engaged with fans on Twitter, he does every podcast going… After a while you forget that Steven Gerrard was actually the manager at Rangers, it’s basically become accepted fact that Beale was the brains behind the whole thing, when there were five other coaches on that team too, including former Scotland international Gary McAllister who’s been a manager in his own right previously. Gerrard’s struggles at Villa this year provide more fuel for that fire. That’s the power of good PR, and he knows how walking out to Wolves at that point would have looked if that job didn’t go well. Since journalists and sites like this one started questioning this “no contact with Wolves” line he’s been absolutely at deliberate pains to stress in interviews that he has no agent, no representative and nobody working on his behalf. One person who had a meeting with him recently told me he’d mentioned this “about 37 times”, with only a hint of exaggeration. When The Telegraph later headlined an interview with him "I'm aiming higher than Wolves," (which he hadn’t specifically said) Beale and QPR quickly demanded (and got) it changed. He knows how the game of public opinion and perception is played, he knows how vital image is in modern football. Still, had the Wolves offer come now, when QPR have one point and one goal from five games, I wonder if the decision might have been different, just as I suspect it would have been had it come post Blackpool. It was always going to be different for Glasgow Rangers. The theory around the club now is he turned down Wolves because he knew this was coming up — hence no new contract, no new release clause. He’s clearly enraptured by the place and the club from his time there, and is tight as arse cheeks with their sporting director, Ross Wilson, who’s been pushing for his appointment at Ibrox ahead of other candidates such as Sean Dyche. He will obviously now pitch this as the exception that proves the rule about honesty and integrity — “wouldn’t have walked away for any other club” etc. If it didn’t ring hollow enough, then having happily leaked their preference to a rabid local press, blowing up the inevitable hurricane of piss on social media, Rangers were super well aware that Beale’s position at QPR was no longer tenable, and therefore there was no need for them to meet his already slim release clause of £1.5mish. Sky’s Jim White and others reported they spent most of Saturday and Sunday low-balling QPR. And by low-balling, I mean, like, £0. Beale did at least agree not to move unless the compensation was paid. I don’t think it was any accident on the part of a media-savvy modern manager that, as pressure mounted on Giovanni van Bronckhorst, a recent afternoon in the Ibrox directors’ box for their 4-1 win at home to Aberdeen was plastered all over his Instagram. Coming just 24 hours after I’d shelled out a not inconsiderable amount of time, money and work holiday watching his team lose rather pathetically at Birmingham City, I couldn’t help but feel a little miffed, and that the day might have been better spent watching somebody like West Brom or Huddersfield who’ve subsequently beaten us since, or that he might have kept his splendid day out to himself given the circumstances. I can’t imagine van Bronckhorst was impressed either. There’s also been stories doing the rounds of him being in Rangers pubs in London watching their Champions League games with fellow fans at the time their manager was obviously coming close to getting the sack — an “open secret” up there, I’ve been told this week. There hasn’t been such an obviously flagrant public pitch for another manager’s job since Schteve randomly turned up on the Sky panel for our 2-2 draw at Fulham and directed every talking point back to how much he knew about Ian Holloway’s team. He’s planning on taking the coaches with him too, including Neil Banfield who he found here when he arrived. What can you do other than laugh? Beale doesn’t do things by accident. It’s been clear for some time (there’s been a thread on our message board saying exactly this for weeks) that when push came to shove, it would always be Glasgow Rangers over Queens Park Rangers for him. Today, he’s simply confirmed that. What you could have wonIt’s barely a month since it seemed certain Beale was heading for Molineux. At that point David Ornstein’s Athletic scoop that the QPR man was now Wolves’ preferred candidate and they expected a swift appointment (which, I say again through tears of laughter, Beale invites you to believe happened without them ever having a conversation) was met with something approaching anguish by the W12 faithful. QPR, top of the league at last, playing brilliantly, sweeping all before them, scoring goals, winning away games, eight victories in 11 matches, and the manager leaves. I was on a work trip to the South of France that week, sitting at a bar, with an icy cold glass of wine in my hand, a delicious lunch just starting to settle, gazing across the Med, and I was totally fucking miserable. Just, absolutely gutted. Why can’t we have nice things, woe is me/us, etc etc. This time it’s more a quiet, fed up, eye-rolling resignation. QPR fans who went through all that last time — a trauma that could have been stopped by Beale at any point simply saying what he said on Thursday on Monday instead when he had ample opportunity to do so — and then got all wet around the crotch with his loyalty, integrity and being “all in” talk, are justifiably pissed off that we’re here again so soon. All that positive press he got, all those empty words, and 36 days later he leaves anyway for four games a year against Ross County. This time there’s much more a sense of ‘we can’t have this every two months’ and if he’s really that desperate to go then just get on with it and go while we’ve got a World Cup break to find somebody new. Les Ferdinand’s comments this week mirror this mood change well: “I don’t want to have to fight to keep anyone at QPR. I want people who want to be here. That’s the only way we can move forward. If they want to be somewhere else, that’s what they’re going to do.” Of course what’s also happened since then is QPR have taken one point from 15 and scored one goal in five matches, losing a pair of dire games at home against the bottom two sides in the league and getting absolutely taken apart by Coventry. Had Beale left post-Cardiff his would have been the stuff of Loftus Road legend, forever talked about in the pubs of Shepherd’s Bush as the season we absolutely would have pissed the league and gone onto Premier League glory and European football if only this miracle working genius manager had stayed. That hype has cooled considerably in the weeks since. A few of the faithful have been a bit keener for a poke around the emperor’s wardrobe of late. Beale himself says his team is still “working out what it wants to be” and we’ll now forever be left to wonder how it would have ended up looking.
When Beale’s QPR have been good, they’ve been really very good indeed. The performances and victories at Watford, Millwall and particularly Sheffield United were terrific. The first half destructions of Boro and Hull at home were electric. The first half at Bristol City is as good as I’ve seen a QPR team play in a very long time. I thought we were brilliant in the face of adversity and physicality in a televised win at home to Reading. The tactical set up at Norwich was pristine, albeit slightly lacking in ambition against a side that was gettable at the back. He inherited a squad that had been reliant on two Warbs favourites — Lee Wallace and Moses Odubajo — at full back, who were frequently injured and not sticking around for 2022/23. In two moves he made that position our best on the field, with the additions of the outstanding Ethan Laird and Kenneth Paal. In Tim Iroegbunam he’s gone some way to addressing a lack of legs, drive and threat from a central midfield last season that, bar Luke Amos, managed just two goals between them. Ilias Chair has gone from a player Beale “didn’t think you could win with” to a ten posting exactly the sort of numbers the analytics community, and therefore the buyers, get very excited about indeed. I suspect, and Dave McIntyre wrote as much at the time, that turning down Wolves in the manner he did, at least publicly, strengthened his hand at QPR massively and one would presume came with some assurances about some movement in January if the team was in contention. Plenty of reason for optimism. When they’ve been poor, they’ve been borderline unwatchable. Already, in 21 games, Rangers have failed to score on eight occasions, including four of the last five, and in the majority of those they’d remain scoreless if they were still playing those games now. Blackburn, with the early start, the injuries, the signings still to come, the Kakay shot off the bar, perhaps mitigated. Norwich, a good performance, and result, that maybe just lacked a bit of bravery, or that extra Chris Willock factor from the start. Stoke, they set up very well. But West Brom, Swansea, Blackpool, Coventry… my God, games I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. With a change of manager, system, and half a dozen new players, QPR were always likely to catch the division a little cold, particularly when two of the big changes have involved players as brilliant as Paal and Laird. All of Beale’s immediate predecessors had impressive runs of results in the autumn too, but they all fell away and since Luton there’s a real sense the opposition scout reports have been filed and digested, and the division has got a little wise to us. We thought the beauty of it was you might be able to shut out Illy and Willy, or Paal and Laird, but you’d do well to do both, and yet there it has been in every game since bar Cardiff, who were woeful and even then had a dire refereeing decision go against them. Even Wigan, at Loftus Road, I thought were singularly unfortunate to lose. Beale The Wonder Coach didn’t reinvent the wheel by switching the team to 4-3-3 with underlapping full backs, and getting four Premier League loans in. I was intrigued to see what he came out the traps with after the World Cup break because at the suspension of the season, as I predicted when people started turning on Mark Warburton, a lot of the problems people had with his predecessor still existed with the new man: lack of a plan B when things aren’t going well and slow to change things from the bench; post match interview comments that don’t match up to what we’ve seen on the field; lots of goals conceded from set plays; heavily reliant on three or four players keeping fit and playing well, two of whom have been dogged by injury problems.
I said when we signed Leon Balogun that it wasn’t the sort of thing we should be doing — bringing in a 34-year-old the manager knows on a short-term deal to play in front of younger, sellable players we do own in that position. When he monstered his first few games, and we went from two clean sheets in nine months to two in two games and four in seven I looked a right div — not for the first time. But in recent weeks, particularly against Huddersfield, he has been poor, and looked his age. Rob Dickie has gone backwards under a guy who was brought here to develop players. Jimmy Dunne’s game time has been restricted. Balogun, Jake Clarke-Salter and several other Beale boys who arrived in the summer have been porcelain fragile, often departing the first half of difficult games with injuries that don’t even keep them out for the following match. Proper, academy, when the goings to tough, have a few days in the gym at Cobham, let us know when you can play vibe. All that pre-season talk about closer alignment with the academy has predictably turned into occasional appearances for the super raw and naïve Sinclair Armstrong and nothing more. In the end we don’t get to find out, and we’ll only be able to make educated guesses for how it would have gone based on what he goes on to do in his career and what happens to our team from here. All of the problems, frustrations and restrictions with the team, the FFP headroom, the club, the injuries etc. will be waiting here for the next manager, just as they were waiting here for Beale in the summer and Warbs when he took over. Except now you’ve got a group of players like Kenneth Paal who left his pregnant girlfriend in Holland to come to a foreign country and work with Beale; Tim Iroegbunam, Jake Clarke-Salter and Leon Balogun who’d worked with him before and wouldn’t have been here without him; Ethan Laird, Taylor Richards and Tyler Roberts who are here at least in part through his connections and reputation (loans like Laird and Iroegbunam now at strong risk of a January recall one would think); Seny Dieng, Chris Willock and Ilias Chair whose retention was a red line in him taking the job in the first place; and everybody else who he “got in a room with Mick” and had that “you versus yourself” mission impressed upon them only for the salesman pitching the snakeoil to piss off after 21 matches. Fair to say I’m pleased we’ve got as many points on the board as we have. If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via PayPal using loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. Pictures — Ian Randall Photography The Twitter @loftforwords Ian Randall Photography Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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