A transfer window where QPR were meant to be shedding their best players has closed with them all still in place. LFW assesses renewed expectations, the character of the leading lights, and the nonsense peddled as fact surrounding them.
Lee Hoos is the American executive charged with reigning in the rank stupidity of a club that once held a press conference at the top of London’s Millbank Tower to unveil the signing of Ji Sung Park, and make him the captain, despite his physical condition qualifying him for a government grant towards a Stannah Stair Lift. He’ll probably need a stiff drink tonight. You don’t factor undone deals into budgets, nor do you ever make assumptions, but it was probably reasonable for the money men at Loftus Road to think that at least one of Charlie Austin, Matt Phillips, Leroy Fer, Sandro or Rob Green would be leaving this summer, taking their wages with them, and that a sizeable transfer fee would be forthcoming.
Hoos is currently negotiating with the Football League over the extent of the fine due for the last time QPR came down and chucked stupid money about and needed a sensible summer to add weight to his case. There have been some strides made: Richard Dunne, Stephen Caulker, Joey Barton, Rio Ferdinand, Bobby Zamora, Shaun Wright-Phillips and other bit part players have all been shifted on, accounting for a significant portion of the club’s wage bill, and Fer, Junior Hoilett, Armand Traore, Sandro and others don't remain for want of trying. Not only are Tjaronn Chery, Massimo Luongo, Daniel Tozser and Gabriele Angella better players than the ones they’ve replaced, they’re also younger and cheaper.
The Raheem Sterling windfall also needs to be factored in but I’m sure Rangers expected their income from transfers to be higher, and their wage bill lower still at this stage.
Blackburn and Nottingham Forest look on like the militant straight guys who’ve found their regular breakfast café mobbed by the attendees at a Gay Pride march. The Financial Fair Play rules are a mess, and almost completely unenforceable as written. QPR are, rightly, challenging them and working out a more reasonable outcome but while they’re doing that they’re still signing players — good players. Meanwhile Michail Antonio, Tom Cairney, Rudy Gestede and many others have all left Ewood Park and the City Ground while an embargo on buying replacements remains in place to varying degrees. Two clubs who should be challenging for promotion have made poor starts to the season as the talent drain takes effect. If the boot were on the other foot, I can’t imagine we’d be taking this well. The longer it goes on, the deeper the effects are felt in Lancashire and Nottinghamshire, the more the Football League is at risk of serious legal action from those two clubs if QPR win their case.
There are, though, financial positives, as well as the obvious football ones, to the outcome of the window, which has left QPR with one of the best starting elevens in the division on paper. Firstly, in a crazy summer where Sheffield Wednesday offered £10m for Ross McCormack, Bristol City twice lodged £9m bids for strikers, Burnley succeeded with one… QPR didn’t get involved. They walked away from deals like Daniel Bentley from Southend, and lost out on others like Tim Ream who eventually moved from Bolton to Fulham. That hasn’t happened in recent years — QPR have gone in, the price has gone up, QPR have stayed in and signed the player anyway. The Bentley one may come back to bite them, because he’s a smashing keeper and probably a snip at £2m, but it sent out an important message: QPR are not the club with bottomless buckets of cash and the brain of a person who reads the Cara Delevigne stories in the Evening Standard any more.
Secondly, given that the new philosophy (if it exists and isn’t merely PR) seems to be about buying youngsters for low amounts, developing and selling them on for profit, the hit they’re now almost certainly going to take on Charlie Austin may offer a reward elsewhere in the long run. Had Rangers spent all summer asking £15m for their main striker — which is by no means an unfair price given the amounts players like James Chester, Connor Wickham, Jonny Evans and Bradley Johnson have moved for — and then rolled over late in the window and accepted £10m it would have weakened Les Ferdinand and the club’s position for many transfer windows to come. What hope would Rangers have of getting what they want for Chery, Luongo and others in the future if the world knows that, when push comes to shove, the price will drop on the deadline?
Such steadfastness requires the cooperation of the players. There have been numerous underhand attempts from other clubs to unsettle Austin and Phillips, and one quite flagrant and obviously libel crack from West Ham at getting the price lowered for the former. This is disgraceful, and completely against the rules, but it’s common place, and the rules are never enforced — what punishment is being metered out to Chelsea, for example, for having John Terry, Gary Cahill and others talking openly about John Stones of Everton in official press conferences?
We have seen this evening, with Saido Berahino at West Brom, how easy it is to end up with a toxic asset on your hands when you try and stand your ground. Berahino has publicly bemoaned how the club has treated him (having picked him up as a 12-year-old who didn’t speak English and had spent time in a care home and coached him into the player he is today, with lots of Premier League first team football along the way) and said he won’t play for them again after Spurs tried their usual tactic of making numerous derisory bids right on the deadline.
It would have been easy for Austin and Phillips to start throwing toys around the place themselves, and force moves through. Austin is safe in the knowledge that his contract expires next summer so, barring a serious injury, he’ll have his pick of 50 clubs then rather than rushing to sign a deal now from a choice of two or three that may not be a good fit. Phillips, meanwhile, seems to genuinely appreciate the improvements that have been made to his game by Chris Ramsey and, again, was in no hurry to rush off and sign any old deal just for the sake of a swift return to the Premier League.
Harry Redknapp’s claim that he was looking for the "right sort” to sign for QPR has, rightly, been ridiculed in the wake of a succession of Benoit Assou-Ekotto and Ravel Morrison-type signings. Neither Austin nor Phillips were much of a punt when he signed them, nor were they cheap at £9m for the pair. And it’s worth remembering that just last January he was trying to bomb Phillips out to Wigan so he could get Callum McManaman having never once got the best out of the player. But… he deserves credit for not only signing the type of player QPR should have been looking at long before, but also the type of character. They’re both worth more than twice what Rangers paid for them, and neither of them are being a dick about it. Indeed, despite the disappointment of not getting their big moves, they both seem genuinely happy to stay and work hard for the club. Both have started the season well despite the speculation.
Rare breeds, and great players, who we’re lucky to still have.
Take Leroy Fer, Charlie Austin and Matt Phillips out of the current squad and for all the decent additions made, the cupboard looks bare. The summer rhetoric has been more about consolidation, steadying the ship, building a platform and so on, rather than thumping the tub and promising an invasion at dawn.
Whether that will stand up now, given the players they have available to them until January at least, remains to be seen. There will continue to be teething problems and bedding in time — Chris Ramsey’s style is very distinctive, often leaving the defence exposed in the quest to pose a goal threat from all areas of the pitch, and it’s taking some getting used to. There are two more new players to add into that now, plus Sandro, Fer and others to come back in. After Mark Hughes and the Taffia, talk of giving a team time to gel is to QPR fans what a late night appearance from the police helicopter is to residents of London’s suburbia — deep down you know it’s right and necessary but fuck me can you shut up and get on with it already?
There are shortages — neither full back is impressing, an injury to Nedum Onuoha (who is prone) would be hugely damaging, likewise to Austin, defensive minded central midfielders number two of which one is Michael Doughty… But a team of Green, Perch, Onuoha, Angella, Yun, Faurlin/Tozser and Sandro with Austin up front and three from Mackie, Luongo, Chery, Fer and Phillips behind is as good as there is in the division.
Given that some didn’t even seem willing to give Ramsey the benefit of August, even after three league wins and a draw from five matches, before calling for his head it remains to be seen how much the expectation level will now ratchet up and what effect that will have one the team at games.
A game at home to Nottingham Forest scheduled so early many would still prefer to be in bed, at the behest of the TV companies, won’t help that atmosphere first up. This is a much younger, much more exciting, much more attacking team than QPR have had on their hands for some time. There have been some duds signed this summer, but there have been some potentially brilliant additions as well. An all guns blazing start against Forest wouldn’t go amiss, but let’s stick with them a while longer than that if it doesn’t go well eh?
Love when people think you would just "invent" something or "lie"... Why? Because the abuse is oh so worth it?– Miguel Delaney (@MiguelDelaney) September 1, 2015
Hmmm, yes, but, a cynic writes, the retweets, click throughs and page traffic don’t hurt do they?
The Transfer Deadline Day bandwagon continues to roll, but if you look in the back there’s still only that day Man City signed Robinho and a lone Everton fan waving his wife’s dildo around.
They’re quiet and getting quieter. As we’ve seen with Everton and John Stones this summer, the grotesque new Premier League television deal that comes in next year, rather than furnishing clubs with the money to go nuts, is actually enabling the middle ranking teams to say ‘no’. Stones would almost certainly have gone in years past, just as Daniel Levy’s attempts to land Berahino for a bargain price right at the death would have succeeded.
If a further indication were needed about how the market is changing, Tottenham’s summer activity stands testament to it. Levy was once held up as the shrewdest of the shrewd, who always got his man for less than he was worth, or sold a player on for a vast profit. He pulled every trick in the book, getting Rafael van der Vaart in miles after one deadline, persuading Simon Jordan to part with Wayne Routledge for a pittance on another by secretly doing the medical and getting the player parked next to White Hart Lane before even lodging a bid on another. Spurs, this time, have had a lousy summer, and are left relying on two strikers — Harry Kane’s difficult second album and Emmanuel Adebayor whenever Jesus and the voices in his tiny mind tell him it’s ok to go out onto the grass and play some actual football for his £100,000 a week. These days the asking price means the asking price, and you can either piss or get off the pot.
But words like "quiet” doth butter no parsnips. Sky still, for instance, station a reporter at Arsenal all day. The hype has, at times, been replaced by the surreal — at one stage today a "Football Manager gamer” was wheeled out to say he’d completed ten seasons and Anthony Martial had only averaged 6.36 and ended up playing in League One with Burnley so it "seems like a strange move from United this one.” I may have mentioned this a time or two before but it seems appropriate to gently raise it again — I got to the fucking UEFA Cup final with a Scunthorpe United team that still included Alex Calvo Garcia and Chris Hope on that game.
At one stage this morning a LFW message boarder started a thread saying his painter and decorator, a Villa season ticket holder who "knows people high up at the club”, had told him they were in for Nedum Onuoha and Tim Sherwood had been to see him play at Wolves last week. Sure enough, within minutes, it was out on the dreaded social media, at which point he fessed up to the whole thing being an experiment with that hypothesis in mind.
Later Sky reported, briefly, before never mentioning it again, that Alex Oxlade Chamberlain was going to Galatasaray. Just think about that for a moment. A seriously unlikely story, put forward as fact and truth while you are persistently encouraged throughout thebroadcast to log in and stake your actual, hard-earned, money on, effectively, whether it's true or not via Sky Bet. Having spent an entire summer taking money from punters on where Charlie Austin will go only for him to stay with the same club he was at all along, they waited precisely ten minutes after the close of the window to open a market on where Charlie Austin will go in January.
Austin has, at various stages of the summer, been going to Newcastle, West Ham, Crystal Palace, Bournemouth and, finally, laughably, Manchester United. Matt Phillips’ list of admirers is almost as long. Except they’re never reported as admirers, never reported as merely interested, always as a "done deal” always as a "medical tomorrow”. It’s always just about to happen, and the person telling you is always sure and has always got some success story they called in the dim and distant past to back up their credibility.
QPR are lucky to have Dave McIntyre at this time of year - non-sensationalist, genuinely connected, with a good success rate. But I leave these here, a random mixture of the worst of the rest, merely to break up the page for the people who struggle with a lot of words and not enough pictures and say I write too much.
This one, for instance... pic.twitter.com/IvcW6J5vfR– LoftforWords (@LoftforWords) September 1, 2015
0 from 5. Best stick to drumming.... pic.twitter.com/yAs9TKked6– Buck Fitches (@hitman_hearn) September 1, 2015
And again... pic.twitter.com/9TNCx7lfBg– LoftforWords (@LoftforWords) September 1, 2015
Rob Green having a medical at West Ham and could be unveiled tomorrow. [London Evening Standard] #WHUFC pic.twitter.com/w78LLwCAd5– West Ham News (@WHUFC_News) August 21, 2015
Nedum Onuoah could be leaving QPR. Norwich among those interested but he earns upwards of £45k. Not sure he is worth it @TheSunFootball– Charlie Wyett (@CharlieWyett) September 1, 2015
Watford are also trying to sign Crystal Palace's Mile Jedinak for £5m @TheSunFootball #wfc #cpfc– Charlie Wyett (@CharlieWyett) August 31, 2015
Spurs are attempting a £15m move for West Ham midfielder Cheikhou Kouyate #WHUFC #thfc http://t.co/EBuGPKsC4s– Charlie Wyett (@CharlieWyett) August 31, 2015
Even the good, trained, qualified, reputable journalists, who will have been taught about multi sourcing stories, questioning the integrity and potential bias of the person telling you the information, admit that this time of year in football is all a game. Agents peddle them a bit of a line to get their client in the news, maybe stir the market up a little bit, and in return for publishing they get an actual scoop a little bit further down the line.
That’s pretty lamentable. Where it gets particularly disgraceful is people who have none of those qualifications, none of those ethics and none of that training, peddling football stories often out of thin air for the sake of click through, followers, traffic and page impressions. Even this morning it went round that West Brom were back for Phillips, offering Jonas Olsson and Victor Anichebe in exchange, with all the associated debate about whether that was a good deal flowing forth afterwards. Phillips himself Tweeted that he was at home watching the television.
People are lapping this stuff up. The Newcastle fans were particularly embarrassing, responding en masse to every Tweet from Austin and his new wife and twisting any subject they cared to mention back towards a move to St James' Park. At one stage when Austin mentioned he'd had a new consignment of underwear delivered, half a dozen Geordies were online within minutes letting him know they also have pants and a postal service on Tyneside. All of these people are clicking fervently on any half-official looking suggestion that it might be a "done deal #bang", making the parasites richer as they go.
Here’s a fact for you — QPR didn’t receive a single firm bid for either Charlie Austin or Matt Phillips in the final 48 hours of the transfer window. Not one.
You’re being lied to. Start actively rejecting it.
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures — Action Images