 Thursday, 23rd Aug 2012 00:06 by Clive Whittingham QPR today confirmed the departure of 24-year-old Matthew Connolly to Cardiff City on a three year contract while at the same time pursuing the signature of 34-year-old Ricardo Carvalho on loan. Sigh. Perhaps it’s little wonder that most of the professional footballers at the very top of our game seem to be thick as sun-warmed pig shit. Wayne Rooney, for example, is arguably the outstanding English player of the last decade and yet he probably thinks a thesaurus is the one with the brightly coloured collar and venom spitting ability that accounts for Wayne’s Knight’s slobbish character in the original Jurassic Park movie. There goes ‘Wazza’, a couple of brain cells rubbing together frantically searching for a spark, sleeping with prostitutes behind his wife’s back and swearing into Sky TV cameras while at the same time terrorising defences at home and abroad and propping up England’s attack for several years. The experts talk about players who are capable of forming a picture in their mind of what they’re going to do next before they actually execute it. But then they also talk about the best players operating on instinct. Perhaps the more intelligent footballers over think things. QPR fans will remember Clarke Carlisle being crowned Britain’s Brainiest Footballer by an ITV quiz show during his time at Loftus Road. They’ll also remember him searching for answers to his despair at the bottom of pint pots and packets of Marlboro Lights when his knee fell apart. We’re all currently being treated to the terribly worthy – and potentially entirely made up – angst-laden ramblings of The Secret Footballer in the Guardian. And we’ve all been watching Matthew Connolly for some time now. Footballers can be dangerous when they start to think. Matthew Connolly was, until today, the second longest serving player left at Queens Park Rangers having arrived at the club since January 2008. He was part of the first batch of players signed in the transfer window following Flavio Briatore’s takeover of the club and arrived along with Fitz Hall, Patrick Agyemang, Fitz Hall, Kieran Lee on loan from Man Utd and the converted loan deals of Akos Buszaky, Hogan Ephraim and Rowan Vine. Arriving from Arsenal’s renowned youth set up via a loan spell at fellow Championship side Colchester he was, arguably, the only one of the lot with any long term potential. Potential is certainly something Connolly has never been short of at QPR. As you would expect from an Arsenal academy graduate his ball control, passing ability, awareness, technique and positional play was a cut above anything else at QPR, or in the Championship, before he’d even arrived and started to play. He was a thinking man’s centre back, outwitting rugged centre forwards rather than trying to out-muscle them. Aged just 19 when he arrived but already playing like a man of ten years experience, Connolly gave more hope than most who have come and gone at the club since. Connolly signed for Rangers on January 2, 2008. Hogan Ephraim, signed on loan five months before Connolly arrived and awarded a further contract extension today for reasons unknown, is the longest serving player at the club. Hogan Ephraim. Today we bid farewell to Matthew Connolly who has joined Cardiff City on a three year contract for an undisclosed fee. He leaves QPR exactly the same player he was when he joined – only four and a half years older. This is perfectly understandable. When Connolly first arrived the team was managed by Luigi De Canio who, despite speaking very limited English, showed in his nine months at the club what can be achieved through coaching individual players and the team as a unit. QPR were flawed, because the players weren’t good enough, during De Canio’s reign but they were good to watch and effective because he took what he had and he coached them to be that way. Since then Connolly has played under eight different permanent managers, none of whom have lasted more than 18 months. Five were in situ less than six months. In that time, according to Soccerbase, QPR have been involved in 119 permanent player transactions (discounting loan deals) - 54 in and 65 out. Of those 54 players brought in and 65 released only Alejandro Faurlin can be said to have improved during his time at QPR – and he started from a pretty high personal level anyway. Not a single one of the 65 departures has been picked off by a bigger, more successful club for a profit. Players like Fitz Hall, Peter Ramage, Mikele Leigertwood, Kaspars Gorkss, Damien Delaney, Paddy Kenny and others have come to QPR, earned lots of money, and left for a sideways or backwards move exactly the same player as they were when they arrived. Some - through injury, advancing age or plain bone idleness – have left a lot worse than they were when they arrived: Rowan Vine, Alessandro Pellicori, Matteo Alberti etc. Many have cost a pretty penny upon arrival only to leave much later for nothing after years kicking their heals on lucrative contracts. Managers at QPR haven’t had time to coach. They’ve come in, they’ve signed or been presented with a layer of six to eight players in the transfer window, they’ve attempted to put some sort of team together and then they’ve been sacked. Only Neil Warnock, after De Canio, was given any sort of time and control and he got the team promoted but having done so he too then became much more likely to turn to the transfer market than coach and improve what he had at his disposal already. Faurlin apart, not a single one of those 117 players coming in and leaving QPR since our glorious takeover in 2007 have improved. Hogan Ephraim, extending his deal today, is exactly the same player with the same fantastic attitude and glaring failings as he was when he joined us on loan from West Ham when John Gregory was the manager. He’s still got good technical skills, an admirable work rate, a welcome approach to his profession and a likeable personality. He still does nice things with the ball at times and scores the odd eye catching goal. He’s still built like a damp dish cloth, still playing well in pre-season and disappearing from the scene in mid September, and still too timid. Upper body strength can be built through diet and gym sessions and yet five years after first arriving at QPR Hogan Ephraim still looks like he might blow over in a stiff breeze. This is unforgiveable on so many levels. Matthew Connolly is listed as weighing 13st 2lbs. If he does, I’d be surprised. I base this on a bizarre five minutes at a Player of the Year dinner a couple of years back when I had to prop him up in a tired and emotional state, and a picture of him taken this summer showing off his new sleeve tattoo when he displayed a torso almost identical to my own 11st frame. I wouldn’t fancy going toe to toe with Grant Holt built as I am, and neither did Matt judging by his various struggles with him over the years. Connolly has the natural ability and brains to be able to play at centre half despite his slight frame. QPR have bred centre backs like him before – Paul Parker was tiny, Glenn Roder similarly ghostly in appearance – and could have done so again by pairing him with a more physical partner and coaching the pair of them. It looked like Neil Warnock may have done just that when he based our promotion winning team on a back four that included Connolly and Kaspars Gorkss at its heart. But as QPR stuttered in the latter stages of that season – losing three times over Christmas, then heavily at Scunthorpe and finally at Millwall – Warnock made scapegoats of Connolly and others. He dropped him and Gorkss abruptly ahead of a home match with Ipswich, then dropped their replacements Shittu and Hall after the Millwall defeat. By the end of the season Connolly looked nothing like the first choice centre half of a title winning defence. He was nervous, mercilessly allowing balls to bounce on the edge of his own penalty area, and causing as many problems as he solved. He would dither, over think, and find himself robbed of possession by the thick people who had no problem with either of those traits. He’d stood still football wise for three and a half years and now he was regressing mentally. Had he been dim perhaps his mistakes wouldn’t have affected him but he’s not and they did. He was left out of the team at the start of the Premiership season only to suddenly find himself flung back into a struggling team in December for the visits of Man Utd and Sunderland to Loftus Road. There you go Matt, you sit there picking your feet for six months then come in and mark Wayne Rooney. The consequences were predictably disastrous. Warnock took Connolly out then slung him back in again out of the blue for a New Year’s fixture at Arsenal where, again, he clung onto the game by the seat of his pants. Then he was loaned out to Reading where he was excellent for three weeks before getting injured. Warnock is famed for his man management ability, and rightly so when you listen to what he’s done for people like Sean Derry. He handled Connolly abysmally. Meeting Matthew Connolly is enough to restore your faith in footballers. He’s articulate, intelligent, down to earth and nice. Faced with a lucrative contract from the good people at Loftus Road he invested in a tattoo business in Hatfield, recognising that tattoos were coming into fashion and Hatfield didn’t have a tattoo parlour. Other footballers in the same situation stuffed all the cocaine they could find up their nose and shagged Danielle Lloyd. At the infamous Player of the Year dinner in 2009 - when the first team turned up late, hung around in the bar during the meal, and then left early for a nightclub - Connolly sat attentively at his table, collected his Young Player of the Year award, and stayed long after the others had gone, talking to the youth team players. It was only his choice of company that reminded you how young he actually was himself. He interviewed well, and spoke up for QPR and how much he liked the club even when the entire place was descending into a farce and had nothing to like about it. At the height of the crisis, between the ludicrous reigns of Paul Hart and Mick Harford, he won a point at Blackpool with a flick up and volley from 20 yards that fizzed into the net and would have graced any game in the world. He then pointed to the badge on his chest. When I look at him the frustration is so enormous it makes me want to find a flap of skin on my forehead and start peeling layers off my entire face. It’s ironic that we’re playing Norwich this weekend, a few days after his departure, because Carrow Road has served as a microcosm for Matt’s QPR career. In September 2008 Connolly was sent off on that ground for two foolish, naïve pieces of rash play. In January 2011 on the same pitch against the same opposition he was sent off again for a foolish, naïve piece of rash play that enabled Grant Holt to do his trademark turn and theatrical flop onto the ground to draw a card. Three months before that Holt had done exactly the same thing to Connolly at Loftus Road to win a penalty which Wes Hoolahan missed. There’s no progress here. No lessons being learnt. These are the same mistakes, the same failings. Connolly looks – facially and physically – exactly the same as he did when he arrived. Like Ephraim there has been no bulking out, no physical maturity. He does the same things right and wrong as he did when he arrived, only now the lack of progress and coaching has drained him of his confidence so he’s added a nervous tameness to his game. That’s the sum total of five years at the mercy of a conveyer belt of managers at QPR: he’s the same player he was when he started but he’s more scared of things now. I can’t help but wonder, as we chase the signature of 34-year-old Ricardo Carvalho on loan for the season after a 5-0 opening day home defeat, why nobody at QPR ever looks at coaching what we already have here rather than trying to buy somebody new all the time. Hopefully this will change as Mike Rigg’s influence is felt. Or perhaps, perhaps, Matthew Connolly isn’t actually very good: too slight, too nervous, not assertive or aggressive enough. We’ll soon find out, because from tomorrow he’s working under Malky Mackay who was a bloody good centre back in his day and is, in my opinion, the Championship’s outstanding managerial talent. Mackay is fast developing a reputation for coaching the best out of the players at his disposal. I think this is a superb move for Connolly and for Cardiff, but we’ll find out soon enough. Tweet @loftforwords Pictures – Action Images, Neil Dejyothin Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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