Rock and a hard place - preview

With Saturday's defeat at Bournemouth leaving QPR facing half a dozen largely meaningless games before the play offs, Harry Redknapp's attitude to team selection will say a lot about the club's direction beyond May.

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You would think after all these years in management that Harry Redknapp would be somewhat immune to the criticism by now.

It must be exasperating for him to have picked a side up from the mess QPR were in at the end of last season, totally restructured and restaffed it in one summer, got it to third in the league despite all its best players having long term injuries at one time or another, and still be getting grief from the crowd despite sitting third in the league. But after 30 years in the management game what does the opinion of a mug punter count for anyway?

That exasperation has shown through once or twice though — once the cameras were off at a recent pre-match press conference following the defeat at Charlton he forcibly ran through all he’d had to deal with this season and made his point about what a decent job he’s done in the circumstances. So it is getting to him, and for that reason he must have winced slightly to find that while Mobido Maiga — his, expensive, signing — turned in his latest shambolic performance up front in a poor defeat at Bournemouth on Saturday, Tom Hitchcock — who scored on the only occasion Redknapp gave him a first team chance and has never been near the side since — was bagging a 30 minute hat trick for Rotherham at Gillingham.

Hitchcock has been a convenient stick to beat Redknapp with this season — scoring goals regularly for Crewe and Rotherham while out on loan in the league below, while Ranger struggle to find anybody who isn’t Charlie Austin to score goals at all for them. There is a danger that the thirst to see a young player come through the ranks at QPR — only Richard Langley has done so with any sustained success in the last 15 years — is putting Hitchcock up on a pedestal.

He’s not a kid — well into his 20s now — he was released by Blackburn and he has zero Championship experience. Harry Redknapp has seen him every day in training and decreed that he’d be better off out on loan somewhere, and in fact at Rotherham he’s more super sub than starter. So we’re not, it would seem, in the Ipswich Town situation quite yet — where they repeatedly loaned Jordan Rhodes out and then flogged him for a song while spending four times as much on Tamas Priskin — but to see Hitchock beautifully pull a ball out of the air with one delicate touch and then exquisitely flick it over the Gillingham goalkeeper with his second while QPR persist with Maiga and Will Keane in attack did stick in the craw somewhat. Maiga won’t score a goal like that as long as he’s got a hole in his arse.

QPR don’t currently look like a team that’s going to be promoted this season. We’re running the risk here of getting to the start of next season having given Maiga a run for West Ham, given Keane some experience for Man Utd, while leaving players we actually own on the shelf, so next season we’ll be once again loaning them out for experience and loaning others in to play for our first team. It’s classic Redknapp management, and very in keeping with the way QPR have gone about their business since the money arrived back in 2007.

The bigger shame for me was loaning in Oguchi Onyewu, and then later Aaron Hughes, when Max Ehmer is waiting in the wings for his chance. He’s plenty good enough for Championship level, and quite what he gained from another three months in League One with Carlisle — a division where he’s already spent a season and a half with Yeovil, two separate spells with Stevenage and a few months with Preston is beyond me.

And that was when QPR were playing for automatic promotion. Having passed up the opportunity to close the gap on suddenly-injury-hit Burnley to five points with poor results against Blackpool and Bournemouth, the R’s are now in a strange position of having nothing to aim at ahead of them, and little threatening them further back, over the remaining games this season. Barring an extreme collapse, and extraordinary run from the chasing pack, QPR will be in the play offs in May regardless of what they do.

It seems an ideal opportunity to do a couple of things. Firstly, rest important players who have had a long, hard season. Richard Dunne has been regressing slowly from a formidable start to his season to the point on Saturday where he looked badly exposed against a striker as limited as Yann Kermorgant. Clint Hill, too, has made tired mistakes in recent games. And the purpose of rushing Charlie Austin back into action with more strapping around his shoulder than your average linebacker is completely lost on me as well. Secondly, start blooding players who will definitely be here next season, and Hitchcock is certainly one of them along with Mike Petrasso.

Certainly in their cases, the form of the loan players being selected ahead of them, suggests it might actually improve our team in the short term as well, even disregarding the long term benefits.

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