QPR started to click into gear with a fine performance and win at Cardiff City last weekend.
1 – The Match
One sided, though not in the way most people would have predicted beforehand. QPR controlled this game from start to finish with a controlled passing game that kept possession for long periods, creating numerous chances and frustrating the hosts. Cardiff hardly threatened all afternoon with Chopra and Bothroyd well marked by Gorkss and Stewart and Burke and Whittingham kept reasonably quiet by Leigertwood and Borrowdale. With the ball Rowlands and Watson dominated the match and carved out numerous chances. It was 2-0 at half time thanks to to two crisp finishes from Jay Simpson, although he looked offside for the first, and could have been 4-0 by the end but Vine hit a post and Buzsaky’s late free kick flashed just wide with the keeper beaten.
7/10
2 – QPR Performance
Almost faultless. Rowlands and Watson in the middle of midfield controlled the possession, dictated the pace of the game, guided QPR around the park and completely dominated Cardiff. Simpson up front terrorised the hosts and scored twice. Other than that though there were no outstanding individual performances – this was just the perfect all round team performance. QPR didn’t have a bad player, everybody did their job, and we had the necessary quality to get in front and the necessary passing game to frustrate Cardiff thereafter. Things are certainly improving, at Scunthorpe when we won the possession retention was poor but here it was brilliant at times with the fans cheering the passes from very early in the first half.
9/10
3 – QPR Support
Rangers took around 700 fans to South Wales for the first ever trip to the new Cardiff City Stadium. Although, as at most new grounds, we were marooned up in the corner the atmosphere in the away end was very good, helped of course by a great performance on the pitch. Once in front the QPR fans rarely shut up – the song about where Cardiff can stick their dragon always makes me smile, but for me the funniest one on the afternoon was a group at the back of the stand doing Cardiff’s bizarre Ayatollah head patting dance while signing “what the f****** hell is this”.
7/10
4 – Atmosphere
Almost non-existent. Ninian Park was renowned as one of the most atmospheric and intimidating grounds in the league and while they may have only moved across the road Cardiff now find themselves in yet another soulless bowl of a stadium with all the aesthetic value and atmosphere of an Ikea distribution centre. The home fans roused themselves briefly just after half time, but QPR’s further domination soon quietened them down and the game was played out to silence apart from chants from the merry band of 700 QPR fans in the corner and groans, criticism, boos and jeers aimed at their own players from the Cardiff fans. Their record on this ground is good so far, but playing in this vacuum every week will only benefit away sides just as much as Ninian Park used to help Cardiff.
4/10
5 – The Ground
Am I in Coventry? Am I in Derby? Am I in Middlesbrough? Oh no, wait, the train ticket says Cardiff. Who is doing this? Which bastard architect is out there telling football clubs that these giant cereal bowls are what supporters want to come to watch football in? I just don’t understand why all these new grounds have to look exactly the same, especially when they’re bloody horrible. I mean when they started to spring up clubs like Huddersfield and Bolton at least made a bit of an effort to make theirs a bit different, but now it’s like they’re being delivered in flat pack boxes. I hated this ground, I hated everything about it. I hated the way the atmosphere of Ninian Park has completely gone, the way it has turned the Cardiff fans from one of the most passionate bunches in the league backing their own side to a bunch of Johnny-come-Lateleys who expect their team to win and abuse it when it doesn't, the way the away fans are bunged up in the corner, the distance from fans to pitch, the thousands of empty seats, the barcode reading turnstiles that save not one penny for the club because they all need an operator to help you through anyway and so it goes on. It may have been a shithole but I pined for the shack over the road. Show some bloody imagination people and design a ground with a bit of character about it. Look you didn't have to piss in a portacabin, you could see the match from your seat, you weren't seperated from a baying mob by a felt curtain, your view wasn't obstructed, there were plenty of refreshment kiosks and toilets - it was everything you need in a football ground. Functional but utterly, utterly characterless.
5/10
6 – Pre-Match
Very dull. I wanted to watch Burnley v Sunderland before the game so I went in the first pub that had that on offer which sadly was the Wetherspoons next to the station. I thought this might be the case so I ate at Birmingham on the way down so I didn’t have to eat their horrendous food. The football was on, I got a seat, it was filthy, the drinks were cheap, it was heaving – it was what you would expect basically. Walked down to the ground at about 2pm, took me 25 minutes.
5/10
7 – Journey
This actually turned out to be quite an emotional one for me personally because it is the start of QPR trips on my own. My brother Paul had been due to come to this one before starting back at university for the Barnsley game but had to cry off late with another commitment. Now I’ve been to midweek games on my own before, and I always know plenty of people when I arrive, but for my whole life I have been travelling down to the games with people. However this season with Paul somehow voted in as Sports Secretary in the University of Sheffield legal department (rigged election I reckon) he is not coming to as many games and Northern the Elder sadly passed away during the close season. So after years of coming with my grandad, dad, Northern the Elder and brother now suddenly there was just me. And God it was lonely.
The trains down ran reasonably smoothly. I changed at Birmingham New Street and although the Cardiff train did that annoying thing of appearing four minutes late on the board and then drifting out by another two minutes every time two minutes had passed it did not do it for long and we were only 20 minutes late, or thereabouts, when we left and we had made most of that up by the time we got to Cardiff at half 12. There was a nasty incident between Sheffield and Chesterfield where some overweight, smelly blob sat in the seat behind me and spent the first ten minutes of the journey violently clearing is sinus of copious amounts of glop that was then wiped on his hands/floor/seat/t-shirt. I was going to move seats, but he was only going as far as Chesterfield and it turned out everybody else in the coach had been thinking the same as widespread sighing and laughing ensued when he flopped out onto the platform. His seat was then declared a bio-hazard and future passengers warned against sitting in it.
Coming back I managed to get sat with two weirdoes. On the Cardiff to Birmingham train some sneck nosed arsehole sat reading his academic literature breaking off every now and again to abuse the fat woman on the other side of the aisle for a) being fat and b) spreading out across three seats and putting her feet up. She dealt with it very well I thought, I was tempted to get up and smack him in the face myself for being so rude to a perfect stranger for no good reason whatsoever but decided to immerse myself in the Mark Kermode podcast instead.
Things only got worse at Birmingham New Street where a massive bloke in waist high wellington boots caked in mud approached me on the platform. Why always me? He wanted to know where I had been, what I had been doing and where I was going. I told him and he seemed very happy about that as he was going to Sheffield as well – and that meant apparently that I could wake him up when we got there. I tried to escape by sitting in a single empty seat next to a normal looking woman but he saw through that and sat next to me on the other side of the aisle and spent the next ten minutes telling me, and everybody else, that he'd been up since 4am that morning shooting. He didn’t go to sleep in the end, but did produce a large shovel from a carry on bag and spent quite some time between Burton and Chesterfield sharpening it. Unnerving.
5/10
8 – Police/Stewards
Very few police and no sign of trouble as far as I could tell. The stewards were fine by and large although I did manage to have a run in with one before I had even got through the front gate – and I don’t make a habit of arguing with stewards. When I first arrived I had my ticket checked and was told there was a programme seller by the turnstile. When that proved not to be the case I went back out to the road and walked round the ground to get one. Then I walked back to the turnstile. At some point I must have passed the ticket checking stewards again and one chased me down towards the turnstiles issuing a bollocking about ignoring him – I honestly hadn’t heard him. The nearby police officer laughed, and waved me through. Give a man a yellow jacket…
6/10
Total – 42/80