QPR's pre-season got underway in earnest on Saturday at Loftus Road, with a good account of a new-look team against a strong Tottenham outfit - all a far cry from where we were a year ago.
Last Thursday, on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Jasmine Paolini was bobbing and weaving, ducking and diving, and ultimately riding her luck all the way through to the women’s final. It took a comeback from a first set deficit, a third set tiebreak that eventually finished 10-8, and a game that lasted longer than any other women’s semi-final in SW19 history, to wrestle past Croatia’s Donna Vekic. Paolini, height of Ilias Chair, hair of Rayan Kolli, had never won a game on grass prior to the tournament, and now she was a finalist. It was utterly compelling, perfect sporting theatre and drama.
In front of me a bawdy, middle-aged, woman, who liked to let everybody around know what she was thinking through the medium of SPEAKING OUT LOUD, spent much of it WhatsApping a gentleman almost certainly not her husband, tactically seated a row and three seats away to her left, about whether "a quick shag in the toilets would be out of the question”. (Don’t look at me like that, she had her phone set on that large font your mum uses.)
Disconnect and distraction. I know how she feels.
On Thursday night, under a low summer sun at The Oval, Sam Curran moved Surrey, and himself, into position in a T20 Blast fixture with Hampshire. He used the last ball of the penultimate over to get himself on strike, then hit a six so tall and mighty it eventually clunked down on the roof of Kennington Tube. Surrey won by five wickets, Curran had a personal tonne. What a privilege it is to watch people with such supreme individual ability go about their craft. And I sat there, watched the planes come in, drank my £8.50 pints of "craft lager”, chatted to our Sheff Wed correspondent Lovely Jon about why exactly he’s moving to Nantwich, clapped politely, went home, and got into bed with my book.
It has been a summer of sport, and I have sat through all of it washing over me with something approaching total apathy, waiting for anything, anything at all, to trigger any sort of emotion whatsoever. In a tiny tavern with a wooden swing door, off the idyllic town square of Maussane-les-Alpilles, I saw Jude Bellingham bicycle kick his way to his country’s rescue, surrounded by locals desperate for England to humiliate themselves against Slovakia. The BeIN Sports studio team passed a ball sideways between themselves, shrugged, and threw to the break at half time in mock mimic of England’s passive style. Then Jude returned serve, straight back up the coal hole. How do you like them apples? Two goals in a minute in that environment, and my primary reaction was whether the little place over the square we’d been eyeing up for entrecote et frites afterwards would still be serving after extra time. I saw Ollie Watkins score an England goal of all time surrounded by the sort of Tooting Market massive who like to performatively throw their pints into the air in the hope of starring on an Instagram account celebrating "limbs” and worried more about my work shirt. Friends and family moved heaven and earth to secure flights, hotels and match tickets. They collectively lost their minds and tempers over Gareth Southgate’s perceived rank incompetence. And I watched it all come to its seemingly inevitable conclusion, from my usual spot in the Crown & Sceptre, shrugged, got the train home, and haven’t thought about it since.
I’m waiting to discover whether this numbness is a product of my long standing mental illness that pits QPR over and above all others and other when it comes to sport, and indeed several other aspects of life normal people consider more important than football (career, other people’s bloody weddings). Or if, in fact, QPR’s 2023/24 put us all through the ringer to such an extent we’re going to struggle to feel anything about anything else for a long time to come. The fear of our club sinking into the existence currently being slogged through by Charlton, who and how we’d cover all those bloody Pizza Trophy games against Premier League puppy farms, then the worry we’d left it too late to finally get ourselves a brilliant manager and would always wonder what he could have done with us had we only got him a month sooner and stayed up. That grim drive back down the M1 after Leeds, that long lonely Valentines Night in Stoke’s less than Premier Inn, the outright fury at Asmir Begovic in Plymouth… All of it eventually usurped and melted away into the fantastic performance at home to West Brom, the last-minute Jimmy Dunne winner against Birmingham, and the televised whitewash revenge against Daniel Farke’s stumbling side.
You only realise how much it’s consuming you, how much you’re thinking about it, how much you care, when it’s all over, and you go looking for other things to fit in the hole it’s left behind. And how ill equipped those things are at doing the job when you come to rely on them. When you’ve experienced that Jimmy Dunne goal, what else is there left? Where else do you get a high like that?
I’m considering taking up smack.
Pre-season friendlies have always been a poor substitute for the hopeless addict, especially this year with the club’s poorly considered decision to reward its fanbase for two years of remarkably good -humoured support through a time of crisis by sticking the fun bit of the preparations behind closed doors.
It’s a fool’s mission to read too much into what are largely fitness exercises, but it was impossible to sit in a packed Loftus Road, with a billiard table playing surface, and watch us go toe-to-toe with a strong Tottenham Hotspur team, and not reflect on how things have moved in 12 months.
A year ago we were following a fairly farcical tour of Austria with a scrappy draw at Wimbledon and outright pasting at Oxford United. Our first game of the season had to be switched to Vicarage Road because we’d dug our pitch up at the end of May instead of the beginning "in case we made the play-offs”. Lewis Wing was about to choose crisis club Reading over us, money enough to tempt Chris Forino from Wycombe or Josh Knight from Peterborough could not be found, and Gareth Ainsworth was in danger of passing out from the emotion of the great Asmir Begovic knowing his name. Wycombe 2.0? This wasn’t even Wealdstone seconds.
Third kit the colour of regurgitated chip-shop curry sauce notwithstanding, the mere fact Tottenham want to come here and play a game tells you something. Not only come here, but come here in mid-July with Son, Werner and Johnson up front, Bissouma in midfield, an outing for expensive new boy Archie Gray... Brighton, another progressive Premier League club, will also entrust is to be part of their preparations in a fortnight, and while it’s somewhat depressing to be pre-season fodder for clubs we all remember playing, and regularly beating, in league games, it says plenty about the improved standing of QPR, and their manager. From cowboy boots and tactics to cream chinos and shrewd moves. We saw similar when Mark Warburton started to motor in W12 and Man Utd and Leicester (albeit with Covid travel restrictions imposed on their grotesque summer globetrotting) requested games here because it was similar style, formation and culture to that they’d face week-to-week. Requests to spend 90 minutes on the end of a wheeled cannon firing shrapnel in the vague direction of Hamzad Kargbo were few and far between.
Hear from Martí after our pre-season friendly with Tottenham 🗣 pic.twitter.com/k4WoT98Ytt— QPR FC (@QPR) July 20, 2024
The recruitment is markedly different as well. A year ago the emphasis was on the manager’s picks, and getting some experience into a beleaguered squad and broken dressing room. The incomers were domestic, often in their 30s, and given chunky contracts to persuade them to come here rather than the one-year deals they were being offered elsewhere. The club has the same head of recruitment, Andy Belk, now as it did then. Belk has long been leading on certain signings at Rangers – Willock, Dozzell, Paal – from his data and analytics department. Previously, though, the squad has been a mish-mash of players signed for those reasons, players signed because the manager liked them (Ball, Gray, Odubajo), players signed because whichever flavour of the month at the time said we should (Gary Penrice liked Wheeler, Osayi-Samuel, Freeman), players signed through rank desperation (Cameron, Hemed, Rangel) or players pushed by the Chris Ramsey side of the business (Kakay, Hamalainen, Eze). This summer Belk is four for four, and if links to Sporting Gijon’s Jonathan Varane come to fruition that’ll be five. All brought in from the continent.
QPR flip flop around between recruitment strategies, changing direction more than the Top Gear test track, and have been on one of these continental recruitment drives before (Sylla, Borisiuk, Wszolek) but this definitely seems like this summer’s ideal, and it’s a marked contrast to a year ago.
Goalkeeper Paul Nardi was the early big winner of the newcomers. Most obviously, he made three excellent one-on-one saves against good Premier League players to catch the eye and bring a bumper home crowd to its feet. That happily offset the mumble and grumble about Luca Gunter’s second half tip of Lyndon Dykes’ goalbound header onto the post at the other end – Gunter one of approaching a dozen (Harvey Elliott, Alfie Gilchrist…) QPR academy prospects pinched by category A puppy farms for a paltry collective sum of £700k which Les Ferdinand credited for holing his development club plans for Rangers below the waterline. Nardi could do nothing about Bissouma’s slick opening goal (celebrated by karate kicking the corner flag and an assortment of very Spursy secret handshakes, in a July pre-season friendly, against Championship opposition – there’s dick swinging, and there’s just being a bit of a dick) nor Dane Scarlett’s second.
Paul’s first save in W12 was a big one 🧤 pic.twitter.com/qjjXvtXEks— QPR FC (@QPR) July 21, 2024
More importantly, though, and the reason a goalkeeper like Nardi was seen as a priority first signing this summer, was his fleet of foot and comfort on the ball. He pinged an accurate 40-yard ball straight into midfield to bypass a Premier League high press in the first ten minutes, and his pass selection and execution for the rest of the game was near faultless. There will be mistakes to come, out of hand and foot, and there’s a danger the only way from this performance is down. Nevertheless, like Joe Walsh at Coventry in May, you’ll quickly see the difference a modern, progressive goalkeeper like this could make to a Marti Cifuentes team as opposed to the Cleethorpes and District Arthritis Care vice chair we had between the sticks last season.
Hevertton Santos, on the other hand, looked a little ropey/rusty to me. The fear is, naturally, that players with that sort of background may struggle with the rigours of the Championship. It’s an oft-touted, lazy assumption that Johnny Foreigner couldn’t possibly stand the nuances of a Tuesday night trip to Hull (Kenneth Paal seems to have managed alright, a virtual ever present over his two years so far), but it is a more physically demanding and relentless league. It may well be the presence of those Ainsworth signings – particularly Cook and Colback – from a year ago that help offset that potential struggle.
Of the players who were here last season, the ultimate stand out was Rayan Kolli. Back from a six-month injury lay off with Tina Turner hair and Donald Duck waddle still in situ, he seriously impressed with a highly accomplished showing against a team who he’d previously taken to the cleaners in the FA Youth Cup as one of his breakout QPR performances. A first half 25-yarder athletically tipped onto the bar would have been a nice crown to sit atop an excellent 45 minutes that sent the visiting Spurs fans home chattering about a long-awaited new Eze off the Shepherd’s Bush conveyer belt. Perhaps that highly ambitious switch to Cardiff City for Chris Willock and Chris Willock’s hamstrings won’t be the catastrophic blow to QPR Chris Willock and Chris Willock’s dad might think on this evidence. The departure of Sinclair Armstrong, on the other hand, has palpably robbed an already slow team of what little pace it did have – highlighted starkly by the athleticism of top flight players – and Kolli was noticeably reluctant to take his full back on down to the byline when isolated one-on-one.
Rayan rattling the woodwork 🚀 pic.twitter.com/Oga671DaQD— QPR FC (@QPR) July 21, 2024
Kolli, and Michy Frey, were also unfortunate that a nice first half move for a goal was narrowly (and perhaps incorrectly) flagged offside. That would have been richly deserved for Kolli, and much needed for Frey who was becoming a bit of a standing joke by the end of last season. I still thought the Swiss target man looked clunky as hell. I like him on the press, but he runs about like me coming down a flight of stairs after the Amazon delivery guy catches me in the shower.
I’m told by the Twitter this is a harsh assessment, and perhaps it is. The mood music at the moment is overwhelmingly positive and the club can do no wrong. Winding the clock back a year I’m sure we’d have all have been lambasting them giving 18 months to a striker who moves like he’s made out of bits of old boat, and locking us out of pre-season friendlies played on a golf course against teams that would struggle to compete in the Paradise Park Monday Night sixes. At the moment though it’s all part of Christian Nourry’s grand plan, and people are lapping that narrative up. The club would do well to think carefully about how they spend that credit and what on during this honeymoon period, because it will not last. It’s QPR, it will not last.
A need for improvement up front has been clear for a long time, and we wait to see wither Zan Celar, unveiled before the game, is that answer or Adam Czerkas mkII. Try not to think about him being behind Jan Mlakar in the Slovenia pecking order and be optimistic for a change you miserable sods. Lyndon Dykes got a nice early sitter under his belt at the near post shortly after making his comeback from the injury that robbed him of his own Euros outing.
Central midfield, too, you would think would likely be the next area of attention. Having previously never heard of him, I am (typical fickle football fan) now disappointed analytics darling Stefan Teitur Thordarson picked Preston over us. In him and Ben Whiteman the Lilywhites now have the central midfield Belk wanted to put together here, and this was another game where exactly that sort of big, physical, ball-on-the-turn, midfield presence to play ‘eight’ (puke) was missing. That’s not me ridiculously harshly judging the always willing Elijah Dixon-Bonner and Jack Colback, who were playing their first competitive friendly games this summer against bloody Bissouma, Pape Sarr and later James Madison, just stating a pretty obvious area for attention in this team. Isaac Hayden continues to aggressively like every QPR Instagram post, though whether he’s the answer to that I remain to be convinced.
Lucas Andersons’s skip around the crest-and physically fallen Timo Werner was pure sex, and merits it’s own paragraph. Go get the Barry White music.
Pre-season is often about who’s not there as much as who is. Ilias Chair, in the stand, alleged back injury. Sam Field, not seen since one of the Spanish non-leaguers tried to rip the ballsack off him. Reggie Cannon, still notably behind Jimmy Dunne in the right back pecking order – Dunne looked in terrific shape, and captained the side, which felt like a bit of a Cifuentes statement with Steve Cook on the field.
And, of course, the plethora of kids being given their big moment in the sun. Of a string of late substitutions, Alfie Lloyd was the obvious stand out and a potential answer to that quicker, impact sub role Armstrong previously fulfilled. The temptation for him, Crocodile Bennie who looks and plays far more physically mature than his 18 years, and others, is to try and get on the ball, dribble round people, and shoot, to potentially score that big, eye-catching goal that gets people talking about you for the first team. There was a lot of that in a chaotic end to a 2-0 defeat, and people did indeed (justifiably) go away talking about Lloyd. For me, contrary for contrary’s sake perhaps but old enough to remember Kieron St Aimee (Hitchin, Thurrock, Maidenhead, and very, very frequently Hornchurch) destroying Celtic on this ground, I liked Welsh youth international Alfie Tuck. He played a disciplined role at the base of midfield and passed a nice ball out of there, resisting the urge to try and Hollywood ball his way to attention. I’ll be keeping an eye out for him.
From the family stand part of the Lower Loft a boy of around 11 made the most of a lull in proceedings to proclaim West London wonderful in glorious falsetto. "Full of tits, fanny and Rangers” he cried. Full of Rangers once more, and not before time. Kerry Katona Parent of the Year award already bagged. We so back.
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