QPR fans have been burned may times before, so they’re cautious in their optimism about the direction of travel ahead of their opening game in 24/25.
Sky’s Lunchtime Super League >>> Saturday August 10, 2024 >>> Kick Off 12.30 >>> Weather – Muggy, cloudy >>> Loftus Road, London, W12
Don’t start the first preview with a ‘this time last year’ retrospective. It’s been done - you’ve done it - over and over, to absolute death. Leave it alone. It happened, and now it’s gone. Long gone. People didn’t enjoy it at the time, and they don’t need to keep reliving it, or have you bringing it up and reminding them. We’re optimistic now, it’s a different time, different team, different club. Focus on that. Talk about the sunlit uplands that lie in wait, not the elephant graveyard we miraculously escaped.
It was Ian McCullough what done it. Seeing his face back on the pre-match West London Sport beat today. A face I remember staring back at me, haunted, from across the train carriage home from Watford on the opening day of last season. Walking in to speak to each other and then just staring some more. "What can you say?” What could you say? What was there to say? You look at the end to the previous season and think ‘we’re in the shit here’. You look at the accounts and think ‘we’re in the shit here’. You watch the signings they make, the farcical pre-season tour, the 5-0 defeats at Oxford, and think ‘we’re in the shit here’. You sit and listen to the manager tell a room full of supporters "there’s always a team that gets whacked four or five nil on the opening day, I just hope it’s not us” and you think you’ve picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. But surely it’ll be sort of alright, won’t it? You go into a geography exam having only revised three of the potential 12 topics and, sure, it’s not ideal, but maybe you’ll get lucky with one of them coming up, and you can just wing the rest... Then you get to Vicarage Road and it’s not a geography exam at all. It’s 1992 Nigel Benn. And he wants to fight.
I’m sorry. I tried. Oh Lord knows how I did try. I think it’s a form of footballing trauma. Every time I close my eyes all I see are… red cowboy boots. If ever a club needed a complete and total reset in everything it was doing, it was QPR.
The transformation in the team on the field by March-April time was remarkable. Only promoted Ipswich won more than QPR’s eight of the last 14 matches and within that were exceptional performances where we saw some of the best football in Hoops for many years – Leeds at home is the obvious one, but this fixture against West Brom was another despite it only ending in a draw. We battered the Baggies that night. Manager Marti Cifuentes had ascended to demi-God status in W12 by the time he finished with three wins from three games, derailing Leeds’ promotion bid in the process. Like a snooker player completing is 147 playing the final three shots left-handed.
The themes, on and off the pitch, are clear.
The signings we’re now making are clearly based on data, analytics, numbers. A year ago we were jizzing like the fountain in Trafalgar Square because Asmir Begovic had blue ticked our WhatsApp message. The goalkeeper coach heard from an old mate that the veteran might be willing to move here – ErrrrrrrrMaGod ErrrrrrrrrrrrMaGod can you believe it? That sort of Monday night sixes ‘I might know a keeper’ approach to recruitment has no place in professional sport in this day and age. Begovic’s performances showed you exactly why.
Sorry, again, I think I’ve genuinely got PTSD.
It's easy to get carried away with these things. As we’ve discussed before, fans just like it when you’re signing players and if you’re not signing players you’re not doing it right. QPR have had the same head of recruitment, Andy Belk, for a long time, and have previously pursued this European, data-led approach for the likes of Ngbakoto, Borysiuk and Sylla. Prior to that Gianni Paladini tried it with Monday Oliseh, Adam Czerkas, Marcin Kus etc – although given his track record, and the state of those players, that was almost certainly based on nothing more than who your agent was. It’s certainly a departure on what happened under Ainsworth and Beale, though.
I liked and respected Les Ferdinand and Lee Hoos a lot when they were running the club. I thought, particularly in the early days, they were on exactly the same page with how I saw Rangers and wanted it to be. They received very harsh criticism for things which happened largely because people above them would seagull manager the whole thing, swooping in unannounced to say "that’s all well and good but here’s Ian Holloway/Steve McClaren”. Nevertheless, it was painfully obvious, having gone big and early shooting their shot with Mark Warburton and the Eze money in 2021/22, they were basically finished here when it didn’t work out. Their pitch was ‘you may not like what we say, but you’ll never have the sort of FFP issues you had here previously ever again’. Then Andre Gray turned up and two years of financial purgatory lay ahead. Once that happens, what’s the point of you? It was clear they were both varying degrees of spent and checked out, and those ‘finer details’ that Hoos, in particular, had been so super-hot on in the early days were being missed.
Christian Nourry has taken on a huge job in combining both those roles into a "football-facing CEO” at one of football’s most notoriously difficult and tempestuous clubs.
A lot of people who’ve been part of a failing organisation for a long time have been sent on their way with a handshake. For instance, we’ve long questioned our weird and wonderful goalkeeping retainment and recruitment and Gavin Ward has now exited to be replaced by Andrew Sparkes.
This new broom has been particularly prevalent at the top of the academy, where Manisha Tailor, Chris Ramsey and Paul Hall are all on their bikes.
That group will always be able to hang their hat on Ebere Eze, one of the club’s all time greatest success stories and its biggest ever sale. Pending a move from Palace he’s potentially a huge cash cow for us all over again. Ilias Chair, Seny Dieng… compared to what was happening before, when the best graduates were Michaels Petrasso and Doughty, it’s been a significant improvement. Not as significant as the "30 first team graduates” Paul Hall would trot out in interviews, but better.
The sight of Luca Gunter playing so well against us for Spurs a fortnight ago only served to remind that he’s one of a dozen brilliant youngsters now featuring at Premier League level (Harvey Elliott, Alfie Gilchrist) who were ripped from the development model QPR were trying to foster here for a collective - utterly insulting - fee of just £700k. That no fault of the exasperated QPR academy staff, but instead due to the vindictive EPPP rules that were forced upon the EFL upon pain of having their table scraps withdrawn. Pitched as a way to bolster the national team, it’s become a way to park any half decent teenager in a giant puppy farm. England still haven’t won anything, and their team is still largely dominated by players who got to play actual men’s football at EFL clubs to begin with. Lo and behold Alfie Gilchrist is now at… Sheffield United, playing exactly the sort of football he could have been playing here for years already. There were warm words and tributes paid to all three coaches as they left their positions here.
Nevertheless, by Ferdinand’s own admission before his departure, the conveyor belt at QPR had stalled and the academy lost its way somewhat. LFW has been contacted on several occasions by family members of players in the system at QPR concerned about the standards they've experienced. Perhaps repeatedly losing by cricket scores to the likes of Fleetwood and Stevenage isn’t the wonderful development model it had been made out to be. When your system isn’t able to produce a single boy who can come in and fill in for a player as mediocre as Lyndon Dykes for a month or so and you have to go out and get 34-year-old Chris Martin instead then… again… what is the point of you?
It’s been refreshing to see Nourry able to sweep the decks clean, including several long servers who’d previously felt a bit untouchable.
Jon De Souza arrives as the, frankly ridiculously named, "head of methodology”, which sounds like a lot of old management speak, but is a role that’s intended to get every player, team, coach and manager in the system at QPR singing off the same hymn sheet regards formation, style, standards, goals. Well, durr, right? I agree. But a big part of the breakdown in relations with Mark Warburton was around his refusal to even countenance taking an Aaron Drewe or Joe Gubbins along to sit on the bench, preferring instead to go to Bristol City over Christmas and name five subs, because he didn’t rate what was going on in the academy and complained the junior and reserve teams weren’t playing the same style, shape or formation as the firsts and therefore it was harder to integrate the players.
To a degree we’ve heard all of this before and it’s basic stuff. Kevin Betsy is not gonna reinvent the wheel guys. But QPR have not been doing basic stuff well.
In communications there have been some welcome changes too. Nourry’s comments about "inquisitive minds” in a series of drip-fed press releases about player exist over the summer were low hanging fruit for un-original tossers like us to take the piss out of. And we did. But, affording everybody who has represented QPR their own separate mention and statement, rather than just whacking them on a list of names, is a really welcome development. Lee Hoos never left you in any doubt what he was thinking, and sometimes people like Ryan Manning didn’t deserve much of a send-off, but I’ve long thought us needlessly chippy and short with people who tried their best, gave us good service, and are just moving on out of circumstance – Mass Luongo and Matt Smith spring immediately to mind. We need to make QPR an attractive, enticing place to come and play. Any tiny advantage we can steel on rivals is important with our budget. I love the small, finer details approach.
Choosing to try and get the most out of the home atmosphere, and offer up cheaper season tickets, by commandeering the Lower School End is another win over prioritising rinsing as many away fans as possible for £35. Though, how that helps us FFP wise, and why that lower tier had to be split in myriad convoluted ways for the Birmingham and Sheff Wed games last year, remains to be worked out.
Small, finer details can stack up the other way as well.
Nourry gave a very clear explanation to the Chris Willock situation that left nobody in any doubt to what had gone on there, while still remaining professional. That was on the official website, where he’s issued another update today and can control the messaging. Communication and interaction with the fanbase in other areas is eroding. We’re no longer allowed to know how long the player’s contracts are for, and transfer fees have long been withheld anyway. We got ourselves into this mess through lousy recruitment and retainment decisions, almost everybody involved in that (Les, Lee, Tony, Amit) walked away from the consequences and left us with them. Now we’re going to be told even less about those decisions going forwards. The pre-season tour, an annual treat for those who’ve been slogging to Preston and back for ten years, was behind closed doors. No squad list was issued for that trip until the very last moment before the first friendly. Hevertton Santos and Liam Morrison, who’d obviously been training with us a while (Morrison’s pictures were done at Heston), had their signing announcements punched out an hour before they made their debuts in Spain. The opposition for the two friendlies was revealed only a day or two in advance. Those who went to fairly herculean efforts to get there anyway were just about tolerated, standing away behind one goal under a tree.
For the first time in the best part of ten years our request for a manager interview was turned down. Cifuentes’ comments to West London Sport after the Reading pre-season defeat about playing Santos at right wing instead of right back because "that’s where we are” and "having a very clear idea of what’s needed and the club knows very well my idea” felt pretty punchy.
Firstly, I would say this wouldn’t I? Because it makes my job more difficult. Secondly, this is stuff that individually can all be explained away: cards close to our chest on contracts enabled us to play clubs off each other to get a great deal for Armstrong; international clearance was required for Santos and Morrison; the venue was unable to cope with travelling fans for the first friendlies; the club has been burnt previously by Mick Beale… Thirdly, none of it matters in the grand scheme of things, particularly when it’s going well. When it doesn’t go well though – and at QPR that’s rarely more than a fortnight away – suddenly these things add up to a bigger picture. Like I say, finer details can work both ways.
Getting teams like Fulham, Tottenham and Brighton to play you in pre-season – particularly in this period where all the clubs who spend nine months moaning about fixture congestion then like to fly 10,000 miles to play each other on converted baseball diamonds – speaks to how our team, style, manager and approach are being taken seriously in the game again. Ange Postecoglou wouldn’t waste his time bringing a group of that strength down here to have a Gareth Ainsworth team punt long balls at Hamzad Kargbo. A year ago the best we could do for a final warm up was Oxford away, and we got beat 5-0.
Those friendlies have perhaps served another useful purpose though. Nourry’s messaging today felt very much geared towards patience, long term project and so on. Losing the final four games of the summer without scoring a goal has perhaps just brought home to everybody what a long road back it will be from where we got to, compared to the mood after the 4-0 Leeds victory when the dust was being blown off the HMS Piss The League memes. The last time I went into a QPR season genuinely full of beans and confident I spent an hour in the Crown & Sceptre talking to Mel about how the Junior Hoilett signing could be the one that pushes us over the top into European qualification. Two hours later we’d lost 5-0 to Swansea. A little bit of realism about where we, and the team, are, is very useful as we try and rebuild ourselves from what was, let’s be honest, a smouldering hole in the ground. It’s a long job.
Much will depend, initially, on whether Zan Celar is any good, and whether our supply lines have improved beyond Ilias Chair writing the theme tune and singing the theme tune. That will be acid tested straight away, because Chair isn’t fit to start the season. Sinclair Armstrong’s departure drew a mixed response, but it has removed what little pace we had in an already biblically slow team. Paul Smyth remains, but so does his final ball on the evidence so far.
Remember though, we’re not the only ones in this boat. Every interview we did for the season preview this summer, bar Luton, spoke of the need for at least one, probably two, strikers. More than a third of the recruitment done in the Championship this summer has been from abroad, on Celar-types from less fashionable international leagues. Could get Ale Faurlin, could get Sammy Koejoe. Some will get Viktor Gyokeres, some will get Jan Mlakar. Lots of Blackburn (Gueye, Ohashi), Cardiff (Kanga), Portsmouth (Sorensen), Swansea (Franco, Viptonik, Ji-sung Eom) types are all going to be relying heavily on forward players coming from leagues like France, Belgium, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and scoring in the notoriously hostile Championship.
There’s also a thick three weeks of window left. Sheff Utd, Hull, Watford and others will surely not be going into September with the same squads they’re going in this weekend with. QPR look excellent at the back and light up front to me as we begin. A month from now we could have sold Jake Clarke-Salter at the eleventh hour and be relying on Morgan Fox to fill in until January, but also signed/loaned four brilliant attackers. Karamoko Dembélé is an exciting late link this Friday night. Making judgements and predictions based on where teams are now, and what they do tomorrow, is a fool’s errand.
There are few better examples of that than Watford 4-0 QPR. Gareth said they might be champions, look at them since. We wondered if we’d ever win a game again, look at where we’ve got to.
It’s long, it’s complicated, it’s nuanced. It’s certainly better than where we were opening day last year.
Links >>> Corberan’s toughest test – Oppo profile >>> League Cup triumph – History >>> Webb in charge – Referee >>> Season Preview – Contenders >>> Season Preview – Midtable >>> Season Preview – Strugglers >>> West Brom Official Website >>> Independent West Brom forum — Message Board >>> Boing — Blog >>> Express and Star — Local Paper >>> Birmingham Mail — Local Paper
Team News: With Chris Willock now in Cardiff and Ilias Chair sidelined with a back injury, though now apparently with most of his legal worries behind him, QPR have been short on goals and creativity in pre-season. That won’t be aided by Chair’s return in time for tomorrow, but Lyndon Dykes has trained all week and can compete with Zan Celar and Michy Frey for the striker spot after a horrible summer in which one ankle injury in training wrecked his chances of going to the Euros and then another in the friendly at Reading curtailed his pre-season with the R’s. Ryan Kolli, Lucas Andersen and Paul Smyth are the likely starters behind whoever gets the nod up top. Jonathan Varane signed last week from Sporting Gijon but hasn’t played any of the warm up games so will likely start behind Jack Colback and Sam Field in the midfield pecking order. The back four also seems pretty set with Jimmy Dunne definitely the favoured choice at right back ahead of new boy Hevertton Santos, and Morgan Fox out injured. Paul Nardi will debut in goal having been the stand out performer in the friendlies. Although the armband has been passed around during the pre-season, it’s no surprise to anybody that Steve Cook has been named captain for the season.
Reggie Cannon’s notable absence from almost all of pre-season so far is perhaps explained by today’s breaking news in the Portuguese press that the US international has in fact lost his case against previous club Boavista for breach of contract and unpaid wages which he believed enabled him to walk away from the Porto club for nothing. The judge has reportedly ruled Cannon owed Boavista around £1m, and that QPR are also liable to pay them compensation having taken a chance on signing him as a free agent when several other clubs (Fulham, Burnley, Bournemouth) had been put off by the legal situation. Rangers have appealed the ruling, and likely took out a form of indemnity insurance against such an occurrence when they made the signing. Still, how very QPR to potentially have a chunk of our summer transfer budget wiped out on a player we no longer seem to have much use for, just a year after a chunk of our summer transfer budget was wiped out on a loan player we no longer want anywhere near the gaff. You R’s.
West Brom have similar issues with their attack. Grady Diangana will miss the first six weeks of the season and Brandon Thomas-Asante, who top scored for the Baggies last year with 11, has been flogged to Coventry as part fo the club’s efforts to grapple with an FFP issue left behind by the previous ownership. Daryl Dike’s amazing exploding Achilles has gone off again so he’s unavailable. Lower league journeyman Devante Cole, 18 goals for Barnsley in League One last year, is the only addition up front so far. Rush keeper Cedric Kipre has departed on a free to be replaced by Norwegian Torbjorn Heggem. Yokuslu finally got that move to Trabzonspor that’s felt like years in the making and he’s been replaced but Ousman Diakite – an Austrian youth prospect rated as one of the hottest properties in Europe before his own two years of injury hell.
Elsewhere: Our Sky overlords wasted no time in making clear just how much havoc they intend to wreak upon the soppy hobbyists who want to go to the actual games by televising, and therefore moving, every single one of them this opening weekend. They’re pitching their (delayed) announcement of every pick through to January as some kind of win for the travelling supporter, but with such nonsense as an opening day, Blackburn away and New Year’s Day all at 12.30, and Luton on a Friday night, it’s quickly becoming clear what we always knew – that’s bollocks.
It’s difficult to see what the armchair fan at home really gets out of this either. I can’t imagine showing QPR v Watford twice in three weeks, for example, is going to move the needle on subscriptions greatly. And whatever audience you’d normally pull on a Friday night for Derby v Blackburn, Preston v Sheff Utd, Barnsley v Mansfield or Chesterfield v Swindon will now be split four ways because they’re showing all of those games tonight. That’s three of the sides widely tipped for relegation struggles in the Championship, and the team fresh out of the Premier league that common consensus says is going to be the worst of the three.
Multiply that tomorrow when our match is one of eight being televised all at the same time. Who’s that for, exactly? Some of the classics that’s thrown up immediately are Sunderland having to get to Cardiff, Portsmouth to Leeds and Bristol City to Hull for midday games. Swansea’s supporter coach for their opening game at Middlesbrough leaves at 04.00 tomorrow morning.
Among the more palatable trips are Watford, whose start will be fascinating with their threadbare squad, heading to Millwall; new boys Oxford start with Norwich at home then Coventry away which is quite a baptism; and Stoke host Cov who I really fancy to be brilliant this year and potentially push for automatic promotion.
Wayne Rooney’s Plymouth Argyle start life under Wayne Rooney with a Sunday trip to many people’s dark horses Sheff Wed, and a weekend of absolute torture for the travelling fans is concluded on Monday when Burnley are asked to journey all the way down to Luton.
It’s going to be a long year folks.
Read in depth previews on all 23 of our opponents, and where we think they’re going to finish, in our extensive deep dive season previews at the following links… >>> Season Preview – Contenders >>> Season Preview – Midtable >>> Season Preview – Strugglers
Referee: David Webb for this opening game. Not a referee QPR have happy memories of last season after Asmir Begovic’s overturned red card at Leeds and the blatant handball penalty missed at Ipswich, or in general really with the R’s victorious in just one of 13 matches overseen by this official. Details.
QPR: Rangers finished with three straight victories against Preston (1-0), Leeds (4-0) and Coventry (2-1) to stick nine points on the board and stay up with something to spare after a long season of struggle and heartache. Marti Cifuentes has won 13 of his 33 games in charge since taking over at Loftus Road, and nine of those have come in blocks of three following the victories against Stoke (4-2), Preston (2-0) and Hull (2-0) before Christmas and then Bristol City (1-0), Rotherham (2-1) and Leicester (2-1) in March. The R’s haven’t won four games in a row since beating Watford (2-1), Blackburn (1-0), Brentford (2-1) and Bournemouth (2-1) under Mark Warburton, during lockdown, in February 2021. In all, Cifuentes’ side won eight of the final 14 Championship fixtures which is a record bettered only by promoted Ipswich who won ten of theirs.
We won’t have to try too hard to beat last season’s appalling start of two wins from the first 17 games, but there’s big work to do on improving results at Loftus Road this year and pay the fans back for their extraordinary loyalty and support during two horrid seasons. In 22/23 the team managed by Mick Beale, Neil Critchley and then Gareth Ainsworth were beaten 12 times in 23 games at home – a club record. That didn’t improve greatly last year with another ten defeats clocked up – only Sunderland (11) lost more than Rangers at home. Having the first game here should help a bit with that if history is anything to go by. Rangers were supposed to start here a year ago but switched it to Watford because the pitch wasn’t ready and promptly got walloped 4-0, having also lost 1-0 at Blackburn the year prior. They last started at home against Millwall in 2021/22 and have never lost an opening home game at Loftus Road in the second tier. If they are beaten by West brom it’ll be the first time since losing to Villa (4-1), Man Utd (2-0) and Blackburn (1-0) in the Premier League in the 1990s that we’ve lost three opening games on the spin – hat tip @Hoops&Dreams.
Ilias Chair and Lyndon Dykes both top scored at QPR last season with a paltry seven goals each. Both have missed most of the pre-season with injury and the problems with creating and scoring goals in this side clearly remain. The R’s scored 47 times in the league, only three times managed a lower total and Huddersfield (48) and Birmingham (50) were both relegated scoring more. Cifuentes’ side finished their summer losing to Spurs (2-0), Reading (1-0), Fulham (4-0) and Brighton (1-0) without troubling the scorers.
If you want to listen to @AnalyticsQPR and myself crunch the numbers on QPR, and the other 23 Championship clubs, all three subs tiers of our Patreon can listen to our deep dive season previews here.
West Brom The Baggies had a terrific 23/24 when their financial and ownership situation is taken into consideration, defying the odds to finish fifth in the Championship and then putting up a brave but ultimately futile resistance to Southampton in the two legged semi-final. It was a success built on defence – 18 clean sheets was second only to Leeds’ 19. They didn’t finish well though. The enthralling 2-2 draw played out here when these sides last met was part of a sequence of four wins and two ties in six games. After that, however, Corberan’s side won only two of their last eight, drawing with struggling Millwall, Watford and Stoke, losing to Sunderland at home and Sheff Wed by three clear goals. They won only two of their final 12 away from home. There was a general feeling that a squad stretched thin by circumstances had simply run out of steam. They got fairly well battered in W12 as well, despite the result, making QPR arguably the best and worst sides they’d played all season across the two polarising fixtures.
Albion’s pre-season results have been every bit as poor as our own. They started of with a trio of games behind closed doors against League One sides – losing 2-1 to both Bolton and Blackpool while beating Peterborough by the same scoreline. Three more losses have followed against Real Mallorca and Cambridge United (both 1-0) and a 4-1 humping over at big spending Birmingham in the final match.
This is QPR’s tenth season back in the Championship and West Brom have not been a good opponent for the R’s in that time. Since this fixture restarted in 2018/19 there have been ten fixtures and just one QPR win – 1-0 here in February 2021 with Charlie Austin’s memorable (and offside) last minute header at the Loft End. Two West Brom wins, one on each ground, since then and a pair of 2-2 draws. The six Baggies’ wins in that sequence includes, of course, the 7-1 nadir of Steve McClaren’s terrible year in charge in 2018. It is maybe worth saying that QPR had won three in a row before that, including a Premier League double in our relegation season 2014/15.
Prediction: There’s still time to enter our Prediction League for 2024/25, where we’ll once again be handing out prizes for being top at Christmas and overall winner from The Art of Footbal - sample the merch from our sponsor’s newly extended QPR collection here. For the first time last year we had joint winners so this season you’ll be hearing from one or both WestonsuperR and SimplyNico in the match previews.
Nico says: "I doubt we are going to start the season the way we finished with Leeds and Coventry. With the current absence of Chair (for whatever reason), we lack anything creative in attack, but we will be solid defensively and in midfield. I think this will be a dull 0-0 (no scorer). Come the end of August, probably a different story.
WestonSuperR adds: "Apologies in advance for my general pessimism, it was definitely Ainsworth’s start that helped me to ‘joint’ top last season. Not scoring for the previous four pre-season matches is worrying and although our defence looks solid and keeper upgraded, we lack creativity, pace and goals. With Celar and Frey appearing to be the options to lead the line versus a pretty decent WBA it is tough to envisage a positive result.”
Nico’s Prediction: QPR 0-0 West Brom. No scorer.
WestonSuperR’s Prediction: QPR 0-1 West Brom. No scorer.
LFW’s Prediction: QPR 0-0 West Brom. No scorer.
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