QPR go in desperate search of a first home win of the season at the eighth attempt in the league this evening as Michael Carrick's inconsistent Middlesbrough visit the Bush.
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The league table gets some unfair press.
Nothing will ingratiate you with football’s new-age hipster crowd faster than completely rubbishing the old football maxim that the league table never lies. It lies constantly, apparently.
You and I may think playing 46 games over nine months and then adding up who’s won the most games is a pretty decent way of determining who the best team in the division is. Wrong. You’ve got to look at the "underlying numbers” grandad. Didn’t you learn anything from Brentford? Don’t worry, one of theirs will be along shortly to mansplain it to you again on our message board. League table? Pah. Justice League baby.
If you want to come across as proper old school instead, a really good way is to sit with your pint of Best and tell people how late in the season you leave it before looking at the league table for the first time. "I don’t look at table till the first week of May me” you might say, between sips. Embellish it with a story or two about how they never used to show a league table on Match of the Day until after Christmas, or Cloughie never used to look at it until the second game of the Easter weekend. True? Who cares. Too good to check.
The league table does exist though, does matter, and is starting to loom a little over Queens Park Rangers.
Steadily the grind of the Championship is sifting its teams into much the order we thought they would be at the start. There are still a few surprises kicking around – Sunderland, Blackburn and Watford at one end, Luton at the other - but elsewhere things are starting to look very familiar. Two of the three teams with the biggest parachute payments are now in the top four. West Brom are sixth, because of course. Coventry are beginning their usual autumn climb after their typically slow start. The early hype around Oxford has quietened down to a run of eight without a win and 18th place. The Wayne Rooney fan boys who thought Wazza was going to make a mockery of all the snooty pundits who’d queued up all summer to prophesise doom for Plymouth have themselves now silenced as the Pilgrims drop into the bottom three. Their away record this year is seven defeats and a draw (the losses 4-0, 2-0, 1-0, 1-0, 5-0, 1-0, 3-0) and you can all guess where that point came.
For QPR so far there’s been a sense that a lowly placing on the early league table is a bit of an anomaly. Good manager, finished last season well, we’ll be fine. Just got to get these new signings up to speed, ten analytics boys from Europe always going to take time to settle, we’ll be fine. Just got to get these injured players back, missing Clarke-Salter, Colback and Chair from the spine of the team, we’ll be fine.
But at the moment the league table is not lying, and QPR are not fine. They have the division’s joint worst home record, with Portsmouth the only other team still waiting for a win on their own patch. They have scored fewer goals than everybody in the division bar Swansea. Plymouth and Portsmouth, the other teams in the bottom three, have both taken points from Loftus Road. As discussed, that draw is the only point Plymouth have away from Home Park, and Portsmouth’s win in W12 is their only victory anywhere all season. The Saturday just gone was the second time Rangers have spent a prolonged period of a home game playing ten men and not been able to score.
The injury list is lengthening rather than shortening. A good eight first teamers out tonight. A bench at the weekend made up predominantly of teenagers/development squad players. Nothing, at the moment, is moving in the right direction for Marti Cifuentes’ team and it’s Leeds away on Saturday. Even just a couple of weeks ago we were only one win from the top half – just a couple fewer saves in those Plymouth and Hull games. Now the gap to Swansea in twelfth is six points.
That is, of course, nothing. Look where Millwall have taken themselves by winning three in a week. It’s the Championship, that can happen, and putting together a few consecutive wins can quickly transform things. But as we said, and saw, last season, going through your first 15-16 games and only winning one or two of them is a significant millstone to carry around the remaining months of the campaign, however well you play. You rarely escape from that whirlpool entirely
A team that can’t score goals and can’t win at home is only going one way, unfortunately. We need to hope the positives that have been apparent in the last three games – the tighter defence, the clean sheets, the three-man midfield set up - start to manifest and increase, while the problems – particularly in front of goal – start to subside.
We need a win, basically. Pretty bloody desperately.
Links >>> Maddening inconsistencies – Oppo Profile >>> A shock 5-0 win – History >>> Langford in charge – Referee >>> Middlesbrough Official Website >>> Teeside Gazette — Local Paper >>> FMTTM — Message Board >>> Boro Breakdown – Podcast >>> One Boro — Forum >>> Bonkers for Boro — Blog >>> Boropolis — Podcast
Team News: Marti Cifuentes continues to grapple with a lengthening injury list. Harrison Ashby, himself filling in for injured Kenneth Paal at left back, went down with a hamstring injury on Saturday. Neither are expected to be fit for this one. With Morgan Fox also sidelined again I guess we’re looking and Hervertton Santos or Koki Saito out of position on the left side of defence. Jake Clarke-Salter is sadly back to the fragility we saw in his first season with the club. Jack Colback, Michael Frey and Karamonko Dembele are medium term absentees. Liam Morrison is the only one back in full training.
Hayden Hackney was sent off 22 minutes into Boro’s weekend whitewash by Coventry and will sit on the naughty step for this one. Marcuss Forss was ill at the weekend, impressive Liverpool teenager Ben Doak was out trick or treating, and Emmanuel Latte Lath was only on the bench – all three push for starts here after a 3-0 loss to the Sky Blues.
Elsewhere: Five other games tonight as well as our own, including the goat rodeo between our fellow strugglers Portsmouth and Plymouth, a game our Sky overlords continue to pitch as "The Dockyard Derby” despite Portsmouth being closer to Birmingham. There’s also a clash between two of the division’s stranger sides – Watford, who randomly won 6-2 at Sheff Wed at the weekend, travel to Swanselona, who are in the top half of the table despite only scoring ten goals in 13 games which is the division’s lowest total.
After a fantastic start, Oxford are sliding back to something more like the position we thought they’d end up in. They’re at home to Hull City tonight, whose manager Tim Walter stormed out of a post match with BBC Radio Roverside at the weekend after their latest failure at home to Portsmouth. Bristol City v Sheffield Red Stripe, and Sheff Wed trying to recover from that weekend hammering at home to Norwich round out the Tuesday list.
Five more games on Wednesday led by the friendly derby between Millwall and Leeds. The Lions, in Steve Gallen’s first full season as director of football, have won three in a row after the weekend success at home to Burnley and are up to seventh in the table. While Wawll are a surprise early success story, Luton’s season of underachievement continues with the Hatters sitting fourth bottom ahead of a home game with Cardiff.
League leaders Sunderland go to Preston Knob End, Coventry are hosting Derby and Blackburn are at home to Stoke.
Scott Parker’s attempts to convince the good people of Burnley that a 0-0 at West Brom is always a terrific result is this week’s Thursday game. Then we’re back to it on Friday with Watford v Oxford.
Referee: Oliver Langford has refereed QPR more than any other side, with this his 29th appointment with the R’s. Second on that list is Middlesbrough, with 28. Details.
QPR: Rangers have stemmed the bleeding, with three consecutive draws after a run of four straight defeats, but it’s now only one win from 13 league games and ten matches without a win (nine in the Championship). The last two games have finished 0-0, which on the positive side means Paul Nardi and his defence have kept two clean sheets in a row after none from the first 14 league and cup games. On the negative, though, Kieran Morgan’s goalkeeper-assisted equaliser against Coventry is the only goal the R’s have scored in three games, and only Swansea (ten) have scored fewer league goals than their 11.
The stalemate with Sunderland at the weekend is the second home game this season QPR have played against ten men for a prolonged period of time without scoring after doing so for an hour against Plymouth earlier in the campaign. QPR are yet to win in nine home games in all comps, seven in the league, having taken nine games last year to win for the first time at Loftus Road. Only QPR and Pompey are yet to win a home game in the Championship. QPR have won eight of their last 50 games at Loftus Road, 13 of their last 57 to the start of the 22/23 season, and 15 out of 65 going back to January 2022.
QPR have drawn consecutive games 0-0 for the first time in over 11 years
Our last two nil nil's in consecutive games came against Man City and Norwich on 29 January and 02 February 2013 respectively— Hoops & Dreams (@HoopsDreams_QPR) November 2, 2024
Boro: Michael Carrick’s side were beaten 3-0 at home by bogey side Coventry at the weekend after Hayden Hackney was sent off after just 22 minutes. It leaves them with a 5-3-5 record in the Championship and continues an inconsistent start to their season. They come into this game on a sequence of WWLLWDL which rather sums it up. Away from home they’ve lost 1-0 at Derby, Sunderland and 2-1 at Watford, won 1-0 at West Brom and 2-0 at Cardiff, and drawn 3-3 at Norwich in a game they led 3-1 at half time. Tommy Conway is the top scorer here with four goals.
Middlesbrough won this fixture here 2-0 last season when QPR were on a hot streak of three wins and a draw from the previous four. Prior to that though Rangers had a good record in games against Boro with one defeat from nine games, a run that includes four wins from five away trips to the Riverside. This can often be a game for the away team – five of the last ten and ten of the last 22 meetings have gone the way of the away side.
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 Football - 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’s Prediction: "We seem to be following a similar path to the one we had last season, where Marti initially found a way to stop goals being conceded and then had to deal with our non-scoring forwards through goals being chipped in from elsewhere on the pitch - we haven’t got to that bit yet. Boro are wildly unpredictable this season and we have to start scoring goals. Now would be a good time to do so. I think we will blitz a quick goal (a set piece), and then painfully hang on for a win.”
Weston’s Call "Certainly better performances in the last two matches but still tough to predict a win with any real confidence, not creating enough and when we do haven’t got the strikers to finish. The decision to start the season with two senior forwards looks more baffling with each match. Tempted to go for another 0v0 but hope surely we have to score soon.”
Nico’s Prediction: QPR 1-0 Boro. Scorer – Jimmy Dunne
WestonSuperR’s Prediction: QPR 1-1 Boro. Scorer – Ilias Chair
LFW’s Prediction: QPR 0-2 Middlesbrough. No scorer.
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