QPR tasted the relief and joy of victory for the first time in three months and 13 games, but is that Cardiff win the first step on the road to recovery or just brief respite? We’ll find out more tomorrow lunchtime at the scene of one of our biggest horrors of 23/24.
Sky’s Super Saturday Brunch Spectacular >>> Saturday November 30, 2024 >>> Kick Off 12.30 >>> Weather – Grey, slightly milder >>> Vicarage Road, Watford
It has been a season of extremes, and not a lot of grey area, for Queens Park Rangers.
With the profile of signing QPR made in the summer – ten players from European footballing backwaters, all but one of them under 25 - this was always going to take a long time to settle down and work, if indeed it does settle down and work. Look, I know I’ve repeated this line a lot but, please, find forgiveness in your heart, at the end of a three-game week of content. These previews don’t write themselves.
The best case scenario was the team continued its momentum and confidence from the end of last season, when it was in play-off form losing only four of its last 19 games. High performing stars of that side – Jimmy Dunne, Steve Cook, Jake Clarke-Salter, Jack Colback, Lucas Andersen, Ilias Chair – were all here and already in place. If even half of the ten newcomers could settle reasonably quickly to Championship/London/QPR life, then the sky felt like the limit under this manager. Well, thirteenth, maybe – the sort of season that has you hailed as some sort of soothsayer at QPR given what we’ve suffered over the last decade.
There are huge swathes of grey area possibilities below that which would have been absolutely fine. What’s occurred instead is basically the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Everything that could have gone wrong, has.
The key players from last season’s run in have either cratered in form, or fitness, or both. Literally all of them have dropped off the side of a cliff, bar Steve Cook, and even he’s been a bit prone to dropping too deep in front of the goalkeeper and costing us goals. Lucas Andersen isn’t even the same human being as he was six months ago – can’t correctly play a six-yard pass to put Alfie Lloyd in for a winner against Stoke last Saturday, when last season he was spraying ball about this way and that. Thoroughly QPR’d, just when we need him most – lacking creativity and goals from that ‘ten’ position.
Clarke-Salter and Colback always had suspect attendance records. The folly of smothering the former with a new contract and "outstanding human being” accolades because he’s almost made 30 appearances in a season for the first time in his life was always likely to bite Rangers. Nevertheless, to lose the terminally available Ilias Chair too, not once but twice, and chuck Michy Frey onto the pyre as well, right down the centre of the team… Obviously there are huge questions about why our performance director is now allowed to phone his job in from abroad but, fuck me, that’s unlucky.
At the same time, only goalkeeper Paul Nardi of the newcomers settled and played well straight away. Given he’s the most experienced (the only over-25 we signed) and he’s been here working with the team and the coaching staff the longest (he was the first signing of the summer) perhaps that’s not a surprise. However, the extent to which all of the others have struggled has, again, been something approaching as bad as we could ever have feared.
Zan Celar, no goals in 19 appearances. You’d think he’d have scored one by accident. They even gave him a penalty to get him going for goodness sake. Like those videos of footballers trying to get their three-year-old to dribble the ball into the goal when they come on the pitch for the end of season lap of honour. Dembele burned bright, quickly lost confidence, then his knee exploded. Nicolas Madsen, the 6ft 4ins midfielder who cannot head and will not tackle. Liam Morrison, injured immediately. Jonathan Varane, scared to turn around, so goes the other way and gets sent off, three game ban. Hevertton Santos, doesn’t know where to stand. Koki Saito has kept at it, his attitude is tremendous, but he spent the Hull game repeatedly hitting the post and we lost 3-1 – the best of the new arrivals so far, he’s yet to score. Harrison Ashby is the one who’d actually played Championship football and he looks weak as piss.
It was entirely foreseeable these guys would take time. To not do any older heads, Championship experience, Isaac Hayden types, was at best optimistic and at worst arrogant. But, again, Christ, you’d have legitimately allowed yourself to think one or two of them might do slightly better. Coupled with the collapse of what was already here, it’s been the nightmare scenario.
This has, naturally, shifted the focus and criticism on those responsible for putting the squad together.
The best-case scenario is Christian Nourry truly is the "Lional Messi of football execdom” and QPR are about to sweep all before them with this recruitment strategy and his "game model”, once everybody stops being either dead in the treatment room or comatose on the pitch. The worst case is an ownership group, which has always been susceptible to people with good chat convincing them they can make this disastrous investment work for them, have handed the keys to our entire club over to a 27-year-old for his first proper job out of school. There are huge grey areas in between, but the way the season has gone so far grey areas aren’t where QPR eat at the moment.
Wednesday night’s win at Cardiff follows along a similar theme.
The overall feelings are, naturally, joy and relief. You walk away from nights like that euphoric, and buzzing with adrenaline. You can smash 12 bottles of Peroni back at the Premier Inn and not even feel it (well, a little snooze on the morning GWR into Paddington perhaps). It's hard to even sleep, because you're buzzing so much. Not only because that’s what gets you off in general, but also because it’s been so bloody long – no win since August, two wins since May, and it’s now the end of chuffing November.
The best-case scenario is that is the rot stopped. A team missing key players, and clearly bereft of confidence, has got a win over the line. By accident, by hook, by crook, they’ve got one. It was never going to be pretty, and it wasn’t - although the two goals that won it were exceptional finishes, rather than the ‘one off the arse’ cliché. The win, the clean sheet, the performance of Paul Nardi, the goals of Zan Celar… something to start building from. Three clean sheets in six games after none from the first 14 in all comps.
There are signs of life from one or two newbies. Saito continues to impress with attitude and ball. Varane is daring to run forwards occasionally, rather than turning back. Morrison is fit(ish) and imposing at centre back. QPR are actually four points better off than they were at this stage last season. Zan Celar has shifted a monkey the size of King Kong from his back, and done it really in quite fine style with a pair of excellent goals – no goals from his first 28 shots, now two from two. Nardi goes from strength to strength. Rangers are in touch with the teams around them, in what looks a significantly worse Championship requiring a substantially lower point total than last year’s 51 to survive. Teams doing a point a game are currently seventeenth, last year that total was second bottom.
The worst case is that was a scrambled, lucky win. Cardiff, for my money, are the worst side we’ve played. I thought they were dreadful. Prior to Celar’s outstanding finish for the first it was a game of biblically low quality that would have shamed the division below, if not the division below that. I stand by everything I said about Celar in the match report but, let’s be quietly honest, even he’d been mostly terrible again before sparking into life with the goal. QPR and Cardiff are now the division’s joint lowest scorers with 15 each, both in the bottom four, and my God didn’t it look and play like that? QPR sat on a block lower than a Gregg Wallace workplace joke, and played/begged/pleaded for time. They gave Cardiff just shy of 70% possession, allowed 24 shots on their goal and seven of those were on target. They allowed crosses into the box repeatedly, and relied on Dunne, Cook and Morrison to deal with that along with their man of the match goalkeeper. Again, this versus the worst team we’ve played in my opinion.
Rangers were certainly owed some luck and got it. Only the hardiest Welshman could begrudge us that. And if it gives us confidence, if it frees Celar of his mental shackles, if Nardi, Saito and Varane continue their upward trajectory, if we do start getting some players back from injury, then… maybe. But in amongst the euphoric joy and relief of Wednesday was the quick, collective realisation that we’ll have to play far, far better than that to beat literally anybody else in this league. Starting immediately, at Watford, who are running red hot at Vicarage Road. We’ll know whether it was just eventually beating somebody by law of averages, or the start of the long road to recovery, by the middle of next week – Watford and Norwich are difficult games, but Oxford is a doomsday night looming.
Even landing in the grey area would be fine – three or four points, say. But grey area isn’t something QPR do at the moment.
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Team News: Hopes that Jack Colback may be ready to feature for the first time since Sheff Wed away in September have been dashed at the end of his first week back in training, with Cifuentes saying his veteran midfielder will need more time before being eased back into the side. Better news on Liam Morrison, who’s been a stand out in this week’s games so far but left the Cardiff game with ten minutes still to play – that was only cramp, so he’s good to go. Kenneth Paal did not impress off the bench on Wednesday night but is, in theory, available to return from the start against the club he almost joined in the summer. Michael Frey, Ilias Chair and Jake Clarke-Salter remain sidelined down the spine of the side. Alfie Lloyd remains sidelined with a groin issue. Karamoko Dembele is a long term absentee. Centre midfield duo Jonathan Varane and Sam Field are both one yellow card away from a ban with two games still to go until the five booking amnesty.
Watford’s latest break-out attacking star Kwadoh Baah was substituted at half time in the midweek home win against Bristol City. Tom Dele Bashiru, who scored in the opening day massacre here last year, is definitely out along with veteran defender Angelo Ogbonna and Kevin Keben. Loan striker Daniel Jebbison, who’s only played ten minutes of football in the last six weeks and is (groan) yet to score for the Hornets, is back in contention.
Elsewhere: The Championship’s game of the weekend is tonight. Sunderland were six points clear at the top when they came to Loftus Road at the start of the month, but a draw there and four more since have seen them slip off the pace while maintaining an unbeaten run. They go to Sheffield Red Stripe, one of the three parachute payment teams (yawn) who have now jumped ahead of the Black Cats at the top of the table.
The other two, sitting either side of the Blades in first and third, are Red Bull Leeds and Burnley Nil. They both have tricky away games this weekend with Leeds enjoying Northern Rail’s three-car special over the Pennines to Blackburn (7,000 away tickets sold, shall we put an extra train on? Nah.), and Scott Parker’s free flowing entertainers drawing 0-0 at Stoke.
Watford, as we know, get to go first from fifth against our rabble. The play off picture is made up by Middlesbrough, who did perhaps the most Middlesbrough thing ever during the week by following up three matches in which they scored, four, five and six goals respectively with a 1-0 home defeat to Blackburn. Strange side. They should recover from that with a home win against Hull, although Tim Walter’s sacking for the third bottom Tigers perhaps adds an element of unpredictability to their performance. Some of the more extreme elements of the German’s "heart attack football” are likely to be jettisoned immediately by caretaker Andy Dawson, one would think.
Hull are third bottom, which is of course the bit of the table we’re sadly more interested in. Pompey now sit bottom, albeit with two games in hand having randomly lost both their fixtures this week to a waterlogged pitch at Ewood Park and a floodlight failure back at home against Millwall. They’ll be rested, if nothing else, for their Saturday trip to Swanselona.
The four teams in the most immediate danger should the bottom three get their act together are Cardiff, Plymouth, Preston and Oxford. It'll be interesting to see how Cardiff go after Wednesday at Frank Lampard’s Coventry. Plymouth continue to impress at home while flopping completely away and they’re on the road again this weekend, albeit only as far as Bristol City, following a midweek hammering at Norwich. Preston Knob End have been everything we thought they would be and less. They’re at home to play-off chasing West Brom. Oxford are slowly coming back to something like the position we expected for them, and now face a lunchtime homer with Millwall. That game at Loftus Road the week after next looms large.
Norwich v Luton rounds out the weekend list.
Referee: QPR seek a first win in five attempts with Durham’s Andrew Kitchen, and they’ll be hoping he’s in slightly kinder mood than he was for our recent 0-0 draw away at Burnley. Details.
Watford: It’s not quite on a Plymouth level of extreme (0-2-7 from nine away games) but the difference between Watford at Vicarage Road and Watford elsewhere is really quite stark. They have the division’s best home record with 22 points, while away they’re 2-1-6. It’s Watford’s best start at home since 1931/32.
The Hornets, infamously, started last season with a 4-0 home success over hapless QPR which led Gareth Ainsworth to proclaim them potential champions. They won only five of their remaining 22 home matches – only whipping boys Rotherham won fewer games on their own ground than Watford in 23/24. That has been spectacularly reversed by new manager Tom Cleverley, who has sought to restore the connection between an increasingly irritated and apathetic support, the club and the team. Watford now have the division’s joint best home record – 7-1-0 from eight in the league and 9-1-0 from ten in all competitions. They’ve scored 13 times in those eight games, and conceded only four. Add in their cup games and it’s 20 scored, four conceded, and six clean sheets from ten games. They’ve won five in a row here, the last three all by the same 1-0 scoreline against Blackburn, Oxford and Bristol City. Middlesbrough were the last side to score here, in a 2-1 defeat, 306 minutes ago. Going back into last season, where Cleverley was brought in as caretaker to steady the ship late on, it’s 14 games since an away team last won at Vicarage Road – Coventry, 2-1, on March 9. They’ve conceded four times in the last 13 games here. Tom Cleverley is the first Watford manager ever to avoid defeat in his first 12 home league games.
Only three sides have scored more than Watford’s 26 in the league. One of those is Norwich and the thing both have in common is an extremely high shot conversion rate – Watford score 13% of every shot they take, only Norwich 15.66% have higher. They beat Bristol City 1-0 here in the week, despite playing poorly, by scoring with their only shot on target. No surprise that at 6.45%, QPR have the league’s lowest. Vakoun Bayo (sold to Udinese and loaned back, because of course) is the Watford top scorer with seven. Both totals are boosted substantially by a surprise 6-2 win at Hillsborough against Sheff Wed, a game in which Bayo scored four times in the second half.
QPR did a surprising double over Watford in 2022/23, winning 3-2 here at the height of the Mick Beale ‘era’, and then beating them 1-0 at Loftus Road for Gareth Ainsworth’s first win in charge – QPR’s only win in 21 games. Watford repaid that with a double of their own last term – 4-0 at Vicarage Road, 2-1 at Loftus Road when Jake Livermore scored two goals in a game for the first time since 2016. That 4-0 thrashing halted a four-match unbeaten run for QPR here, three of them wins, dating back to the 2-0 victory in 2010/11 which sealed the Championship title for Neil Warnock’s men. QPR have played Watford more than any other side bar Norwich, and have a 51-32-35 winning record over history.
QPR: QPR are the only side in the whole EFL yet to win on a Saturday. Their two victories came at Luton on a Friday, and Cardiff on a Wednesday. The R’s have lost seven and drawn five of their 12 Saturday games so far. More worryingly still, this is the "away fatigued” game. By that we mean it is not only game three of a three game week, but it’s away. That is exacerbated by Watford playing Tuesday at home, and us playing Wednesday away – a long way away. Significantly reduced recovery time. I know we’re utterly beholden to our Sky Overlords but if you are going to insist on splitting the Championship midweek like this, entirely for the benefit of your bloody midweek goals show where Tim Sherwood is considered a resident expert, then where possible these sort of discrepancies should be avoided. A 12.30 kick off just as a final boot in the balls.
It felt to me like QPR always struggle in game three of a three game week, particularly when it’s an "away fatigued” game, so we put our number crunching columnist Andrew Scherer on it in between a really quite reasonable fried breakfast in Cardiff on Thursday morning and, yeh…
Since returning to the Championship in 2015/16…
QPR’s away averages:
Points per game: 1.07
Goals per game: 0.96
Goals conceded per game: 1.45
QPR’s away averages at the end of a three game week:
Points per game: 0.86 (18.87% worse)
Goals per game: 0.88 (8.44% worse)
Goals conceded per game: 1.53 (5.3% worse)
Extra kicker...If we take out behind-closed-doors games of the pandemic:
QPR’s away averages:
Points per game: 1.03
Goals per game: 0.95
Goals conceded per game: 1.49
QPR’s away averages at the end of a three game week:
Points per game: 0.73 (29.12% worse)
Goals per game: 0.85 (10.29% worse)
Goals conceded per game: 1.63 (9.73% worse)
Statistically, nearly 30% worse is… a lot. And that’s hammered home when you compare it to the rest of the division over the same period. Excluding the pandemic games behind closed doors, and looking at teams who have played at least ten away matches at the end of three game weeks, most teams do not have a particular problem with "away fatigued” games. QPR do. They really fucking do.
Long equation short, no team in the Championship is worse when playing away in game three of a three game week than us. Because of course. But, anyway, The White Lion has said it’ll open at 11 so it’s not all bad.
Prediction: In our Prediction League for 2024/25 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: "Cardiff was hard to watch and a degree of luck in the score due in a large way to Nardi’s brilliance. We also had Celar breaking his duck, in some style. The question to be addressed in relation to Celar is whether Cardiff witnessed the resurrection in the second coming of Paul Furlong, or a dog having its day - time will tell. This season Watford are either very good or very bad. I am not filled with confidence – our midfield disappeared in the second half against Cardiff and I think we are going to lose.”
Weston’s Call "‘I was there when Celar scored’. I really was and what a thoroughly great evening, such an important win. As much as I am still mentally celebrating that win ‘Celar again ole ole’ I thought our performance was pretty poor, Conceding 68% possession and 24 shots on our goal to a fairly awful Cardiff side isn’t good enough and doesn’t fill me with confidence despite that vital three points. Watford are far better than Cardiff, play like we did on Wednesday and I believe we are in trouble. Hope Celar and co prove me wrong but still don’t fancy us on current form.”
Nico’s Prediction: Watford 2-0 QPR. No scorer.
WestonSuperR’s Prediction: Watford 2-0 QPR. No Scorer.
LFW’s Prediction: Watford 3-0 QPR. No scorer.
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