The first in a marathon, international break catch up on the Awaydays takes us back to August and September and a mixed bag of results and experiences at Watford, Swansea and Milllllllllllllll.

When worlds collide

Two very distinct phenomena in the following of a mediocre football team collide in the final Saturday of August in Watford.

The first is spending time, and money, to travel away from home supporting a team you’re almost entirely certain is going to lose the game. Now, Watford is at the end of the Metropolitan Line, it’s not like we’re going to some World’s end place like Middlesbrough expecting to be bummed in the gob, but it’s quite far enough given the context.

Emmanuel Dennis has indeed fallen victim to the the giant, cordless Dyson Nottingham Forest have been waving around trying to suck up every living being that’s ever played football beyond the park level, but Ismaela Sarr and Joao Pedro, despite heavy interest from Everton, Newcastle, Palace and others all remain for our visit. This would be bad news if QPR were in good form. QPR are not in good form. They’ve already bollocksed up trips to Blackburn and Charlton, come very close to doing the same with a 3-0 lead at home to Middlesbrough, and escaped a drubbing at Sunderland only courtesy of a remarkable period of stoppage time in which they scored their first direct free kick since Noel Edmonds was last on TV and then equalised via a header from their own goalkeeper. The week immediately prior to this fixture was spent taking one point and one goal from two home matches against divisional behemoths Rotherham and Blackpool — a 180 minute experience akin to trying to shit out a Lego garage. We are going to lose here, of that there can surely be little doubt.

And yet here we are anyway. Special WhatsApp groups have been commissioned, client reference numbers have been collected up, loyalty points have been calculated and recalculated, the designated driver has sacked off work to attack the QPR ticketing website with the mixture of blunt force trauma and outright pleading required to wrestle a dozen tickets from its Krypton Factor-style obstacle course of log ins, passwords, linked accounts, price bands, assignments, incorrect warnings about insufficient point totals, booking fees and randomly appearing countdown clocks telling you there’s only 26 seconds left before you get kicked out and all the tickets go back on the pile for you to start again. There’s a good argument to say we don’t need the loyalty point system any more — the ticketing website being so unashamedly long-winded, buggy and shit that only the most far-gone, addicted, beyond-help QPR fans would persevere with the thing long enough to get a ticket out the other end of it anyway. Rangers, listen, I’m saying this as a friend: if I were a robot capable of logging into somebody’s account on the QPR ticket website - which as both regular readers will know requires you to log in once, immediately click the little man at the top, and then log in all over again a second time, before you can begin - then I reckon I’d be well capable of ticking that little box that says “I’m not a fucking robot” too.

The day dawns bright and we journey into town to that breakfast place we like to drop a score on some bacon and eggs. Then Mabel’s Tavern to chuck £6 a throw on pints of Moretti because the only Peroni they’ve got is the gluten-free piss and it turns out the gluten is the best bit. And then the train up to Watford with beers even the station off licence reckons it can charge £4 a bottle for these days. Into Watford past that little Wetherspoons that pretends not to be a Wetherspoons and that death-star Wetherspoons that absolutely does not, past the nightclubs and fleshpots of Watford High Street (one is advertising “late opening” to 1.30am, don’t drink them all at once kids), and eventually to Vicarage Road. They’ve put up some new-builds here since our last visit, two storey brick shoeboxes piled atop each other by somebody who must have been short of time, balconies staring straight into the back of the away end from a distance of 20 feet advertised by a big poster as “Vicarage Court — Stylish One Bedroom Apartments Now Available”. Phwoar, take my money.

And we’re going to lose. We’re going through all this hassle, all this rigmarole, all this money, all these livers, and we’re dodging traffic on inner ring roads in fucking Watford, to watch QPR lose. We’re going to lose, even when Ilias Chair’s long range speculator hits a passer by and diverts into the other bottom corner with Daniel Bachmann flapping around like Christ in a crucifix shop. That’s because Keith Stroud is here to wave Ken Sema through a reasonably huge shout for a handball to equalise. We’re going to lose, even when Chris Willock immediately restores Rangers’ lead off a beautiful Ethan Laird assist — a proper football goal of the sorts proper football teams score. That’s because Keith Stroud is here to wave play through a reasonably huge shout for a foul on Rob Dickie for Joao Pedro to equalise. And when the non-believers, concerned relatives, frustrated partners, or that strange breed of people who manage to still be optimists while following QPR around this sordid little shithole, ask why we’re bothering, why go, why not stay at home and save your money, all we’ve got for them is “because it’s what we do”. Daft as Jimmy Dunne’s favourite brush.

As it turns out, we’re not going to lose. Phenomena number two is about to ride in over the horizon and curl an absolute steamer into the back of Keith Stroud’s throat. The stairs goal.

Stairs goals can be scored from any distance, by any player, in a variety of circumstances. Obviously Dom Ball’s last minute, 30-yard, left footed winner against Cardiff City at the Loft End is the ultimate stairs goal, except we weren’t allowed near the stairs at that point and had to make do with smashing up the Crown and Sceptre beer garden instead. Idrissa Sylla’s last minute, one-yard tap in to win a relatively meaningless, early-season game against a crap Hull side, was a stairs goal. They’re hard to define, but you know when they’ve occurred, because you’re on the stairs, sometimes on your back on the stairs being trampled by the other stairs people, sometimes being punched in the face by people you thought were your friends. When Kenneth Paal gets in down the left and cuts a perfect ball back from the byline it opens up perfectly for Stefan Johansen to score, and him completely fluffing that line and making the seething mass behind the goal feel the chance was lost only makes what comes next better. It’s Albert Adomah.

😍 𝗜𝗧'𝗦 𝗛𝗔𝗣𝗣𝗘𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗔𝗚𝗔𝗜𝗡 😍

Safe to say @uncs37 enjoys his trips to Hertfordshire 😅#QPR | #WATQPR pic.twitter.com/1pZ2DljodL– QPR FC (@QPR) August 28, 2022

Context upon narrative upon narrative upon context. This QPR supporting player scored his first ever goal for his local team, right at the fag end of his career, from this spot, on this ground the season before last. It was in the last minute of a televised fixture Rangers desperately needed a result from, against all the bookies’ odds and Watford’s resources, to climb away from a relegation whirlpool they were in increasing danger of being sucked into. The celebrations that followed it were indeed mental, but they were in 20,000+ small pieces, scattered all over the world, locked in our living rooms, faces pressed up against the glass of our screens, locked outside of our world and invited to peer in only via technology and Andy Sinton screaming. A wave of relief and victorious ecstasy, sure, but then the television went off, the lights came up, and it was just another day, week and month trapped between the same four walls. You couldn’t help but imagine what it would have been like to be behind that goal at that moment, how that night would have unfolded from there, racing to Mabel’s for last orders, anointing the adverts on the last tube home with slurred graffiti about the size of Troy Deeney’s arse. Time and memories we thought we’d never get back, and yet here was Albert again, steadying himself on the same spot, for the same shot, past Bachmann and into the roof of the net.

Pandemonium. Kath catches one in the face and splits her lip. This may well (ok, was) have been from me. Joe chooses to find it funny, but his eyes tell a different story and I’ve been buying him pints of Pride ever since. As a body switches to horizontal flight and passes overhead, from two rows behind us to three in front, my phone slips out of my pocket and is jumped upon somewhere in the region of 36,000 times. A spate of subsequent away wins soon has me on first name terms with the grumpy bastard in the St Pancras branch of iSmash. We’ve had a tip from a QPR supporting landlord that he’s just take over The White Lion near Watford Junction station, so it’s all back there for a nice quiet pint after, and wait for this all to blow over. He’s delighted, and has hung a QPR shirt over the bar just to really antagonise his new regulars.

A goal, but not just any kind of goal — a stairs goal. A win, but not just any kind of win — one when you were sure we would lose. If you could store the electricity created by such moments you’d power the national grid at a price a normal person could afford to pay. Instead it’s back to work on Monday, to try and pay for the bills we can’t — nobody around us on the tube, in the office, in the world knowing or understanding just how those moments make us feel. That’s why we go to games we think we’re going to lose, and why you’re (occasionally) missing out if you don’t.

By the seaside

Swansea has a beach? Who knew?

Well, actually, lots of people, I presume. The clue is kind of in the name. And on the map. But still, I don’t know… Blackpool — beach, Skegness — beach, Cleethorpes — beach, Brighton — beach, Bournemouth — beach, Grange-over Sands — sand… Swansea — beach? It somehow doesn’t compute, like when they stick a big wheel up for the Christmas market and call it The Sheffield Eye, or announce record numbers of people in employment in Scunthorpe. Swansea Beach just doesn’t sound right, even after consuming three million Private Eye articles about its bloody tidal lagoon power project. And, yet, there it is, sprawling out before me, the best part of half a mile thick on account of the tide being out. On this grey, windy Saturday morning, that’s already promising a day of perpetual darkness with ever more threatening clouds sweeping in from out at sea and enveloping the place, it’s just one bloke and his dog, and one QPR fan and his running shoes (yes, I’m being that twat). I’ve essentially got the thing all to myself — perhaps nobody else has heard of it either — and in 40 minutes of steady, hungover jogging I enjoy the space without encountering a single turd, which in Britain in 2022 counts as some achievement.

I’ve started with the beach because I was desperate to say something nice about Swansea. For years this was a chore of a trip that started with an expensive and ball-aching train journey (think you’re nearly there when you get to Cardiff because they hate each other? You are not nearly there when you get to Cardiff) and ended on Wind Street, a street so horrendous they have to employ door security on its Premier Inn.

Footnote - Allow a bit of a dick-swinging tangent here… I only know this about the Premier Inn because many years ago when I still had hair and abs I actually struck it (reasonably) lucky at the town’s Pop World (shut up) after a particularly dramatic 0-0 midweek draw but upon taking the lucky other back to that night’s Chez LFW I was told in no uncertain terms by said doorman that the room had been booked for one person and another would only be admitted if they signed in at the front desk — name, address, phone number, DOB, national insurance etc. Not since Brian Potter took that frizzy-haired social worker up to the bedroom on his Stannah Stairlift has there ever been quite such a romantic and alluring lead up to intercourse as drunkenly stumbling out of Swansea Pop World and holding the lift while the guestbook is signed at the reception of Wind Street Premier Inn. Ooooh, the things I’m gonna do to you. Just you wait. FML, etc.

But, last May, we cracked Swansea. We went down late the night before, slept in the perfectly adequate hotel across from the station which did us a very decent breakfast in the morning, emerged into bright, warm, sunlight, and ignored Wind Street entirely. Just keep walking, down the marina, and the beach, and the sea, and the sun. QPR won 1-0, Andre Gray scored late on, we wandered back into town and sat with our feet dangling off the side of a lock, watching the sun go down on the day and the season, reflecting on a promotion campaign gone wrong and a final day of the season gone oh so right. I wanted to write that awayday up, but on the train back afterwards fellow sufferers who’d been in the team hotel the night before started recounting the sad side of the story being put forward by Mark Warburton, John Eustace and several players. The realisation that a season of writing for LFW wasn’t over, and would in fact ramp up over the inevitable fall out of the weeks to come, started jumping up and down on my head as if it were a ripe watermelon. So I never got around to it, which is a shame, because Swansea, as it turns out, is a properly nice place.

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Second time around, which I am now writing up, it is less nice.

Obviously mortal embarrassment would prevent me from ever returning to the Premier Inn on Wind Street, but in the name of economising and rank stupidity I have booked the one down by the harbour. They get in touch the day before via email to say: “We're so excited to be welcoming you to stay with us once again. But, much like many businesses across the UK, we’ve been experiencing supply chain issues across a number of different areas, including team shortages, which unfortunately puts some added pressure on us to be able to deliver the experience you expect and love. We know that these are our challenges and not yours - it's all part of being the UK's largest hotel chain. We just wanted to be honest with you about where we're at…” Where they’re “at”, it turns out, is the place is a filthy, unmanned, construction site currently being stripped of its flammable exterior by a team of builders who start wandering around on a scaffold outside my window at whatever time of the morning it was a minute and thirty seconds after I decided to treat myself to starting the day with a wank. The toilet has a flush you need to work at, and build a bit of momentum up with. That’s without getting into why the plug sockets at a Premier Inn are always on the opposite side of the room to the bed.

Breakfast is at The Kardomah, a Swansea institution, and real-life time portal. I’d say close your eyes and QPR are champions of England again, but you don’t even have to close your eyes in here, just look around at the décor, and the clientele. A lot of brown and orange on the walls, a lot of those weird grey coats Littlewoods issue you with when you get a bus pass on the back of the chairs. It’s like some rabid R’s fan came here after that 2-0 win against Leeds, stopped the clock, and decided to just live in that moment for the rest of time. My full breakfast fills every inch of a plate the size of a dustbin lid, and costs half a pint of Amstel in new money. There’s a piece of fried bread here giving my arteries the evil eye — three slices guaranteed to bring an elephant to its knees — and the tomatoes are fresh from the can. Unfortunately the sausages are those Weatherspoons/Richmond numbers made up predominantly of ash, and they’ve been cooked using the method of time rather than the application of heat, but for the price and the portion size I still can’t believe it isn’t costing more to put it on the plate than I’m paying to sit here.

Afterwards we quite fancy taking in Everton v Liverpool at lunchtime, and so pick Generic Sports Bar 3.6 on the main drag. Unfortunately, somebody from the International Space Station has been in touch and they also quite fancy taking in Everton v Liverpool at lunchtime too and so an industrial, coal-fired speaker system more commonly seen at all-night warehouse raves is fired up and blasts the commentary at us at a volume that makes it impossible to do anything other than sit there and wonder if you’ve got a fractured skull. Fletch, and Macca. Macca, and Fletch. Fletch. Fletch. Fletch.

It pisses with rain all day, QPR play like a bunch of complete tarts and get deservedly done 1-0, and on the way home we’re punished for a gratuitous, moment-of-weakness upgrade to first class to avoid having to speak to another human being ever again with the onslaught of a hen party at Bristol Parkway. Their London train had been cancelled, group leader Tabitha or Tibitha or Tamara or Camilla or whatever her fucking name was wanted us all to know, and as a result they were commandeering the empty carriage for their own. Fair enough, to be honest, I’d have done the same, probably without feeling the need to tell everybody else on board that’s what I was doing but still. Upon spying a GWR employee, there’s a lot of entitled yelling. Unfortunately, this isn’t the guard, it’s the boy pushing the drinks trolley. He gets a hail of abuse straight into his gob regardless because “I’m a solicitor in Bristol you know”. Standing this for five minutes but no longer, I can’t help myself but point out to Tabs/Tibs/Tams/Cams that she is shouting at the wrong person and none of it is his fault. The “solicitor from Bristol” immediately bursts into tears, calls me a “typical privileged, middle class, white, male”, and continues to harangue the non-white boy pushing a drinks trolley on a football train on a Saturday night for minimum wage for a ticket inspection he hasn’t performed and enforcement action over the first class status of the carriage that he hasn’t taken. We take our middle class bottles of lukewarm Peroni and packet of salt and vinegar crisps and move carriages.

This year, Swansea was not the one. How about that beach though.

Lettum all come

When you’re accelerating towards a tenth consecutive season in this division, and you were in it for 13 of the 18 years prior to that as well, you have to gather what few scraps of joy you can find and take solace in them.

We once used to laugh about having an emergency credit card behind a pane of glass — break in case of European campaign - back when we thought Junior Hoilett might be pound-for-pound the best signing of the Premier League’s summer transfer window. As it turns out, that was ludicrous even back then, when QPR’s wage bill really should have given them at least half a shout at the sort of fun-filled continental adventures West Ham have been robustly enjoying lately. Now it seems so preposterous it’s not even worth joking about, some ridiculous fairy tale from a time of affordable mortgages and chalk streams without bloodied tampons clogging the banks. That tinge of excitement that comes from discovering a new place, visiting a new ground, stumbling across the perfect back-street pub for all our future visits here, now hangs entirely on an annual pair of cup draws that deviate only very occasionally from sending us back to the same Championship ground we were at last fucking week to treat us to Milton Keynes, Swindon, Northampton or Milton Keynes. We’ll get Luton this year, you watch.

There is, though, something to be said for the familiar. That warm, comforting feeling you get from walking into your regular pub or breakfast café and them knowing your name and your order, or taking that sharp right at the bottom of the escalators to the Northern Line platforms at Tottenham Court Road while all the rest of the idiot scum continue off into a mosaiced labyrinth even David Bowie would have thought a bit much. It is joyful, in its own way, to know without looking that Middlesbrough away means this train at this time, and a change at York not Darlington to knock 20 sheets off the price, and drinks in Doctor Brown’s where the pre-match quiz will feature a question about who made QPR’s famous Guinness kit that we’ll be able to get right and win a free pint. That Hull means fish and chips in The Minerva; that Birmingham means a pie in The Old Joint Stock (but don’t stay there for drinks unless you’re willing to sell a kidney to finance the round, pop round the corner to The Crown for cheaper drinks and the sort of people watching that can only come from a pub next to a magistrates court); that Sheff Utd means a fat calzone at Mama and Leonie’s; and that you can do West Brom and back for £12 out of Marylebone — and it’s a a much more pleasurable experience than the horrors of the more expensive Euston line.

Some of these wrinkles — Julian’s fabled pub in Stoke, the weird back-street ale house in Preston that has never not had some sort of disaster with its electricity, extractor fan, chef availability, deliveries, opening time… - take some years to master and my God, in the year of our Lord 2022, we think we’ve finally found the cheat sheet to Millwall away.

Previously, the funniest story we had from Millwall away was when BarbicanR made his way there straight from work, and then found himself crammed in against the dividing gate between the home and away ends afterwards, holding up an attaché case to shield the side of his head from the hail of loose change. It was all terribly Fulham, a few people started singing about “briefcase Ranger”, and he’s never lived it down since. This is, nevertheless, still a story about being trapped in a cage and pelted with coins late at night in deepest Bermondsey.

Over time, our group has drifted away from this fixture. Because yes, you can drink at London Bridge, out by the river at The Old Thameside if the weather is decent perhaps, or snuggled up in the barrel vaults at The Sheaf. Yes you can pass through Borough Market and get tempted by a sausage roll as big as your arm only to end up paying £9 for it because the old boy that flogs you it has a long story about how it’s actually venison from this farm in wherever the fuck you farm venison in this country if you want to charge people £9 for sausage rolls. But sooner or later, it’s The Bunch of Grapes, it’s the lines of police vans and dogs and men, it’s that fucking train, it’s that defeat, and it’s that long stint in captivity afterwards.

This was all unbearable enough when there was a long train running every five or so minutes. Now there is a short train running every 15, because in this country we’ve decided to tackle traffic, pollution, climate change, and a cost of living crisis by running fewer, shorter, more expensive trains, less often — and quite frequently these days, no trains at all. The experience is enhanced this year by the collective decision from the smoking population, taken en masse over the close season without consultation with the rest of us, that vaping is fine inside football grounds, pubs and in this case a train carriage running at roughly 140% capacity. Presumably this occurred at the same meeting it was decreed earphones are no longer necessary for listening to stuff on the tube — why not let the whole carriage enjoy your drill rap on their commute home?

The bloke in front of us at the match is at it as well, one long drag and exhale on his large plastic box every minute for 98 minutes. We watch the whole game through acrid clouds of vapourised bubblegum making the whole thing feel like a weird dream sequence, like that time we lost 1-0 at Newcastle and missed most of the second half from their lofty away end because a cloud had moved in off the Tyne. A sensation only enhanced by Millwall’s frankly completely bizarre decision, post Queen death, that the public address system must be turned off, except for a Mellow Magic playlist which would be allowed to drift along in the background. No letters please, playing Luther Vandross at half time is no more or less respectful/disrespectful to a dead monarch than me sitting here a couple of months later saying this was obviously completely fucking ridiculous. As if Millwall’s insipid efforts on the pitch weren’t enough to invite QPR in for a rare victory in these parts, this torching of their own atmosphere in some weird ham-fisted gesture of reverence finished the home team off completely.

Standing in the cage post 2-0 defeat here last season while one QPR fan in front of us burned off the thick end of 45 minutes repeatedly shouting “would Wilder have got us in the play-offs yes or no?” into the side of his mate’s head from a distance of half a foot proved the straw that broke the camel’s back for several of our lot, and the group was down to a slim half dozen this year for a game, at most, nine miles from any of our houses. For those that did brave it, however, a breakthrough to go with a win. You don’t have to stand in the cage, you don’t have to cram onto the train in a cloud of vape, you don’t have to listen to people yell “DADDY OR CHIPS?” at each other, you don’t have to protect yourself against the flying shrapnel, and you don’t even have to wait too long. There is… another way.

Whether there would be another way had the result been different and the ground not cleared out 20 minutes before the end, whether it existed that night Ian Holloway decided to stand on the steps of the team coach and conduct the car park orchestra, I have my doubts. But tonight, my word, there’s another way, and from there it’s just a couple of twists and turns under myriad railway lines, a circuit around a very fetching incinerator, a bit where we head off into an industrial estate along the sort of road you’d definitely use if you needed shot of a dead prostitute pretty sharpish, few trips round the houses, a big supermarket, and as if by magic, in what can only have been 25-30 minutes tops, we’re at, says here, New Cross Gate. Overground into town, cross over to the Northern Line via a late off licence for some celebratory Diane Abbot tinnies for the tube, back in Barnet a little after 11pm. This a game we once got home later from than an away trip to Burton Albion. Saints be praised, a genuine bona fide miracle, and it’s only taken us 30 years to discover it.

It must be said, this tour of new and exciting corners of The Den only made more hilarious the scandalous, controversial, corrupt and ultimately seen-off idea by the previous Lewisham Council to compulsorily purchase the land around the ground so an off-the-shelf private housing developer called Renewal — which it transpired several former councillors and officers had hands in - could build luxury (zero council housing, 15% ‘affordable’) flats under a development titled, wait for this, ‘New Bermondsey’. We like it here, you poor people are gonna have to fuck off.

Could you really see that here? Sandwiched between this football ground and a 24-hour fire of all the shit we throw away that doesn’t end up in the sea? Gentrified new builds, the Waitrose Mini, the theme café with its £7 almond milk coffee and jolly East End theme, with all the staff wearing flat caps? A Marxist incursion into Bexleyheath of a Sunday morning, handing out vegan sausage sandwiches to amateur footballers? Mike used to have a Combat 18 tattoo, now he’s done six months of micro-dose ketamine therapy for depression and counsels trans youth — he welcomed the death of Millwall saying “I didn’t like who I was at The Den”. Wood fired pizza oven, today’s special: The Stone Island - San Marzano tomato, Italian sausage, Baked egg, Smoked Scamorza cheese, San Danielle pancetta, Ancho chilli, on a granary base baked in a clay oven - available from 11.30am, £23.50. Black and white pictures of Terry Hurlock on the wall — “who’s that mummy?, Sebastien asks over his child’s portion of eggs Florentine. Mummy doesn’t know, sweetheart.

Funny, if it hadn’t come as close to happening as it did thanks to a corrupted local authority. Funny, if it didn’t happen so regularly all over this city, if we hadn’t just pissed away the last major development site capable of taking thousands of affordable homes for key workers in the middle of town to instead build a rich person’s playground with airborne swimming pools and a £20-a-ride lift to nowhere. Funny, if you could rent a house in this shithole for less than £2k a month.

😍 Beale ball from back to front.

𝘼𝙣𝙤𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 delightful @chriswillock goal 💫#QPR | #MILQPR pic.twitter.com/YOkInIEzOK

— QPR FC (@QPR) September 15, 2022

Still, if you wanted actual funny, there was QPR’s first goal on the night, scored with immaculate timing just as some noise had threatened to crank up for the first and only time on the evening. MIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLLLL-oh.

Scores on the doors

Watford: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 8/10 >>> Watford performance 5/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 8/10 >>> Home support 6/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 7/10 >>>> Stadium 7/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 6/10 On the train >>> Journey 7/10 >>> Cost 7/10

Swansea: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 5/10 >>> Swansea performance 7/10 >>> Referee performance 3/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 5/10 >>> Home support 6/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 5/10 >>>> Stadium 7/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 4/10 >>> Atmosphere 3/10 >>> Food 3/10 >>>> Cost 6/10 On the train >>> Journey 7/10 >>> Cost 4/10

Millwall: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 8/10 >>> Millwall performance 4/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 7/10 >>> Home support 5/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 5/10 >>>> Stadium 7/10 >>>> Police and stewards 5/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 3/10 On the train >>> Journey 4/10 >>> Cost 6/10

Totals, Watford 94/140, Swansea 70/140, Millwall 81/140

2022/23 >>> Blackburn/Sunderland/Charlton - 22/23

2021/22 >>> Hull/Boro 21/22 >>> Reading/Bournemouth >>> Fulham/Peterborough >>> Cardiff/Blackpool >>> Bristol/Birmingham >>> Peterborough/Coventry/Millwall >>> Barnsley/Blackburn >>> Luton/Nottingham >>> Sheffield/Preston/Huddersfield

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