Alex Perry is back to review a month when things started to look up in QPR land, with Zan Celar scoring goals and Jimmy Dunne getting a 'serious business' haircut.

Joked I would do 500 words on Jimmy Dunne’s hair, ended up with 850. Yeah, this column doesn’t need preamble.

Zan Celar Scored, that’s it, that’s the headline

It has been so hard to judge Celar so far. What we know of him (because Greg Spires does the lords work) he is a striker who thrives in the box, that is his happy place. Tucking away neat finishes and making clever movements to create these chances. At QPR he is being asked to do a whole lot of not this. Watching Celar toil has been a sad affair, for all involved. The guy has been asked to a lead an attack woefully short of quality, in front of a midfield so dysfunctional they basically exist in a liminal space. He is forced to stand up there making pointless runs in behind for passes no one is capable of playing and leading a press everyone behinds him doesn’t understand. This then makes every missed opportunity all the starker, another sequence of events to etch into the ever-growing totem pole of the clubs failed attempt at data-led recruitment.

Which is why I am delighted that I can write Zan Celar scored some goals, two of them, both as impressive as the other. The first, a brilliant touch to pluck the ball out of the sky whilst simultaneously shifting just far enough to his right to quite literally take a swing at the ball. There was nothing deft about it, here was a man so low on confidence he simply swung his leg at a falling sphere with all the tension of a middle-aged man in a Pilates studio. Only to find the ball nestling into the top corner, lifting the weight of 17 ignominious league games from him psyche.

The second, however, that came with finesse. Clean through against a team only QPR could conspire to lose to and the opportunity to put the game away, 0-2 in the 90th minute. A chance to put one stick in the dam and turn this season around, the echoes of boos after his penalty miss against Stoke still ringing in his ears, images burnt into his retinas. Smash it Zan, let gravity do the work again, head down, foot like a traction engine and exorcise these demons. Instead, he lifted a delightful dink over the onrushing Jak Alnwick and exhumed the kind of confidence you would associate with someone approaching 20 goals this season, not two. It was a glorious way to cap off a particularly attritional, low quality championship affair.

If one is being cynical, we can assume this whole sequence of events was luck, a touch that could have cannoned off his shin and a finish that could have landed anywhere. A chip that doesn’t get off the ground and we’re playing against a team that isn’t half as shambolic as Cardiff. However, in the exercise of daring to be optimistic and watching the goal several times over - so starved have we been of anything enjoyable this season - I think we saw a glimpse of what our recruitment team had in mind when chucking £REDACTEDm on him. It’s the shift he takes away from the defender after the initial first touch, it’s a small detail but without it there is no space to take that swing, it is born from something entirely instinctual.

It is easy to see a bad move do this to a player, the complete removal of all instinct and vibes that got you to this point. The overthinking, playing football like you’ve just had to think about what your pin number actually is. Hesitancy that accompanies every anxiety dream inducing performance, your teeth are still there when you wake up but so is that miss. Soothsayers, Shamans, the Morai and the Norns are all weaving away to reduce a Championship striker to rubble. After the penalty miss against Stoke, we were beyond rubble, simply we gazed upon the human shadow of a man being burnt into the Loftus Road turf. Confidence eroded and being the only senior striker left in an ailing team, those finishes at Cardiff were either the result of complete Nihilism, or a man who may just actually have a bit about him to get to this point in his career. Who would have thought?

Naturally, he would miss a presentable chance one game later and then obliterate his hamstring the game after that. In a perverse way, you could say his Loftus Road career to date is evidence of a man who absolutely understands the prerequisites of being a QPR striker.

The aesthetics of failure

The England cricket team recently continued their trend of left-field team selection by chucking in the lesser-known 21-year-old Jacob Bethell in at number three for his test debut. A prodigious talent wrapped up in the comfort blanket that is being labelled a wunderkind, he has long been touted as English crickets next big thing. Just, not quite yet. A lot was made in media circles around this selection, it’s too soon, this could damage his career, this kid be out of cricket all together by 26. Hyperbolic, maybe. His first innings saw him up against a typically competent and dangerous New Zealand pace attack that had the ball talking and after facing 34 balls he departed for ten paltry runs. Cricket fan or not, it is easy to understand that by all available metrics this is not a very good contribution.

There was something in that innings that made me think about QPR, however. Typically, it came with the ball that got him out. An unplayable delivery that nipped back in off the pitch and found the outside edge. A failure, right there. The defensive stroke with his bat though? Good enough to keep Geoffrey Boycott consuming whatever cursed goblin blood keeps him alive, to tell everyone defensive cricket is still the only thing that should matter. It was the unquantifiable eye-test. Off trudged Jacob Bethell, peroxide imbued mullet, eyes as blue as the Barbadian oceans he grew up next to and allegedly with a penchant for using the word ‘flair’ as a verb, looking every bit an international athlete. That wasn’t failure.
Failure implies finality, things ending, death rattles, obituaries to be drafted. Failure to beat Stoke at home back in November, was assumed to be the end of Marti Cifuentes. A man tasked with forming a terrarium from the cracks in a pavement slab, he would be the fall guy in what was turning into one of the great hubristic reckonings. All the trappings for a sacking where there as well. A goal conceded with Stoke’s first shot on target, your big money striker missing a penalty whilst the player you bought to take penalties stands on and watches, a lucky own goal getting you level and doing nothing to shift the momentum of the game and ultimately only being spared defeat by some generous refereeing. Well, life finds a way.

The romantic in me wants to say it was the fan support, the way his name rang around the ground despite the result, a vote of confidence that actually meaned something. It could have been the online presence after the match, the clear disdain we had for the upper echelons of the club and their latest trend chasing transfer window. We can speculate it was the board doing something brave and sensible, choosing to stick because they have a long-term vision and manager, they want to back, be it the Championship or League 1. Or maybe it was my very own prose in my last column about the managerial asteroid that is Frank Lampard being your most viable alternative, we will never truly know.

What we do know as a fan base, is the look of a manager in terminal decline. It starts with the glaze in their eyes as if they’re staring through anything corporeal, evolves into comments about certain characters within the dressing room and culminates into a team putting in the Finish Him performance that sees it all over the line. That looks like failure.

Maybe I’ve got my rose-tinted glasses on now we’ve had a recovery, but I’ve never watched this team this season and felt like it was a classic sporting disaster. It has looked woeful in parts, a horribly unbalanced team, the result of godless grafting between Ainsworth and Cifuentes. They have looked low on confidence, every touch requiring thought, the ball appearing a different weight for us against better teams, passes and touches just seemingly a few millimetres further away from players feet than they would like. Attacking midfielders just a concept, defensive midfielders merely a state of mind. It was clearly, not working. What it never looked like was a fanbase who wanted him gone or a group of players who were waiting for their next manager. Five games and 11 points later, maybe we’re looking at green shoots of success.

Expectations, narrative and the symbolism of frosted tips

Narrative is everything in sport. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more as long as anyone will listen to me. Let’s take the last six games. A team in the relegation zone having to field youth academy players due to lobsided and unreliable recruitment, playing suffer ball with an absolute aversion to possession or pass completion, more dark arts on display than a necromancer playthrough on Baldur’s Gate 3. Shave at least three points off that total for the Bristol, Watford and Stoke games and let’s say Oxford take advantage, of the worst 45 minutes of football you have literally ever seen. Six points from six games, horrible football and wait… is Marti wearing skinny jeans? Maybe cowboy boots are a big thing in Catalonia and that belt buckle probably doesn’t weigh more than 5kg, yet. I think he’s growing his hair out. Yeah, you’re still thinking about the bad thing.

So, let’s flip that. 12 points from six games. Youth players like Morgan and Kolli stepping up and providing the kind of thrust that’s been missing earlier this season, digging us out of an almighty injury crisis and giving us hope for player development. Back to basics football that screams pragmatism and the simple desire to get points on the board, in the process becoming an absolutely wretched team to try and play against. Players recruited via a Football Manager playthrough beginning to settle into a brutal league, strong and consistent performances from Saito and Varane. Liam Morrison is yet to lose in a QPR shirt, your favourite niche stat. Paul Nardi’s outstanding form a reason we’re winning, no longer a plaster on a gaping wound. A manager self-aware enough to accept his ideal style of football won’t wash here, not in this league with these players, not yet. Giving himself the best chance of turning things around, to build momentum and confidence in a fragile set of players. Putting results before his own ideological delusions, viewing the club as something to take care of as opposed to being his own personal audition for the next great principle-based job opening.

You see, narrative, as important as it is in sport, is an inherently fickle thing. You will have had both of the above conversations and either viewpoint probably revolves around a myriad of circumstances entirely removed from what happens on the pitch. The viewpoints are valid, you can pick and choose any of the points above, throw them in any order and paint a reasonably coherent picture of QPR at present. The missing part is the why.

For me the recent uptick in form is down to something that data and stats can’t quantify. It’s a simple visual que from a player who has best represented both the best and worst of Marti Cifuentes, it is Jimmy Dunne’s frosted tips, or more presciently for the purposes of this piece, the lack thereof. I am not here to judge sartorial choices, nor do I think they’re genuinely representative of anyone’s actual attitude, but there is something symbolic in the follicles of that lovely man’s head.

It goes underestimated; the amount of goodwill Marti has accrued from reviving Jimmy Dunne’s QPR career. One of the infamous players from last winter’s dreadful Millwall defeat, his redemption arc at RB is worth 2,000 words on its own. Any other regime we’ve had in the last decade would have seen Dunne playing for another Championship team on a free transfer, predictably thriving whilst we have no alternative to Hevertton Santos. Instead, the Irish Cafu was rewarded with a well-earned contract extension and we all thought he would form a key piece of a back four that would see us comfortably mid-table if not tickling the play-offs.

We all fell for it; we wanted to see Marti deploy Chair as a false nine and cheer as they set about sacrificing Sam Field in some pre-match total football ritual. Jimmy Dunne would be there, tanned, refreshed and using his new found Kenergy to do rainbow flicks over opposing LB’s. What we got instead was bleach blonde hair that quickly faded into frosted tips, a stark reminder that minutes accrued listening to Diary of a CEO does not translate into boardroom competence and a dreadful first 16 games of the season.

Since the international break Jimmy Dunne has done away with the fallacy of having a hairstyle, instead the buzzcut was back and subsequently so are positive results. Sam Field, a man whom I speculated in the middle of that heady autumn where positivity briefly lived, should be consigned to the past and given to a lesser team who would appreciate his basic professionalism, has shown me that tackles, recycling possession and actually knowing where you are on a football pitch is invaluable. Paul Smyth is great at chasing things/peoples/objects/dreams. Steve Cook keeps shouting at people and Jack Colback is the classic fan favourite non-playing best player. We all wanted to see this team chrysalis into a beautiful bleach blonde butterfly, but I think Marti knows we need moths with buzzcuts right now.

More from this author >>> Frey’s big start – September >>> That Alfie Lloyd interview – October >>> Checkov’s long winter – November

If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk.

Pictures - Ian Randall Photography

HastingsRanger added 11:06 - Dec 24 A good read, thanks
0

Queens Park Rangers Polls