QPR entered another grisly chapter to their inglorious FA Cup history, extending their run as the country’s worst Third Round team with an amateur hour defensive performance at Premier League Leicester on Saturday.

Queens Park Rangers’ run in this season’s FA Cup lasted around ten minutes, but what a ten minutes it was.

Leicester City harried out of possession, a slick three-pass interchange ending with Rayan Kolli teeing up Jonathan Varane. A beautiful, first time, curled shot from the thickest end of 30 yards, round goalkeeper Stolarczyk and into the bottom corner. Difficult to understand how this is the first of Varane’s career with technique like that. A goal not dissimilar from Mikele Leigertwood’s first for the club from that exact spot nearly 20 years ago (I know, it’s ridiculous, we’ll be dead soon). Four and a half thousand QPR fans in raptures - once they’d been informed by the public address system a goal had been scored, that is.

It was a game that should never really have taken place. A beautiful, crisp winter morning with bright sunshine beaming down on the travelling thousands disappeared about ten miles south of Leicester. Once plunged into a city of perpetual darkness there was no escape. You couldn’t feel your fingers, you couldn’t feel your feet. More to the point you couldn’t see the far side of the pitch. Any assistant referee claiming they could look across the line and accurately judge offsides in this is stretching the truth. Mind you, given David Webb was the referee in charge we should just be grateful he even insisted on them turning the lights on. Why use an orange ball when we’ve got this perfectly serviceable fog-coloured one? Pillock.

Leicester fired up a collection of flame throwers pre-game by way of “atmosphere”. These succeeded only in melting the ice on the roof, drenching the spectators beneath in something approaching torrential rain in a covered stand throughout the first half, and freezing up the stairwells just in time for everybody to try and negotiate them for half time. Pillocks. Much of the game, for those in attendance, was a total mystery. “What’s going on?” sang the QPR fans on repeat. Anything on the main stand side of the ground, or on the far side of the halfway line, we were just guessing about really. A farce.

A game, though, QPR were well in. Varane’s goal capped an enterprising and entertaining passage of play in which Rangers had dominated, raining in shots and forcing multiple corners - all diligently plonked onto the forehead of the defender at the near post. The French midfielder really looked the part. Ilias Chair was involved and effective, shooting from range and drawing a top corner save from Stolarczyk. Rayan Kolli v Wout Faes, like watching a tropical rainforest fight itself. Kolli curled a great chance wide from 15 yards when he might have scored. Leicester, in the Premier League’s relegation zone, with three wins all season and five straight defeats prior to this, were starting to look sloppy and slapdash as we’d expected they might. Could this finally be the year the club with more FA Cup Third Round exits than any other bites back, rewards a large travelling contingent and wins a cup tie?

Well, no. Of course not. This is QPR we’re talking about. The cast changes and liberties are taken with an ancient script, but Hamlet always corks it in the end.

Three things, primarily, killed off whatever vague hopes the faithful had of reaching the dizzying heights of round four for another year.

The first was Rangers didn’t so much invite Leicester in as do the job for them entirely. The first goal, scored by James Justin after only eight minutes, was a defensive chaos of many parents. Headers attempted and missed, ducked and left, players unmarked hither and thither from a wide free kick. Joe Walsh on a walkabout (I like a walkabout). By the time Justin nudged the ball home he was scoring into an empty net. Walsh had already been stranded out in the corner of his box by one early miscommunication and Leicester attack, and soon after Paal was messing things up at the far post but recovering to block Vardy from close range. A shambling shambles back there.

If you wanted to be kind and put all that nonsense down to the fog then fine, I can get on board with that. The conditions were uniquely challenging, like watching a live Spot The Ball. There was no excusing the second. Just as QPR were really in the ascendency and dominating the game Harrison Ashby tried a chop back inside they saw coming from space. Mavididi read Ashby like a two-page novel, took the ball from him, and from there it was something of a procession through a busted defence and into the net for 2-1. Khannouss with the assist, but you’d have managed that yourself from the position we played him into.

I don’t want to kick Ashby too hard. Being on loan from a big Premier League club perhaps masks a 23-year-old who’d only played 23 games of professional football in his life prior to joining QPR in the summer, such is the disgusting way EPPP allows and actively incentivises the stockpiling and enriching of boys like this by a small number of clubs who have absolutely no intention of ever having them play any actual football. That he got comprehensively annihilated by a player of Mavididi’s quality shouldn’t come as any great surprise and he’ll learn from it. However, when you are in that situation, don’t take chances, don’t take liberties, don’t take risks. Stay guarded, stay concentrated, stay humble. Do basics, do simple. Get the bloody thing played up the line and bring your team back up the field. Do not be doing chops and cuts and fucking step overs ‘for the Gram’ in your own half. If you’ve been watching Ashby all season alongside me it has felt like one of these was coming. High risk-high reward was how we described it against Watford. Over-confident might be more accurate. That old John Bercow comment springs to mind – if we could buy Ashby at my valuation of him and sell him at his we’d make a bigger profit than we did on Ebere Eze.

Anyway, he wasn’t over-confident after that personal disaster. Head completely gone, openly castigating himself on the pitch and beating the ground, Leicester went picking down that side again straight away, opened Rangers up completely and scored a third immediately with Buonanotte heading home unmarked. From 1-1 and on top to 3-1 down and dead in the water after little more than 90 seconds of incompetence. That's cricket, Harry.

Leicester weren’t averse to some self-destruction of their own. Often sloppy in their work, the Foxes failed to see out two minutes of added time at the end of the first half. Instead a wayward back pass by Winks (apparently) got Rayan Kolli clean through on goal and he composed himself nicely, set himself for a finish and picked his spot in the bottom corner for a fourth goal of the season to make if 3-2. Not the only time Winks had done this in the first half.

A sort of rakish and demented air to the game then. QPR, having twice tried to play their way out of it, were well in the hunt. Then Ashby, asleep for the initial through ball, committed himself into a recovery slide on Mavididi with his arm sticking up in the air in his own area. A penalty so obvious even David Webb couldn’t fail to award it. Jamie Vardy on the spot for 4-2 and Rangers back out of the game again. Ashby by this point may as well have just pulled a blue shirt on and be done with it. Couldn’t find his own arse with both hands.

The penchant for self-immolation knew no bounds. Soon everybody wanted a piece of the action. Jake Clarke-Salter and Kenneth Paal honed in on a routine loose ball on halfway and ended up tackling each other leaving substitute Daka to race away into the vacated space and tee up Justin for an unlikely second – the right back previously something of a figure of ridicule among the home support for his performances this season.

The embarrassment complete when Alfie Lloyd laid a hospital ball to fellow sub Michi Frey up yards and yards short in his own half, allowing Faes to stride onto unchallenged possession, advance into acres of space in front of him, pick his spot from distance and add a sixth goal scored deep in stoppage time. Six conceded, bloody Wout Faes banging them in from 30 yards, every single one of them a rudimentary, amateur hour mistake by the visitors. A real disappointment, not only because Rangers had travelled in such high spirits and big numbers, but because they'd laid a decent platform for a cup upset in the first half. To twice work your way back into what felt like a lost cause, and then just fade away like this anyway was exasperating.

The second reason it happened was pretty obvious from the moment the team sheets came out – Leicester are simply a better side than QPR.

Rangers actually won on this ground last year in fine tactical style as part of their escape from Championship relegation. The result briefly threatened to derail Leicester’s promotion push under Enzo Maresca with Leeds, Southampton and Ipswich all chasing hard. The Foxes did, nevertheless, go on and win the league with 97 points. Rangers hadn’t been given a hope in hell of getting a result from that match by anybody outside the club and the 2-1 victory was considered one of the shock results of the season in the Championship. Sure, now Premier League, City are struggling. Already onto a second manager of the year, Ruud Van Nistelrooy replacing “The Man They Call Coops" (© The Athletic), they’d lost five in a row prior to this one. In theory they looked vulnerable. This is, however, still that promoted side onto which eight new players have been grafted at a cost of about £130m. The hope, with Palace due here on Wednesday in a crunch league game, was van Nistelrooy would sack the whole thing off and pick kids. Instead, he went with a strong side, and once he’d done that QPR had no real right to expect anything other than defeat. Jamie Vardy, on his 38th birthday, is still an absolute cut above this, even allowing for an inexplicable first half miss over the top of an open goal.

Really only Jonathan Varane looked up to the level of the players Rangers were playing against. We could perhaps have expected more of Jake Clarke-Salter, but overall it was exactly the players you would expect to find this all a bit much who struggled most. Ashby we’ve caned enough. Ronnie Edwards, whose first team experience has been with Barnet and Peterborough, was frequently exposed. Koki Saito continues to get a pass from supporters but it’s difficult to see what he adds, particularly away, beyond useful legs and energy on the press from the bench when leading games – here he wasn’t up to standard with the ball and offered Ashby no help or cover without it. The right side was wide open all day – not a good advert for letting young loanees learn their trade on your time. Nicholas Madsen was an empty shirt. A 6ft 4ins tall supposedly creative, supposedly ball playing, supposedly attacking midfielder who finished with zero shots, zero offsides, 0.01 expected assists, zero key passes, two passes into the final third, 33 touches in 96 minutes, two interceptions, one clearance and seven losses of possession.

All of our weakest players showed all of their various flaws, as you would expect when exposed to this quality of opponent. The third reason for defeat, however, is the question of why those players were on the pitch in the first place.

Marti Cifuentes used his pre-match to talk about changing the “typical QPR” culture around a club that has a worse FA Cup record than literally any other – this a 53rd defeat at this stage of the competition. Changing our identity, changing how we think about ourselves, so we don’t roll our eyes and talk about John Jensen and Swindon Town every time a club on a long losing run or a striker who hasn’t scored since the Cretaceous Period hones into view. Typically crowd pleasing rhetoric from a manager whose popularity endures among supporters who’ve only ever wanted exactly this. We’re sicker of going to Fleetwood every January and having our arse handed to us than anybody. Change is good. Change would be wonderful.

Then the team sheet is revealed, and it is, simply put, not the team that would have been selected for a league game. No Nardi, no Dunne, no Smyth, no Morgan, no Frey. Nor were these the substitutions we’d usually expect from Cifuentes if a Championship game was going this way. No changes at half time, despite being gifted a way back into the game on the stroke of the break. Harrison Ashby left out there to continue his own personal torture. A busted, inexperienced, lightweight right side of Ashby, Edwards and Saito left uncorrected. Playing with Madsen is like playing with ten men, but we knew that before we started. The Dane was left on for the full game, posting similar numbers to the ones I contributed from the back of the stand. Kieran Morgan, one of our best players of late, was immediately far better when he did come on, but that didn’t happen until 20 minutes from time and 5-2.

I completely get why this all happened. Jimmy Dunne had started 28 of QPR’s 29 games prior to Saturday and came on as a sub in the other one. When he went down against Watford on New Year’s Day with what initially looked like a dislocated shoulder the world fell out of my arse. Already missing Steve Cook and Liam Morrison, you want to try this sport missing Dunne as well? We saw here what that defence looks like, and you can completely see why Cifuentes doesn’t want to risk having to do a dozen Championship games with this back four. Smyth has been in great form but looked notably leggy and tired against Luton. Morgan has been brilliant but is 18 and has only played 17 games of professional football in his life. Having said for weeks he’ll need looking after and nurturing we can’t then boot off about him being taken out of the firing line for a week. Frey is our only available, senior centre forward and suffered two prolonged injuries through 2024, the second of which he’s only just working back from. Ashby, Saito, Madsen, Kolli… these are all first team players who have featured regularly this season and recently. It wasn’t like Cifuentes tossed out a team of 16-year-olds and threw it.

The fact remains though, this wasn’t the team he would have picked for this game if it was in the league, and these weren’t the substitutions he would have made in that circumstance either. Cifuentes fumed about the mistakes and induvial errors in his latest post-match, but his decisions sent a message that this wasn’t quite as important, that we’re not quite as bothered, and that played out on the pitch. QPR casual and carefree against a standard of player just waiting to feast on that sort of drop in standards. It’s easy to talk change of culture. As we said in the match preview – go on then, do it. The more telling comment in interview this week was probably Morgan Fox post Luton when he slipped on Sky and mentioned “a bit of a rest next week in the FA Cup” before checking himself “we’re going there to win”. For better or worse, that’s how this competition is viewed – by managers, players, and a good portion of football supporters as well. Everybody so desperate to get back to the real quiz of securing 16th position and an 11th consecutive year in the Championship.

So begins the annual supporter bloodletting between those who would sacrifice actual family members for an FA Cup run of some sort and find our record in this competition over the last 30 years a standing embarrassment, and those pragmatic types who know we’re not going to win this competition whatever we do so don’t see the point in wasting energy and risking injury in its early rounds after a hectic Christmas period.

I’m obviously in the former camp. I’m absolutely sick of us doing things like this. When we’re slap bang in the middle of the Championship, as close to the play-offs as the bottom three, then I’d rather us rest players for a league game and go hell-for-leather to try and provide excitement and joy to a support base now ‘celebrating’ a decade of uninterrupted away league games in Preston.

I do, however, completely see the other side as well. Once Leicester picked the team they did it was always going to be a tall order – would flogging Frey, Smyth, Dunne, Colback etc really have moved the needle that much? We’d most likely be sitting here with an even more exhausted and injury ravaged squad having still lost the game anyway. As I keep saying, ours is a fragile recovery. It wouldn’t take much to be sucked back down into the relegation whirlpool. Somebody like Jimmy Dunne getting injured after being run on take-off power for six months would only hasten the likelihood of that happening. We’ve seen now what the defence looks like without him and Cook, and it’s a scary sight.

Where the two camps tend to unite is when you change the team, lose the cup tie, damage the mood and harm your momentum, then get beaten in the next league game anyway when you try and put the side back as it was. It was a fate that pointedly befell Steve McClaren and Mark Warburton and burned off a lot of their credit with supporters. It’s one Cifuentes would do well to avoid away to basement dwellers Plymouth on Saturday.

Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread

Leicester: Stolarczyk 5; Justin 8, Coady 7, Faes 7, Kristiansen 7; Soumare 6, Winks 5 (Skipp 60, 6); Buonanotte 7 (Reid 81, -), El Khannouss 7 (Ayew 60, 5), Mavididi 7 (McAteer 66, 6); Vardy 8 (Daka 60, 7)

Subs not used: Choudhury, Iversen, Okoli, Thomas

Goals: Justin 8 (assisted Buonanotte), 63 (assisted Daka), Mavididi 35 (assisted El Khannouss), Buonanotte 38 (assisted El Khannouss), Vardy 51 (penalty, handball Ashby); Faes 90+3 (unassisted)

QPR: Walsh 5; Ashby 2, Edwards 4, Clarke-Salter 4, Paal 4 (Colback 72, 5); Field 5 (Morgan 70, 6), Varane 7; Saito 4 (Frey 82, -), Madsen 3, Chair 5 (Smyth 70, 5); Kolli 6 (Lloyd 72, 4)

Subs not used: Dixon-Bonner, Fox, Dunne, Nardi

Goals: Varane 18 (assisted Kolli), Kolli 45+2 (unassisted)

QPR Star Man – Jonathan Varane 7 The only one in QPR colours who really looked like he could hold a candle to any of the opposition players.

Referee – David Webb (Durham) 5 Not up to this level.

Attendance 28,242 (4,550 QPR) Like showing up excitedly en masse in fancy dress for a surprise Secret Cinema screening and it turns out to be the Aaron Rodgers documentary.

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Photo: Action Images

062259 added 22:25 - Jan 12 Chastening
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Myke added 23:50 - Jan 12 Great report Clive, I get your frustration. One caveat; at the end of your piece, you mentioned that McClaren lost a lot of credit by losing the next league in the immediate aftermath of his FA Cup defeat. It is worth mentioning that the general consensus on the reason why QPR crashed and burned so spectacularly in the second half of 2019 is because he had flogged the same players to death game after game and they ultimately completely burned out in the New Year. I am (partially) in the camp of those that believe we should be pragmatic about our team selection as we are not going to win the thing anyway - or get close even. I say partially because if I was a mid-table Prem team, Fulham, Bournemouth, Brentford, Aston Villa. Even Nottingham Forest or Newcastle, I would be going hell for leather to win the thing and give their fans something to remember. But us, with our tiny patchwork squad? 2, maybe 3 bad results between us and being sucked back into a relegation fight? No. If we can continue to gradually built and get ourselves back into the prem in say five years from now. And then, if we can become an established Prem side in say another five after that. Then yes, by all means give it a go, Until then...

5

Northernr added 07:31 - Jan 13 Myke - With McClaren I was referring to the ten changes he made for a League Cup game at Blackpool, followed swiftly by a three goal hammering at Swansea in the Championship the game after.
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gazza1 added 08:19 - Jan 13 MC had tough decisions to make regarding team selection Norf, I think he got it about right. As for the subs, I can also understand his decisions for that as well. The issue now is Plymouth and if we win then we will all be pleased. It is not easy being a manager of QPR.
5

qprninja added 09:46 - Jan 13 Looking slightly ominous for Plymouth on Saturday. They have stopped conceding and that was an impressive win at Brentford. Whittaker seems fit and back to form, add the new manager bounce factor in as well, that looks a tough old game now. We shall see if resting players pays off....
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LazyFan added 11:05 - Jan 13 You seem to have Ashby's and Madsen's scores the wrong way around. At least Ashby was trying, even if it all went wrong. Whereas Madsen was hiding for 90+mins after not starting or being subbed on that much. Shocking.
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TacticalR added 11:12 - Jan 13 Thanks for your report. Why did the game go ahead? Is it because the FA Cup is so low on the list of priorities that everyone just wanted to get it out of the way? It did feel like a one man demolition job by Ashby, but given the context which you outline (by far from our strongest team, and Leicester better than us) you can't blame him alone. As pointed out in the forum, we scored two very good goals (which is no small thing as we simply couldn't score earlier in the season). Let's hope this result doesn't interrupt our momentum in the league.

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Northernr added 11:35 - Jan 13 LazyFan - Ah the ratings, always the ratings. We're talking about the difference between a 2 and a 3. And Ashby cost us at least two goals.
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stainrodnee added 13:30 - Jan 13 It was over an hour before the TV commentator first mentioned Madsen’s name. What’s worrying is that Marti is so keen to use him despite half a season of these ineffective non performances.
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MickB added 15:17 - Jan 13 How does Madsen earn a 3 if he didn't contribute anything?
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