After playing six of the league’s top eight sides in the last eight matches QPR start a run of games against supposedly more manageable sides with the visit of Sunderland to Loftus Road on Wednesday night.
Barclays Premier League >>> Wednesday December 21, 2011 >>> Kick Off 8pm >>> Loftus Road, London, W12
Perhaps I missed a memo – when exactly did they change the definition of a ‘must win game’?
My understanding of a ‘must win game’ is a game that you must win. No ifs, no buts, no second chances, you must win or you’re finished. I can recall a few of these in the darker days of recent times. Coventry away in 1996, for instance, where 5,000 QPR fans packed into the side stand at Highfield Road to see the R’s limply surrender to a 1-0 defeat and thereby take their Premiership survival chances out of their own hands. Or Huddersfield in 2001 where 3,000 QPR fans packed into the stand behind the goal to see the R’s limply surrender to a 2-1 defeat and drop down into the third tier.
QPR are not very good at ‘must win games’ as it turns out, which goes some way to explaining our ten year wait for an FA Cup win of any description. We like the safety net of another game or two still to come, so we can have a few attempts at getting the win we need. A good job, therefore, that this Wednesday night’s match with Sunderland at Loftus Road is not a ‘must win game’. I thought it was, given the gross overstatement of its importance across the QPR message boards so far this week, but I’ve taken the liberty of checking my diary and it turns out there are still 22 matches left to play this season, and 66 points up for grabs. More than half a season in fact. Chill pills all round.
Clubs, and teams, do not have ‘must win games’ in December. Managers do, and we saw one tonight as Steve Kean and Owen Coyle faced off in a game dubbed the Sack Race Derby by the media who believe that the loser will be out of a job as he carves the turkey on Christmas day. But it wasn’t a ‘must win game’ for either team of players – they all have those 22 matches and 66 points still to go. Last season West Ham took the unusual step of branding their home match with Wigan in November as a “Save Our Season” encounter, heaping pressure on their own team by announcing publicly that the match was a ‘must win game’. It worked in so much that West Ham won the game 3-1, but come May Wigan stayed up at their expense. Like I say, you don’t have ‘must win games’ this early in the season.
Quite why there is this growing sense of panic around the QPR support I’m not entirely sure. First of all any QPR fan who got to the end of August expecting anything other than an almighty scrap against relegation was kidding themselves – while other clubs, all but two of them more established at this level than us, had spent four months building teams to compete we’d spent all but ten days having our club run into the ground by an owner who was a bloody nightmare to start with and then became a millstone round our neck when he decided he was going to sell up and not fund any team strengthening in the meantime. The Tony Fernandes takeover came just in the nick of time but it still only left us ten days to get a competitive team together, by which time we’d already lost two games against teams around us at the bottom of the league. Hell, managers who win promotion through the play offs lament the three weeks of squad building time it costs you in May, Neil Warnock had ten days at the end of August to sort his lot out. Expectations for the first half of the season at least should be rock bottom, and yet here we are sitting in fifteenth and still panicking and moaning.
The second point to remember is that when we saw the fixture list in the summer everybody immediately looked at the clutch of games in and around November, and the subsequent return fixtures in April, and rightly thought they looked hideously difficult. There are no easy games in the Premiership, but there are harder ones than others and in the last eight fixtures we have played Chelsea and both Manchester clubs at home, Liverpool, Spurs and Stoke away – that is six of the current top eight in the league in eight matches. Throw in a trip to Norwich where we never win and one winnable match against West Brom at home and personally I thought we’d be lucky to take three points from that run of games.
We’ve actually taken seven. If you’d offered me seven points from the next eight games, including a win against Chelsea, before that run of matches started I’d have thanked you very much indeed, banked them and gone on a long holiday through the autumn. I suspect most fans would have been the same and yet now we’ve managed it plenty are still unhappy. It’s a terrific haul, and we have come out the other side of a nightmare run of games still outside the bottom three with the January transfer window, and another chance to repair the damage done by the last dregs of the Briatore regime in the summer, just around the corner. What’s not to like? What exactly did people think we’d get from those games? The expectation levels are astounding at times, and damaging to the atmosphere at games.
However, I’ll happily admit that there are warning signs. The performance level, and more importantly the confidence and belief among the players, was obviously lower in the games against Man Utd and Liverpool than it was against Chelsea and Man City at the start of the run. Against United both Joey Barton and Ale Faurlin had their worst games of the season and they weren’t alone. The fans didn’t expect to win, but we did expect the same sort of enthusiasm for the task in hand that we displayed against Manchester City. It was like the players knew they were never going to beat Man Utd so didn’t really give it their absolute best, unlike against City where the outcome was the same but the mood after the match was a world apart. Performance, confidence and tempo isn’t something you can just pick up and drop whenever the mood takes you, and it will be interesting to see whether QPR can find the extra 30% they need to win this Wednesday so soon after Sunday’s disappointment.
What we’re coming into now is a run of games where excuses have to stop. We’ve had a tough run of fixtures we were never going to take many points from, we’ve taken seven. I’m happy with that, some people aren’t. We now have a run of games where we do need to be picking up points fairly frequently – Sunderland, Swansea, Norwich, Newcastle now their wheels seem to have come off slightly and Wigan at home within the next month or so. That match with the Latics then starts a run of games through February and March, with new recruits in place hopefully, where our season will be decided: Wigan, Wolves, Fulham and Everton all come to Loftus Road, while we go to Villa, Blackburn and Bolton. This tough run of games we’ve just endured will come round again at the worst possible time, so we may well have some ‘must win games’ slightly earlier than normal this year – around March time.
What we as supporters can do is up our game as well, which has also dropped in recent weeks. Compare the Loftus Road atmosphere at the Man City and Chelsea games to that on Sunday where I was astonished at the abuse handed out to Jay Bothroyd and the booing of Neil Warnock’s substitutions. Have we all turned into Wolves supporters or something? How on earth is that going to help? Compare the away ends at Everton and Fulham earlier this season to those at Norwich and Liverpool – total support and noise giving way to grumpiness, arguments and moaning.
We need to get back on our game, because we’re certainly not helping at the moment, and hope the players get back on theirs. There’s certainly no need for panic just yet.
Links >>> Opposition Focus >>> History >>> Referee
Team News: LFW drew comparisons with a meeting between these two sides at Christmas 1990 in the History column this week, and it’s not just the time of year or the current struggles of the two teams that bear striking resemblance to that afternoon 21 years ago. QPR went into that match without a win in ten matches after suffering a series of injuries to centre backs and come into this game with one win from seven fixtures and struggling to field a settled defence. Anton Ferdinand is highly unlikely to recover from his hamstring problem in time to face the club he left in the summer and his partner Danny Gabbidon is also a big doubt after sustaining a leg wound against Manchester United. That would leave Matt Connolly, impressive on his return against United, to partner either Fitz Hall, himself a doubt, Clint Hill or Bruno Perone.
Elsewhere Jay Bothroyd injured his knee on Sunday and is unlikely to start with DJ Campbell the most likely replacement for him – Adel Taarabt and Tommy Smith head the queue if Warnock goes another way. The manager must also choose whether to return first choice keeper Paddy Kenny to the line up ahead of Radek Cerny who has been in great form since returning to the side, but struggled under set pieces on Sunday and is nursing a bad back.
Martin O’Neill is waiting on knee injuries to two of his former Man Utd defenders – Phil Bardsley and Wes Brown, who is also suffering with illness, are both doubtful. As is giant teenage striker Connor Wickham who has fluid on his knee. Fraizer Campbell, Craig Gordon and Michael Turner are long term injury absentees.
Elsewhere: A rare midweek round of the Premiership is staggered over three nights as we prepare for the Christmas festivities at the weekend. Two games were played this evening that QPR will have had a very close eye on, including the ‘Donkey Derby’ between the bottom two sides Blackburn and Bolton. Rovers, who have trips to Liverpool and Man Utd as their next two matches, were desperate for a win but turned in an inept first half performance and trailed 2-0 at half time. A second half goal from Yakubu couldn’t inspire a fightback and they now sit bottom of the table instead of Bolton with the mood turning ugly at Ewood Park. At Molineux Wolves twice came from behind to draw 2-2 at home to Norwich and should really have won it but missed a series of gilt edged chances in stoppage time.
The televised game on Wednesday night is Liverpool’s trip to Wigan where all eyes will be on Luis Suarez who has been banned this evening for eight matches and fined £40,000 for racially abusing Man Utd’s Patrice Evra. Suarez has 14 days to appeal and is available to play during that time so could be on the field tomorrow evening. Man Utd, like Sunderland, face a quickfire return trip to London after playing here at the weekend – they’re at Fulham. Opportunities elsewhere for Everton and Swansea to climb further away from trouble as they meet at Goodison Park, and Newcastle suddenly without a win in five matches host West Brom. Arsenal go to Aston Villa while table topping Man City host Stoke.
The game of the week is undoubtedly on Thursday though as third placed Spurs host fourth placed Chelsea at White Hart Lane in the final Premiership action before Christmas Day.
Referee: Andre Marriner is the man in charge this Wednesday night. The West Midlands official hasn’t visited Loftus Road for several years but was in charge of our 6-0 mauling at the hands of Fulham earlier this season. He was also the man in the middle for the 3-3 draw between Wigan and Blackburn earlier this season where Rovers scored a highly suspect goal from a corner that they didn’t actually take correctly. Anyway his full QPR case file is available to read here.
QPR: There was much talk in the summer of the advantage a tight, hostile home ground like Loftus Road could provide to Rangers. It’s fair to say it hasn’t really worked out that way. QPR have won just once on their own patch this season in nine league and cup games, admittedly only losing three league games in that sequence. If you trace back to the end of last season it’s actually just one win from 12 at home. Bizarrely, in that time, Rangers have won five away matches. The problem is clear as day when you look at the table – six goals scored at home is the league’s worst total with Sunderland one place below us and in town on Wednesday scoring twice that many on their own patch. Rangers have scored 15 times in 16 games this season, the joint worst total in the league. For reference, Arsenal’s Robin Van Persie has 23 goals for club and country this season by himself. Draws when the better team against Newcastle, Villa, Blackburn and West Brom at home have resulted from QPR’s profligacy in front of goal.
Sunderland: The Mackems have an identical recent record to QPR with one win from their last seven matches and currently sit one place below the R’s in the Premiership table. Sunderland have only managed one away win so far this season, at struggling Bolton, and were beaten for the fifth time on their travels at Spurs earlier this week. That said, the appointment of a new manager always seems to skew the form table somewhat – Martin O’Neill has never lost his first game in charge of a new club and kept that record up with a late fightback and victory against Blackburn last weekend. Another similarity with QPR is the lack of goals – they’ve failed to find the net in three of their last six matches having lost strikers Danny Welbeck, Darren Bent and Asamoah Gyan in this calendar year with only really Nicklas Bendtner in to replace them. They have lost three away games on the spin prior to this fixture.
Betting: Professional odds compiler Owen Goulding says…
When I studied this game to arrive at my prices, it was quite scary how similar the two teams are. Defensively, both teams have a 'suspect' centre back partnership. Both team's strengths lie in the competitive midfields they possess and both teams have forward lines that flatter to deceive more than often. Add to the fact that both teams have similar styles of management and it just goes to show why the bookies find it hard to separate them. QPR are slight favourites here with home advantage and that is about right. It’s going to be tight, it’s probably not going to be pretty, and it’s going to be tense. I must admit this is an incredibly hard match to call, and I can’t help but be 'drawn' to the draw at 12/5 with Totesport.
Prediction: Well with the way these sides have been attacking of late I’d suggest that this one has 0-0 written all over it, and that’s what I’m going to back here. However I’d qqualify that by saying that QPR do have a little more about them attacking wise in reserve with DJ Campbell and Adel Taarabt to come into the side and make an impact. Rangers could also be without both first choice centre backs with Gabbidon and Ferdinand injured. One of these things makes me wonder whether we might nick this with a late goal from a sub, the other makes me fear that at some point we’re going to gift Sunderland a chance even their forward line can’t miss. I’ll go for a goalless game but I have a strong suspicion for a 1-0 win either way.
0-0, 10/1 with Stan James and Sky Bet, less than 1.5 goals in the game 9/4 and 11/5 generally available.
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