No wins in a dozen games, bottom of the league, with an injury list as long and arduous as next Wednesday’s trip to Cardiff – Alex Perry reflects on the dark mood descending on W12 and a potential route out of this mess.
The clocks have gone back, ushering in the nation’s two-week strict regime of taking vitamin D supplements and sitting in front of a sun lamp to stave off seasonal depression.
Winter has closed in, making your train delays and football attendance just that little bit more miserable. Saudi Arabia is about to be handed the world’s premiere sporting event for the thing you love, because a man who in every other alternate reality peaked as a Eurovision host is the head of FIFA.
America has just witnessed one of its most sickening victories in a spectacle that ran so thick with dystopia it slid down the global consciousness’ throat like a poorly ratioed protein shake, Donald Trump also won the election.
It’s bleak out there. To pay attention to the world in its current guise is to put your brain into the waltzers. Noise, light and gravity doing its very best to make you ill. Scream if you want it louder.
What a difference a month makes, hey? Yet, the root cause of sadness for a minute section of the world’s population lies in consistency. Tucked away in West London with a diaspora far and wide of people who should have made better choices, a small community has one achingly consistent pain they cannot shed. They support QPR. Geopolitics scarcely effects it; misinformation won’t taint it, and AI can’t fix it. QPR are bad and have been for over a decade now. That’s it, that could be the entire article.
However, as in all times of uncertainty, it’s good to talk. Watching this team right now is like witnessing a close friend make terrible, terrible life decisions. Why did you pass it there? Frustrated. How did he miss that chance? Angry. Oh, you feel like jogging now? Upset. This team does not elicit good feelings, but shared history dictates you must stick with them because maybe they will come good again. If the opposite love isn’t hate, but indifference, then it’s a fair assessment that right now apathy rules amongst most QPR fans. So, come with me as I try and extract some talking points from the bin fire that was October/November.
For those of you who are politically inclined, the last month will have either been one of the darkest moments in democracy’s history or the start of the great awakening – a good rule of thumb for these things is that if it makes Joey Barton happy it should make you unhappy. Regardless, one of more interesting things during the coverage of the lead up to the US election was the phenomenon known as the ‘The Overton Window’. The basic premise of this is that by exposing people to the most extreme ideas, it makes diluted versions of them appear more palatable.
Now let’s throw out a few stats that have done the rounds about QPR recently and see what it is they say about the overall fan experience:
Most games lost in the last 10 years – third
Most goals conceded in the last 10 years – fourth
Longest current winless run – first (11 games)
Now tell me why those three draws in a row felt so damn hopeful? We are and have been consistently exposed to the absolute dregs of what supporting a football club can offer. We don’t win games; we concede too many goals and most damningly of all we can hardly score them either. It is not an exaggeration to label the concept of supporting QPR as an extreme idea right now.
Do you have any idea how many times I have wished I supported Preston in the last 6-7 years? That would not happen if QPR had displayed even a modicum of basic competence from top to bottom. At what point does it become punk to support QPR? A sort of anti-fandom, satirical geniuses cosplaying as a community asset. Yet here we are, with the Lionel Messi of Huel consumption funding his LinkedIn premium membership with our club. All whilst our fanbase gets closer and closer to what you could feasibly describe as a fringe movement.
Ah, there it is again. As the leaves turn ombre and the lowlight of the sun starts to dominate your walk to Loftus Road as opposed to your exit from it, you can smell it. The fermentation prickles your nostrils and welcomes the end of another seasonal cycle, the sweet smell of death.
Nothing hangs thicker around Loftus Road in November than the smell of something ending. Resignation reigns supreme amongst the fanbase. Another false dawn has duped you. Another hopeful man in a suit looks forlorn by the dugout, a captain lost at sea staring at his charges and wondering whether to eat or be eaten. If spring brought forward the hope of renewal and rebirth, that has quickly given way to stagnation and rot.
The only real shock of this international break has been that at the time of writing, Marti Cifuentes is still in charge of QPR. A statement that might not be true come lunchtime next Sunday. I will not write the obituary here; I am sure Clive has the exit pieces set in his calendar like a yearly tradition. I want to explore the alternate reality, the one where we stick, not twist.
I, like many of you, have felt that there is no alternative. We’ve given it time, we have been handed some breaks like Dembele’s goal against Portsmouth, we got back to some defensive solidity against good opponents and still we languish bottom of the league because simply put – we are a dreadful football team. Well, at least we found the floor, it can’t get much worse than this. Then I saw Coventry sack Mark Robins and reportedly opt for Frank Lampard as his replacement. It can get much worse than this.
Saturday is large, big, huge, massive and plump. It is the chance for a course correction, to have two separate seasons again. The teething problems and the subsequent maturity we would all feel for finally sticking it out with a manager. A kinder run of fixtures builds momentum. Us and Marti, Marti and us, a relationship with fault lines that settles into a new continent rife with progress and ambition. It is hopeful, it is naive and almost undoubtedly not what will happen.
However, ask yourself what the alternative is. Our new data gurus aren’t going to opt for Championship pragmatism in the form of a Mark Robins or Rob Edwards, too beige, too obvious, don’t want ‘performance’ in their job title. So, we pluck another continental man who looks like his only hobby is having sex with your wife and roll the dice again. The reality is neither of these choices matter, because our squad building has been so flawed for several years that not even Labour wants anything to do with the inheritance our next manager receives. We are stuck with a squad constructed on ideals and powerplays, stamps being placed, and CVs updated. Marti did well to make some sense of this in the last year, but more statements and cultures have been added than he supposedly wanted and now he’s been left to drown in all the blue sky thinking.
For what it’s worth, I would love to have some good things to say on here. Kieran Morgan’s emergence would be glorious in the context of a winning team, but his current story is to be a symptom of desperation and an ill-advised recruitment strategy. Narratives are everything in sport.
It's hard to think of new things to say about this QPR team of late. Variety is key to any creative endeavour and this team can’t even find different ways to be bad. Our squad is imbalanced, our pressing too passive and our attack too stodgy. It is no wonder watching this team be so bereft of creativity can’t help but engender its observers with a passivity usually reserved for the weekly shop.
I think so much of this goes into the collective mistrust our fanbase has, which feels entirely justified at this point. The overwhelming sense of paranoia in modern football is one baked in wider societal mistrust and entitlement, irrational behaviour given credence by anonymous social media accounts that tell journalists to ‘cry more’. Every supporter has their Woe is Me shtick, the pretence that all things at all points are going against you, cosmic forces maliciously scheming to ruin your Saturday plans, purchasing Zan Celar the Eldritch Truth.
To find bright spots from this season you may have to tuck your head into your chest, crouch down and breath very, very quickly. Once you stand up one of the things you might see is the fact through all the disappointment our fanbase seems to have achieved an understanding, something oh so rare in modern sport. We have an acceptance that we are no longer participators in this mess, mere observers. We’ve witnessed the various attempts to propel this club into a functional state. Culture guardians, data driven continental recruitment drives, championship old hands, data driven EFL recruitment drives. New directors, new structures, new ethos’, old figures, Andy Sinton is there, youth development, sacking people because our youth development is bad. Snake oil sales are always booming at Loftus Road.
We know this team tries and we have seen that Marti Cifuentes clearly has a high ceiling as a manager, it’s easy to forget the miracle he worked last year in keeping us up. We have bought players that had options for other clubs and won the transfer window for our more online fans. We gave contract extensions to key players. The new training ground is brilliant. Yet, there is no club where goodwill is more flammable, and it comes back to that collective understanding.
They do it to themselves, they do, and that’s what really hurts. No one is better at fucking up QPR, than QPR.
More from this author >>> Frey’s big start – September >>> That Alfie Lloyd interview – October
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