Neil Warnock was fuming in his post match interviews after Saturday’s draw with Blackburn because a supporter posted details of the QPR team selection on a message board in advance of the match.
Oh foie gras I tried to resist you. There we all sat last week in the Frenchest restaurant in France ordering our starters, the French people ordering foie gras and the English people ordering mussels. I don’t even like mussels, but the mere sight of foie gras on the menu had my mother’s face flashing before me, indignant as she drives along with her RSPB membership badge swinging from the rear view mirror. She’d never have forgiven me.
For the uninitiated foie gras is made by force feeding a goose until it explodes, then salvaging its bulging liver and smearing it on toast. It is unimaginably cruel, something only the French could ever possibly come up with, and absolutely delicious. I wilted on night two and had some, and by the end of the week I found myself retrieving a day old bit of garlic bread from the bottom of the kitchen bin and brushing the hair off it just so I had something to spread the delicious animal cruelty all over. It’s hard to find in this country, we’ve tried a pork liver pate since I returned home but it looks like something you might find blocking a drain in a mortuary and tastes much the same. I like foie gras, I know it’s bad but once you’ve got a taste for something you can’t help yourself.
QPR have a taste for farce and controversy. They love it. Sometimes, like when the French girl next to you at the table orders foie gras just when you’re trying to be good and have something else, the farce and controversy finds its own way to QPR. But at other times it almost seems as if QPR are actively looking to cause themselves problems. Only Newcastle United seem to relish embroiling themselves in deeply damaging PR disasters in quite the same way and with quite the same frequency but even they seem to have calmed down a bit this season. And so we arrive at the latest chapter in the seemingly never ending saga of QPR’s face palm moments.
You’re probably aware of Neil Warnock’s post match comments on Saturday, they’re available here if not, but to summarise he was not in the least bit impressed that his team selection for the match had been revealed in advance on a supporter’s message board. This goes back to a thread on the We Are The Rangers Boys message board at the end of last week, linked elsewhere including on LoftforWords, that stated Jamie Mackie and Heidar Helguson were set to start, Adel Taarabt had been dropped and DJ Campbell had broken a bone in his foot. All of this turned out to be true.
Warnock said: “What an advantage for the opposition. Obviously he has got a contact, hasn't he? But if he thinks he is helping me, if he is a QPR fan, it is exactly the opposite.”
Now to this point we have three people involved, and none of them come out of the situation particularly well. First there is the source at the club who is leaking information about the team to the supporter who posted it – Neil Warnock seems to believe this is one of the fringe players unhappy about his current lack of action and according to the Fulham Chronicle has immediately changed the training regime on a Friday so that only players directly involved in the Saturday matchday squad will be involved in the session and the announcement of the team. The only player who was not included in our 25-man squad who can feel even a little bit hard done by is Hogan Ephraim, who has a tremendous attitude and would have brought more to our team than Jason Puncheon ever could. If he’s the leak I’ll eat my shoes, given Ephraim’s previous exemplary attitude to the club and his profession, which means if Warnock is right then it’s coming from a player who only has himself or his own lack of ability to blame for his current predicament.
Then we have the poster himself, a QPR fan of many years standing we’re told and certainly a prolific poster on the We Are The Rangers Boys website. Posting under the name Ric Roc he had, after the Fulham debacle, posted another leak from a source within the squad detailing several highly damaging allegations including claims of ructions within the squad with specific troublemakers named. I’m in little doubt that it’s actually this post that angered Warnock, rather than the leak of his team sheet for Blackburn, and the manager has been waiting for his moment ever since.
I mean let’s be fair here, what are the chances of anybody from Blackburn trawling the QPR message boards the night before a game in the hope of uncovering some secret team news? Even if they did have time on their hands to do that would they believe it? That would be a hell of a ruse if so, I’d expect LFW to frequently be sent requests from the club asking us to put out fake threads about injuries to Shaun Wright Phillips if it actually happened like that. Steve Kean flying a drone over the Harlington training ground to take pictures of our pattern of play work sounds more likely than him looking on We Are The Rangers Boys in my opinion.
Indeed the Rovers manager admitted after the match that Jason Lowe had started in a deep lying midfield position with the specific task of marking Adel Taarabt – so he clearly still believed he would start. That Lowe then played for the full 90 minutes marking nobody very much will merely be added to the prosecution file in the case of Blackburn Fans v Steve Kean which is due for another sitting at Ewood Park on Saturday.
The post-Fulham revelations Warnock has every right to be angry about. They should never have been posted, and they should have been immediately deleted. The question came up over food and alcohol at LoftforWords Towers on Saturday night whether or not LFW would publish an article that was damaging to the club, even if it was the scoop of the century. Given that this site has, even this season, come into possession of numerous stories and documents from Loftus Road that have never seen the light of day after being handed to me I can confidently say that we wouldn’t. This site is independent of the club, and to some extent has a role to play in holding it to account, but we want QPR to win at the end of the week like everybody else so when we hear something damaging about Rangers we tend to keep it to ourselves.
Had a player told me the stuff about dressing room rows after the Fulham game it would have gone no further, and it certainly would have come nowhere near LFW or the message board. Sadly the idea that we are QPR fans who want QPR to do well seems to drain out of some supporters who come into possession of such information and often cannot wait to spunk it all over the first message board they can get to in some crazed thirst to be first with the news and genuinely ‘in the know’.
We Are The Rangers Boys has form for this sort of thing. Paulo Sousa’s grizzly end at Loftus Road came not solely because of his post match comments about the loan of Dexter Blackstock to Nottingham Forest as reported, but because of comments made to a supporter outside the ground about, among other things, the medicals (or lack of them) given to several key signings. Again it’s the sort of thing that should never be passed on under any circumstances, again it was blasted immediately onto the internet, and the 50-times capped Portuguese international lost his job because of it.
This isn’t me being deliberately high and mighty by any means. Back in 2006, on the pre-season tour of Italy where Gary Waddock had left Marc Bircham and several other transfer listed senior players at home, I was fed lines from senior people at the club that those left back in the UK were proving to be a troublesome presence on the training ground. Thinking I had a scoop I reported it back in the daily LFW report from Sorrento and was, rightly, immediately lambasted by all. Stephen Dedridge, a good friend of mine and long time QPR First volunteer, said a line at the time that has stuck with me: “you’ve gone a bit OK Magazine on us Clive.” Sometime later a post appeared on our message board about a QPR player who had been spotted out and about smoking something he probably shouldn’t have been doing. We deleted it immediately. Lesson learnt.
But in this latest case there’s a real feeling of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ because at the end of the day on this occasion it was just team news. We carry team news in our match previews, it appears in all of Saturday’s newspapers, it’s all over the television - it’s just team news. Had the post been made on LFW I would have left it where it was just as the moderators on We Are The Rangers Boys did and had I seen it before I wrote Friday’s preview I’d have included its contents.
For Warnock to protest so vehemently about it smacks rather of a man who has been waiting for a chance to get stuck in since the (totally different and bloody stupid) post-Fulham message appeared, and also of somebody adopting the old Alex Ferguson technique of deflecting attention away from the failings of him and his team onto a third party. Usually it’s a referee, this time it’s a QPR fan. A QPR fan who was here before Warnock arrived and will be here long after he’s gone.
But things didn’t end there. The text version of Warnock’s comments appeared on the official website with the personal e-mail address of the message board poster responsible. This, it turns out, was handed to the club voluntarily by We Are The Rangers Boys site owner Peter Davies who currently watches QPR Premiership matches from the press box at Loftus Road as part of his job voluntarily co-hosting the club’s pre-game radio show.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of that situation this latest incident cannot be allowed to pass without mention of two things.
Firstly, for a message board owner to willingly hand over a member’s personal e-mail address that is then published on the club’s official website is against the laws of the Data Protection Act and a clear breach of the trust people place in people like him and me when they sign up with personal details to use our sites. I cannot believe Mr Davies thought this was acceptable, I cannot believe the club asked him to do it, and I’m astonished that they then published it on the official site. Even in the face of Neil Warnock’s demands to reveal the address publicly the QPR Media Team is experienced enough to know that it wasn’t a good idea and probably legally questionable as well. Should Ric Roc want to take this further I’d back even Lionel Hutz to win the case easily, costing the club more money. Former Sheffield Wednesday chairman Dave Allen had to take his club’s equivalent site all the way to court to get them to reveal contact details of their posters, and on that occasion he only succeeded because they’d said something libellous about him. Had QPR gone through legal channels to request Ric Roc’s e-mail address for revealing a football starting line up it’s likely to have been politely refused, and that’s exactly what Davies should have done.
Secondly it later transpired that within half an hour of posting the message in the first place, Ric Roc then telephoned Davies and asked him to remove the thread immediately. He did initially, but then reinstated it. Despite this Davies’ continued role at the club, and with his ‘independent’ website, doesn’t seem to be in question as the club’s media manager Ian Taylor made a point of retweeting his Chelsea rallying cry today. So it seems that Warnock isn’t bothered enough about the leak of his team to remove the press box access of the man who could have deleted the post but chose not to. Ric Roc meanwhile has been besieged by interview requests from the national press.
It’s another one of those “Only at QPR” moments basically. Ric Roc should have thought twice before passing on the information he did, particularly the stuff he said after the Fulham match. Even so Neil Warnock’s anger should be more with the player leaking the information than the supporter passing it on. The subsequent decision to release Ric Roc’s e-mail address publicly reflects horrendously on our club and its media department – it’s the sort of behaviour you wouldn’t even see from an Essex Senior League club.
Still, give it three weeks and we’ll have done something else I’m sure.
The only positive of the whole thing is it’s distracted at least some of the attention away from our verbose captain Joey Barton who has been prolific with his outbursts this weekend even by his standards. Adel Taarabt’s performances and attitude were the first to come under fire in an interview with Absolute Radio and then in a speech at the Professional Players Federation today he spoke about the behaviour of the England Rugby Team and Ryan Giggs. Throw in the usual Tweets about the ongoing parliamentary situation about the Hillsborough disaster and it’s not been a bad weekend all in all.
This is all well and good, but Barton was nothing more than ok himself on Saturday against Blackburn. He’s absolutely right in what he says on Taarabt, and the other issues, but he’s yet to get anywhere close to the form he showed for Newcastle last season in a QPR shirt since he moved here. That’s not to say he’s playing badly, because he’s certainly not, but I’d question whether he’s doing enough to justify commenting on his team mate’s performance at the moment. Even if he was tearing the place apart, the comments on Taarabt should have been said face to face in the dressing room and not on public radio.
Perhaps when he’s meeting his own full potential then is the time to be speaking out, but until then a little more concentration on performance and less on the various ills of the world wouldn’t go amiss.
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