Supporters, LFW and our resident bookie put their heads together for the first of two forum pieces reflecting on the season so far and what lies ahead.
With a three day work trip to Prague sprung on me at the last moment, ideas for populating LoftforWords had to be thought up quickly at the end of last week. Our hastily arranged but nevertheless distinguished panel of supporters was only too happy to help. Rob Gilbert from Blog and White Hoops, Dave Barton from Dave’s Unofficial QPR Site, regular LFW columnist Chris King and LFW official photographer and writer of the QPR Today blog Neil Dejyothin give us their thoughts…
Why are we struggling? Where are we going wrong?
Rob - Perhaps the best way to look at why we are struggling is to compare us to last season. A year ago we had a team who would run through walls for each other. The away win at Reading with ten men epitomised that. Now, 12 months later, we have twice gone down to ten men and subsequently lost from winning positions. We lack a team spirit and more importantly a team identity. Last year we were grafters with one outstanding talent in Taarabt. Warnock isolating him earlier in the season looks like being a poor move. Our identity right now is non existent. I also think we threw the cash around with very little thought as to who or what we were buying. Swansea and Norwich have both proved that shrewd lower league purchases can have a big impact on The Premier League. As good as our signings appear to be on paper I can't help but feel that had we thought outside the box and looked at players like Jonny Howson or Jacob Butterfield (pre injury) we might have fared better. In addition perhaps we were too quick to write off last season’s heroes.
Chris - We are struggling because the team is not performing to its full potential. Having chosen the path of big names, high wages and previous reputation, we are suffering from a chronic lack of players that are hungry to succeed and feel the need to put in that extra bit of effort that Swansea and Norwich’s mostly lower league-sourced players do. Our organisation is abysmal, and as a club we possibly put far too much emphasis on making signings in January at the expense of putting hours in on the training ground to organise ourselves at the back, and work out a system for filling the gaping hole left in midfield by Alejandro Faurlin’s injury. Rangers’ tendency to concede when ahead is extremely damaging, as is the recent trend of indiscipline in the ranks. Cisse’s sending off lost us the game against Wolves, Barton’s dismissal was to blame for our defeat to the Canaries. To put it bluntly, we have lost a series of games we couldn’t afford to lose, and from here on in every match is a must-win. Unless the defence suddenly tightens up, players return from injury and our big names begin to live up to their billing, we could be bottom by mid-March.
Dave - It’s hard to know where to start with this one. We’re not a bad side but through a mixture of poor play and bad luck we find ourselves in this position. It is though pretty obvious that any side who builds a team for the first day of the season, then a new one two weeks later and then another new one in January is set up to struggle. Just two of the team that started the opening day (Kenny and Taarabt) would consider themselves regulars now. I doubt any other club in the division have seen that much of a turnaround in personnel. It all looks very West Ham of last season at the moment.
Individual errors have cost us, we’ve seen poor goals given away, missed chances and had sending offs, all very similar to the 95/96 season really. When we get ourselves into winning positions - which we had against Blackburn, Man City, West Brom, Sunderland, Norwich and Wolves at home - we’ve done our level best to gift the game back to the opposition rather than go for the kill.
In the past few weeks the problems have all been basic errors in games gifting team’s goals and giving the ball away to put us under pressure. It seems with Rangers that once we fix once side of the team and start scoring goals the other part falls apart. You can be sure once we tighten up at the back the goals will dry up again.
A club of our size needs certain things to survive and flourish and having a different back four every game and playing two or three different systems in every game is a recipe for relegation no matter what division we are in. QPR also can’t go on signing a new team every transfer window with no one really leaving, we still have most of the signings we made back in January 2008 sitting around doing nothing, that transfer policy has to change and quickly but we all know that no matter what the outcome this season we’ll be looking for another five or six players in the summer. We also don’t seem to put much thought into how players will mix together, Anton Ferdinand for example is a good defender but for me needs to play next to a dominating centre half whilst he sweeps up alongside, instead we put him next to Hall, Gabbidon or Onuoha who are pretty similar types of players and then wonder why teams dominate us in the air.
What do you make of Mark Hughes so far?
Neil - He is performing how I expected him to. He has historically been a slow starter and history is repeating itself here. The way I see it, the club needed a fast short term solution, but Hughes is applying a long term strategy to the problem as well as adding another layer of players (which in fairness, he needed to do). I think he hoped the players would have adapted more quickly, but he's quickly finding out that there's no magic wand and lots of issues to address. Is this a good or a bad thing? It depends on where you priorities lie. For the long term, it's a good thing, but it may be at the expense of survival if he's not careful. It's a balancing act he needs to get right for his own personal ambitions and those of the club. The shape, organisation and discipline of the team has generally improved across the board, but by the same token, it has reduced our creativity in attack and while that's all well and good, the defensive improvements have still not stopped us from conceding goals and losing games that we need to get points from.
If we can't stop the ball going in because we're simply not good enough, then we've really got to take more risks and go for it, otherwise the season will pass us by quickly and we'll surrender with a whimper and nobody wants to see that. The way his teams play also relies on individual brilliance and good form, but we've so many out of form that you worry whether they're capable.
I find him a bit uninspiring and dull from a media perspective, but that's not really that important. What I do like about him is that his assessment of our performances has been spot on. He's identified the good and bad traits relatively well from each match, but now he needs to walk the walk and show that he can do something about them.
Chris - Mark Hughes is certainly an impressive figure on the side-line. He looks like a Premier League manager should. But appearance is meaningless when the team are succumbing to mediocre opposition as readily as they did against Blackburn and Wolves, and looking so inept at the back. Hughes has been promised £1m if he keeps Rangers up, but as said before, the games are getting harder, and they are running out.
Dave - I’m not convinced so far, I like what he says in the media, he talks sense and has done well everywhere else but on the pitch in games I’m not seeing anything that different to the last two months of Warnock. We look good in patches, awful in other patches and still rely on Taarabt to do something special if we are going to win a game. We’ve started playing 4-4-2 but not all the players look comfortable in that system and it tends to change by half time in the games I’ve seen so far. We look like a side that are ready to crumble at any moment.
I don’t blame Hughes as he’s just walked through the door but it’s obvious he doesn’t know his best team and my biggest fear about changing managers was that we’d have a month or two of trying players and systems out until we found the right one and we simply couldn’t afford to do that but sadly that’s what is happening. I think given time he could be a very good manager for us but we don’t have time and personally I doubt he’ll be at the club next season probably through his own choice.
Rob - I like him. I have a feeling that he doesn't suffer fools, a trait which perhaps dogged Warnock is his final days. I think Hughes has gone about setting us up in the correct way with two banks of four, this is a relegation fight so nothing fancy is needed. Tellingly his substitutions appear to be having an impact, Smith v Wigan and Mackie v Blackburn. That's all positive to me.
What do you think about our January transfer activity?
Chris - On the face of it, QPR’s January transfer activity was overwhelmingly positive and impressive. Obviously, we are yet to see Diakite and there is a good chance that Cisse and Zamora, with some playing time together, could turn into a relatively decent partnership. Taiwo hasn’t looked especially solid thus far, and could well find himself without the time he would understandably need to bed into the English game and adjust to playing for a team scrapping for survival. Onuoha is also a good signing. The problem lies not in the players Rangers have bought, but in the way they are organised, trained, managed and deployed. This is where the fault lies. Here’s hoping that a fully-fit Zamora, a Cisse free from suspension and Onuoha can become the spine that the R’s are so sorely lacking.
Dave - We did pretty well overall, it’s the most the club have ever spent on players so you’d hope the quality is a big step up and it’s looked it so far. The signings of Zamora and Cisse were very good and done with forming a strike partnership which was a step forward. I like Onuoha and the loan signings of Taiwo and Diakate make sense and give us an opportunity to send them back if they don’t work out. Taiwo has looked ok to me so far, strong on the overlap and looks like someone who can get better the more he plays. I still think we needed a strong dominating centre half and our centre of midfield still looks very weak to me without Faurlin but I’ve yet to see Diakate so he could be the answer.
Rob - On paper it's phenomenal. Zamora, Cisse, Onuoha, Taiwo and Diakite (I'm choosing to ignore Macheda in the hope he will go away) are all great, athletic purchases. The one I was apprehensive about was Cisse, but his performances at Villa and pre red card versus Wolves were fantastic. As I mentioned earlier I think we went big when we didn't have too. Howson was sitting there at Leeds and was available, we were lacking in central midfield but missed our opportunity as we chased Steven Pienaar, I feel we missed a trick there. But to end positively Nedum Onouha has the potential to be an R's hero, he has everything needed to succeed at a club like ours.
Neil - I'm not pleased about how we've conducted our business in both the windows for this season. It's been a real kamikaze approach and not the smartest way to build a club. But it is the QPR way. Nedum Onuoha was the most sensible signing in terms of price and fit for the club at this stage, while Djibril Cissé was the eye opening one. I think these two will do well, but I'm less sure about the others and don't think they've provided us with value. We've spent an awful load and while we have improved, it's not by a great deal and if we had a whole season to play with, the improvement still might only be worth a couple of positions or so in the table.
A running theme for QPR fans this season has been the success of Swansea and Norwich who both finished below us last season but have taken to the Premiership far better than us and both look like they’re going to survive with something to spare. If we survive, it’s going to go right to the wire.
People seem mystified as to why this has happened, after all it only seems like yesterday that Rangers were tearing Swansea apart and beating them 4-0 at Loftus Road with Adel Taarabt in sumptuous form.
The difference between the three clubs is short term and long term planning. Norwich and Swansea have been steadily building success for several seasons. In the last three years they have had three managers between them, QPR have had five to themselves. The fourth of those, Neil Warnock, built a Championship team for the Championship division last season with players like Clint Hill and Shaun Derry absolutely key. Norwich and Swansea have both kept faith with the majority of their Championship players this season, and looked down the divisions for reinforcements when they have spent money, but people like Wes Hoolahan, Steve Morrison, Danny Graham and Scott Sinclair were all bought with the future in mind whereas Hill, Derry and others at QPR were bought with the next 12 months in mind only.
Having won promotion the team needed rebuilding, whereas Norwich and Swansea already had the nucleus of success. The summer at Loftus Road was beset with more short termism. First Flavio Briatore didn’t want to spend any money because he knew he was about to sell the club, but did see fit to jack up the ticket prices all the same, then when the takeover did go through Rangers scrambled to get Premiership players in through the door in a rather desperate and frantic manner. More of the same this January – another managerial sacking, another rush to sign five players.
The massively bloated QPR squad is made up of layers of six or seven players signed in each transfer window by different managers, and now we have a Mark Hughes layer on top. The six that Neil Warnock brought in 18 months ago added a spirit and togetherness to the team that I’m simply not sure is there any more in the same way it is at Norwich and Swansea. There’s a degree of ‘only here because nobody else would have him’ about Barton and Gabbidon, an element of looking for a final pay day with Wright-Phillips and Zamora. When the going has been tough in recent games, that will to dig in and see the job through simply hasn’t been there – Norwich H, Wolves H, Villa A, Blackburn A. The body language of many of them is dreadful.
For all the big name arrivals it’s the Championship players – Jamie Mackie, Heidar Helguson, Alejandro Faurlin – who have put their hands up and done their bit for the cause the most. In amongst all the short termism we’ve forgotten the importance of leadership, and players who actually have a bit of feeling and history for the club they’re playing for.
Rob
1 Since mid November we haven't looked like stringing a run of form together.
2 We are relying on a Malian lad who has never played in England before to save our central midfield woes.
3 The run in. Who are we kidding that there are a plethora of points available?
LFW
1 When we play badly we get beaten easily, when we play well we find a way to throw the points away.
2 Our last ten games are frightening. We needed to take points from the run of games we’re in now but have suffered damaging defeats against teams around us and won’t have Cisse back until the last of the ‘winnable’ games at Bolton.
3 The body language in the first half at Blackburn was that of a team staring relegation in the face.
Chris
1 Games are running out and we’ve dropped points in crucial matches against teams around us in the table. Come mid-March almost every game is extremely tough, and if between now and then Rangers don’t pick up points, relegation could become more than just a strong possibility.
2 We have too many egos and not enough players who are actually capable of, in the time-honoured cliché, getting stuck in and giving their all for the club. Shaun Wright-Phillips and Joey Barton are two of the biggest offenders, but sadly we don’t have the players to replace either with. Perhaps this explains their complacency, but it certainly cannot justify it.
3 The R’s simply cannot keep a clean sheet. The defence is hopelessly disorganised and there isn’t the strong spine you need to mount a proper battle against relegation. QPR have thrown away more points than any other side from winning positions in the Premier League, and eventually, we will get punished for this profligacy.
Dave
1 - Our last four games of the season are horrible and no matter how well we play we’ll do well to get more than three points from those twelve available meaning we’ve probably blown our chances with the last four results.
2 - When so much goes wrong so often you have to wonder if it’s just not meant to be, if I wasn’t a QPR fan I’d have us down as relegated.
3 - Just look at Portsmouth for all the reasons we need, over spent on players small stadium and when the billionaire pulled out they were finished. You can tick two of those boxes already for us.
LFW asked professional odds compiler Owen Goulding for the bookies’ take on the season and relegation battle so far:
The 2010/12 Barclays Premiership has thrown up many surprises so far. It is true that Man Utd and Man City were expected to battle it out for the title, and even with Spurs sniffing about still, this seems to be the case. However, the relegation market has thrown up many surprises. The biggest surprise this season has been Norwich.
Bookmakers - me included- have been left with egg on our faces so far from the form of the Canaries. To put it into context, Norwich started the season at 8/13 to be relegated. This means the bookies rated them as having a 62% chance of relegation. Their current price for relegation is 50/1 - a less than 2% chance. Those lucky punters who backed Norwich pre-season on the handicap market (getting 48 Points on Man Utd) - are currently sitting very pretty.
Swansea have far exceeded expectations as well. We all knew they enjoyed passing the ball and may look pretty, but their defensive abilities have come as a surprise to many a bookie. They started the season 8/15 for relegation, (65% chance of relegation) and are currently 20/1 to return to the Championship (less than 5% chance).
Now onto the Superhoops. It may come as a surprise to many, but QPR are currently less likely to be relegated than they were at the start of the season. They started the season Even money (50% chance) for relegation and are now currently 5/4 (44%) chance of relegation. It has been a turbulent season so far, but will it improve?
Wait, stop, put the gun down. Tomorrow the panel turns its attention to the remainder of the season, what lies in store for QPR, reasons for optimism and where you may be able to make money from the remainder of the Premier League Season. So that’ll cheer you up some I’m sure.
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Pictures – Action Images