While a travelling party of more than 50 players and staff gallivant off around Asia in the name of building the QPR brand, LFW wandered off to Woking to check on those left behind.
They don’t mess about with their marketing in the Far East. “Click here for a Roman orgy,” read the banner ad below my moody feed of Friday’s match between Queens Park Rangers and the local Super League champions Kelantan in Kuala Lumpur’s colossal Shah Alam Stadium.
As QPR – slick and quick with possession, hardly playing a single long ball down the field in an entire 90 minutes of football – dominated their physically inferior opposition and ran out 5-0 winners I started to wonder exactly what makes an orgy Roman. I mean are we talking about the people involved or the location here? Do you dress up like a member of their former empire? Or is this just footage of Ashley and the boys on holiday at Abramovic’s expense with their little video camera again? Sadly, we’ll never know. I didn’t trust my antivirus protection enough to investigate.
‘Tis the season to sell replica shirts. Chelsea are in the US, Arsenal are heading East and QPR are island hopping round the Pacific rim. It seems Rangers are about to join the group of clubs that spend the summer flogging their players to death on promotional tours and then surrender their place in both cup competitions at the first possible opportunity citing fixture congestion and player fatigue.
People talk about England standing a better chance in international tournaments if players had the benefit of a rest during a mid-winter break, but you just know that were such an unwelcome stoppage ever added to the UK calendar our players would be dragged off round the world on these trips again rather than left at home to put their feet up. Wasn’t it funny how Arsene Wenger’s concerns about Jack Wilshere’s burn out which precluded him from joining in with the European Under 21 Championships last summer didn’t worry him enough to leave the youngster out of a subsequent two week shirt selling jaunt around the Far East? Still, as Wilshere hasn’t played since and currently shows no signs of being fit again anytime soon one year on, I guess “The Professor” got what he deserved on that one.
If Mark Hughes does decide to deliberately sacrifice the cup competitions this season – and to be fair there’s no indication he would looking back at his record at previous clubs – not many Rangers fans will notice the difference. Pathetic early exits from knock out competitions have become a QPR speciality over the last decade, with this season’s narrow replay win against MK Dons the first FA Cup success of any kind in 11 years.
Vauxhall Motors is the omni-touted worst moment in that sequence but personally I found the following year’s First Round exit at my hometown team Grimsby even harder to bear. Mickey Boulding, who was actually always a better tennis player than he was a footballer incidentally, scored the only goal of that particular match which came just a few weeks after Rangers had memorably won at Blundell Park for the first time in their history and six months before the two teams exited the third tier in opposite directions. After the game, as the visiting faithful attempted to negotiate the salubrious back streets of Cleethorpes, we spotted Warren Barton, the only player apart from Jason Dozzell to actually be worth less than his plastic Corinthian figure, loading beers and fish and chip suppers onto the coach. These days QPR take Djibril Cisse (41 caps for France) and Ji Sung Park (100 caps for South Korea) to matches in Malaysia on their own specially branded plane named after Alan McDonald. It’s hard to believe it’s the same club.
The change in the place, even from 18 months ago, is phenomenal and the danger of such rapid progression is that some people can get left behind. You couldn’t keep the Sky cameras off Noel Gallagher last season as his beloved Manchester City finally won that elusive league title, and for the City fans that were there through their own Grimsby Town-related horror stories that must have tasted very sweet indeed. But author Colin Shindler, another well known Blue and writer of cult classic Man Utd Ruined My Life, has admitted he shows little interest in this new all conquering City, detached and apathetic to a club inflated artificially above its level by money dug from the ground in the Middle East. QPR must be aware of their long suffering supporters and strange traditions during such rapid change, and luckily Tony Fernandes seems to understand that.
Players can get left behind too. This time last season Rangers were scrambling around to add Danny Gabbidon and Bruno Perone to their squad on free transfers, now the R’s shop at Manchester United for the likes of Park and Fabio. It’s another transfer window where seven or eight new faces are going to be added to the QPR squad – an unsustainable situation that has nevertheless been taking place at Rangers every transfer window for the last four years. With every new addition comes the now well worn message board post congratulating the club, qualified with the notion that we still need a centre back. Like a greedy vampire draining a hospital blood bank, slumped in the corner barely able to move and yet still keen to gorge on more: “More blood,” cry the QPR fans, “more players, must sign more players, more money, more blood.” I’ve checked with one or two correspondents this summer that they are aware we can only start with 11 players. “More blood,” they cry in return.
Such short term methods of squad building create a layered squad made up of groups of six or seven players each signed six months apart to paper over different cracks, in QPR’s case usually by several different managers. The first layer, added in the two transfer windows after the arrival of Flavio Briatore by Gianni Paladini in full kid-in-candy store mode, has finally been cast aside this summer and doesn’t the lack of interest from any club at any level in the likes of Rowan Vine, Lee Cook, Patrick Agyemang, Peter Ramage and Fitz Hall really tell you something about just how over valued and over paid those players were at Loftus Road?
On Saturday, unable to afford the plane ticket to Kuala Lumpur, LoftforWords set out instead to see the replacements for that class of 2008. The next layer of players once trumpeted as the great white hopes of QPR only to be cast aside into that strange no-man’s land where you’re only good enough to sign for lower division teams but have such a long and lucrative contract at QPR that you don’t want to go and nobody at your true level can afford you anyway turned out at Woking this weekend, for want of something better to do.
I’m now at that stage of the summer where I’m becoming a danger to members of the general public. A lack of Saturday football for me to release a week load of frustration and tension onto at volume is creating a dangerous imbalance where I could happily turn a minor irritation – people who stop to talk on the stairs, people who don’t swipe their Oyster card properly and hold up the line with a ‘seek assistance’ warning, people who queue at the checkout for ten minutes but don’t think to use that time as an opportunity to get a method of payment out of their fucking handbags – into an excuse to beat perfect strangers into a bloody pulp. So I thought it would be a nice idea to head down to Kingfield on Saturday myself and get away from it all.
Breakfast at Scotts in Covent Garden was interrupted by a man attempting to gain access to the café with two ferrets on a piece of string. Conversation over lunchtime beers in The Sovereigns in Woking soon died away to allow us to listen to Sandra on the adjacent table rejoicing with her friends that her fella’s impending move to an open prison for the remainder of his eight year stretch (so we’re clearly not talking petty theft from Boots here) will mean that they can start having sex again.
God it felt good to be back.
The match itself was similar to a Big Brother eviction in scale and importance. A small crowd, all seemingly embarrassed to be there, shuffled into Woking’s one-part Championship to three-parts nuclear fallout zone stadium and watched on quietly as QPR struggled to even go through the motions.
Woking were promoted from Conference South as champions last season under the guidance of experienced non-league gaffer Gary Hill, and were led by Kevin Betsy - one of those names Rangers fans used to fear back in the days when Mickey Boulding and Warren Barton fulfilled the roles of lion and Christian. QPR seemed to be an eclectic mix of fallen heroes, children, and people found slobbing about on Shepherds Bush Green earlier in the day. The team sheet listed Tommy Smith and DJ Campbell as starters but neither did, and didn’t list substitutes either. Number four was named simply as ‘Albert’. Number three, the left back, was a six foot five inch, 18 stone, Frank Bruno-look alike by the name of Manny Monthe who looked better equipped for the world of cage fighting or razing small African villages to the ground. He’s certainly no kind of footballer on this evidence, but his 45 minute outing was a source of great entertainment.
The public address system announced Tottenham’s Aaron Lennon would be keeping goal for QPR in the first half, but sadly this turned out to be young Australian Aaron Lennox. Camera saves are the order of the day for Aaron it seems – why simply catch the ball when you can back flip through the air and turn it an inch over the bar with your finger tips? – but he looked very promising all the same and was a lone positive in a first half that ended 0-0 despite being played almost exclusive around the visitors’ penalty box. At the other end of the field captain (not a misprint) Rob Hulse wore the look of a man who has long since given up on life.
A man in a shiny suit claiming to be DJ Campbell’s driver offered tours of a souped-up Land Rover in the car park at half time. He said that DJ planned to play 45 minutes here before signing for somebody else next week – although the driver wasn’t sure who. In the bar we wondered whether he’d been the source for the 45-minute claim in Alastair Campbell’s dodgy Iraq dossier.
Campbell, and Tommy Smith, did indeed play for the second half. The former Blackpool man opened the scoring with a penalty and then put the game beyond doubt with a crisp finish after a deft first touch in a tight space. Woking pulled one back late in the day when Lennox’s replacement in goal, Chuckles the Clown, spilled a routine free kick into his goal mouth and was then powerless to stop it bobbling into the net. The video, filmed from several miles away, is worth watching for the touching father son moment at the front of the picture if nothing else.
I felt sorry for Campbell. Here we have a player with a reasonable goal scoring record who desperately wants to play for QPR but cannot even make a touring party squad that includes youngsters like Michaels Harriman and Doughty, Max Ehmer and the patently not-quite-good-enough Hogan Ephraim. Losing 2-1 in a crucial home game with eight minutes to go would you rather DJ Campbell leap up from the bench and peel off his tracksuit top or Jay Bothoyd? Campbell was injured at inopportune moments last season just when first Neil Warnock and then Mark Hughes seemed to be preparing to give him a prolonged run of games, and now apparently he’s been completely written off. It seems a shame. Along with Lennox, and perhaps young midfielder Frankie Sutherland, he was one of few to emerge from this match with credit.
Afterwards the mid-off fielder in a junior cricket match on an adjacent pitch retreated to the long off position to ask the score. “It was 2-1. And it was shit,” came the reply. Quite. See you at Aldershot on Tuesday night for more of the same.
Tweet @loftforwords
Pictures – Action Images, Colin Speller