QPR made it three wins in a week and climbed to joint top of the Lancashire and District Senior League with a hard fought 2-1 home win against Reading at Loftus Road on Friday night.
Down the Westway, through the White City, something might be stirring, in old Shepherd’s Bush.
The local team here, by the end of its previous season, had collapsed in on itself. Incapable of completing even the simplest of basic tasks required by the sport, or beating the absolute worst teams in their league. Five games with Barnsley and Peterborough passed by without a victory — a difficult thing to achieve even if you were trying to do it in last season’s Mercantile Credit Trophy. Send this lot to the shops for a pint of milk and they’d have come back with a roll of kitchen foil and a curse from an ancient demon. Bare months later there’s a Queens Park Rangers side beginning to trust themselves a little more again, and play the sort of football the locals in this part of the world really admire. The team is, slowly but surely, getting a bit further up the pitch, and just starting to believe a little bit.
Hooped hopes have been raised and dashed before of course, never more so than 2021/22, and often at this time of year. Steve McClaren beat Ipswich, Sheff Wed and a Shagger Grealish-led Aston Villa in October 2018 before being reduced to a quivering, wasted piece of jelly. The fate of everybody at the club dependent on not only finding a Premier League loan player we could afford, but who didn’t have fish for dinner. Jim Magilton looked like he’d reinvented the whole sport this month in 2009 — 12 goals in a week, a 4-2-3-1 where one of the twos was Ale Faurlin and three of the threes were Adel Taarabt, Wayne Routledge and Akos Buszaky. Anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding it using that model are dinosaurs, and they’ll be sitting on their ass on their sofa in May watching Queens Park Rangers win the EFL Championship. Or so we thought, within four weeks he’d lost 5-1 to Boro and 3-1 to Watford in a weekend and been sacked for headbutting one of his own players. Bloody club, why do we do it to ourselves?
We do it for nights like Friday. Traffic nose-to-tail as the sun dipped down behind whatever the fuck that monstrosity is they’ve built over North Acton way. Pubs rammed four deep at the bar. Not a spare seat on three sides of our cramped little tinderbox that fizzed and crackled with nervous anticipation, hopeless optimism and one too many £6.40 pints (don’t worry about it, that’s a tomorrow problem). I don’t want a place to stay, pump up the jam.
In the way of Rangers making my day — Reading. Urgh, the coroner, I’m so sick of that guy. Nothing can kill this lot — nothing. Years of financial mismanagement, points deductions, transfer embargoes both soft and hard (stop it), two wins in 20 matches, eight straight defeats, signing Jeff Hendrick, appointing Paul Ince (is a wanker), allowing Kia Joorabchian within 500 miles of the gaff, putting Joe Lumley in goal — nothing. They’re immune. If we’d done half of the shit they’ve pulled over the last ten years we’d be looking up the way to Nuneaton Borough, and no doubt getting beaten there after a miserable afternoon in the world's most Bexity Wetherspoons. QPR could have been the ones to finally squish Reading in 2018, and imagine the muffin baskets we’d have received for that from Championship fans spared the cancerous ball ache of having to get back to the station from that fucking cave of sadness they play in — alas, when awarded a late penalty, we let Jake Bidwell take it. Bloody club, indeed. Tipped for relegation for all and sundry this season (yes, alright, me) they came into this game third with a set of summer signings that reads more like the audience guest list to An Evening With Harry Redknapp, which if ITV haven’t commissioned already they surely soon will. The last cockroach standing post nuclear holocaust, wondering what all the fuss was about as they enjoy one of 40 daily cigarettes and muse about how tired they are of experts and their opinions.
To be fair to Ince (is a wanker), and Reading, you could see here, I thought, why they’ve done well to this point. God they're awkward. Like a big stone in a tight shoe. They neither have the ball, nor want it very much. They’re more than happy to spend prolonged periods without it. Jeff Hendrick still needs Michael Palin with him holding his hand before he contemplates crossing the halfway line, and with a back three behind him and a couple of defensive wing backs either side that’s a veritable forest of humans to pick your way through. Typically, a lot more difficult than we made it look with that fraud pisballing about back there for us last season (Hendrick, that is, not Palin, who I like a great deal). So far teams that have been able to do it have subsequently gone to town (4-0, 4-0, 3-0 already under their belts and a negative goal difference despite the lofty league spot), but seven wins already tells you that others have become frustrated and tired, at which point you get sprung by a big, awkward, gangly front two of Lucas Joao and Andy Carroll. Both absolutely all over the map form and fitness wise, one a standing national joke, but would you want to mark either? Homey, he’s not going to get tired, he’s Drederick Tatum. When Tim Iroegbunam got desperate and went to ground trying to recover his own possession concession that was all the invitation Joao needed to hit the deck for a penalty — horribly frustrating because you can see him leaving his leg there waiting for the contact which he can then exaggerate with his Platoon extra audition, but that’s modern football for you and Carroll tucked home from 12 yards.
In the home dug out, however, the natives are getting very excited about Mick Beale. Mick-WHA? Mick Beale. I heard an interesting story, via somebody who prepared the presentations and videos for another manager QPR spoke to this summer, who had worked with Beale in passing before, and upon hearing that he was also going for the job just laughed and told his bag man they may as well give up and move on because "once Mick gets them in a room he’ll talk himself into that job”. A 40-something Bromley bloke in a tracksuit, living out of a hotel at Heathrow Airport, with a football brain and a turn of phrase that seemingly just makes guys melt and follow what he says. I could listen to him all day, he talks like a beautiful combination of somebody I might meet in The Crown and Sceptre, but also somebody who knows what he’s on about. Luckily, for us, it seems, so could his players.
Three games in a week, no problem. Two long away trips, no problem. Sky have moved game three of three to Friday, no problem. Star boy Chris Willock injured (though, mercifully, only for a fortnight or so), no problem. The Alliance has decided to change the qualifying time from a minute-two to a minute-flat, no problem man. We should, I think, acknowledge that creative young managers like this thrive in the five subs era — Valerian Ismael got Barnsley to a bloody play-off for goodness sake — and it’s especially handy for a thin squad like QPR excessively reliant on a few key players in important positions, including those like Stefan Johansen and Leon Balogun who ideally wouldn’t have to do Bristol City A, Sheff Utd A and Reading H in the time it takes 02’s customer care to answer a call to their "help centre”. But, still, the turnaround in the team from May to now is getting more remarkable with each passing game. You reckon there’s a better left sided player in this league than Kenneth Paal do you? I hear QPR win away now, father.
Having lost game three of a three game week at Swansea a month prior, and lamented the decision to keep the same team three games running, Beale pivoted to a masterful rotation this week. After three clean sheets in four games and a near man of the match display at Bramall Lane, I’m not sure many would have had Balogun down for a rest here, but The BealeBot2000 learns as it goes — Johansen and Clarke-Salter both sat out in the week having starred at Ashton Gate, and the latest switch worked a treat here. So much of what’s been good about this week is players taken out at the right time, replaced at the right moment, and the right choice about who’s coming in — we’ve used 18 players in these three games, including 15 different starters, and taken nine points.
Ilias Chair, defying last season’s stereotype of a boy that needs his little mate to play for him to shine, was in the action early doors, shooting wide off a high win from Johansen. Soon a ball was dropping the way of Tim Iroegbunam — another recall that worked perfectly — and an improvised shot and similarly unorthodox save by returner Lumley produced a rebound that flew just too high for Lyndon Dykes, back leading the attack.
Carroll’s opener was a blow, not least because while newly promoted Premier League referee Thomas Bramall was closer to the incident than Joao’s sock ties and showed eyes like a shit house rat to spot the contact and award the kick immediately, he’d only a few moments prior to that committed the cardinal refereeing sin of not looking through the play towards a linesman and been punished by missing a hand ball in the Reading box from Sam Hutchinson so blatant they were appealing for it on the International Space Station. Arm stretched out from his body, nobody around, Iroegbunam’s back post header collected, pulled into the body, and pushed out for a corner, all with a sweeping motion of the left arm. I just… I can’t speyk.
Thereafter, in front of the Sky cameras, of course, Bramall did that contrary referee thing of trying to show that he wouldn’t be bullied or cowed by a home crowd and the fact he’d given one penalty to the away team while missing a really fucking obvious one for the home. Carroll took a turn in absolutely rattling through the shins of Tyler Roberts close to the touchline on the stroke of half time and was given the benefit of the doubt with a yellow card four inches thick produced from the top pocket almost before the silly old cunt had hit the ground. Benefit of doubt was metered out almost as haphazardly as the advantage rule. Here goes Ilias Chair look, past one bloke that’s fouled him but he's kept it so we’re playing on, and then around another who’s fouled him too, but we’re playing on still, even though he’s now lost the ball almost immediately, and sorry mate I’d stay to give you an explanation for why that is but I think a Reading player might have been fouled over here now so I’m going to charge across and give a big, fuck off, free kick to them just to show how authoritative and in control of the game I am. Total, total penarse. Honestly, every week I’m sitting through things like this. I’m just going to leave the engine running one night. No funeral.
If you didn’t think it was a very QPR thing to win three games in a week before this one started, if Matty Fryatt’s face was appearing every time you got to the good bit of your morning wanks, then things would get a lot worse before they got better. Have you ever travelled by bus before? Your mood’s not going to improve much. Ethan Laird left us. He left us, he left us. But that’s not what Osman Kakay’s going to do. Off he went down the right flank like somebody very unlike Osman Kakay indeed, whipping in a near post ball David Bardsley would have raised an approving eyebrow at, and here comes big fucking Lyndon Dykles running across the near post and attacking a ball at long last, clattering into the ball with a big meaty Les Ferdinand header. As much as things change, they stay the same, Joe Lumley conceding at the School End of Loftus Road. As long as the chief, puts sunshine on Leith.
QPR haven’t scored at the Loft End of the ground since Easter. The new terrace was packed, there wasn’t a spare seat in the house, the floodlights flickered a lux value that will terrorise Lee Hoos’ Bulb bill. It was time. It was time. Eyes down look in. Here we fucking go. Jimmy Dunne does green pen good, but suddenly the speed is too much — red pen, yellow card. Reading starting to look good again. Just sort of big, and awkward, and in a tessellating shape. It’s not as hard as we make it look, this division, you know. There’s a little spell of pressure, and a corner, and a come on you R’s, but it breeds a counter attack, and another highly dubious and generous free kick which Bramall was right on top of in a way he never seemed to be when QPR players were getting booted out of a game by a Paul Ince (is a wanker) team who knew exactly what they were doing. Now Chair, on the charge, lovely little boy, hangs one up to the back post, Reading aren’t interested, Roberts is, in with a header — torn between knocking it back across for a tap in and scoring himself he’s fluffed it rather and allowed Lumley to save. This is why they don’t allow drinking in the seats — I’d have moved onto the bleach at this point.
Into the final half hour and the 4-3-3 BealeMania has brought into our lives snared its latest victim. Reading, for once, are too high, and over committed, and the runners from deep coincide with the drop off from the front seamlessly as Lyndon controls, spins, and releases to absolute perfection. The whole thing is blown apart completely, and now it’s Chair, Roberts, Johansen, Jude the Cat, the Ghost of Dahpne Biggs, and all of our hopes and dreams facing Joe Lumley, Tom Holmes and not a lot else. Chair, predictably, shoots. Lumley has one for the cameras in his back pocket. Hard and low. Listen to Nick London.
Beale twisted again. Johansen, Roberts and Lovely Sam Field for Big Bad Luke Amos, Andre Dozzell and Rob Dickie. A back three, again, just like that. The team slipped into it seamlessly, just as they had done in Sheffield three quarters of an hour prior, because that’s just a thing we do here now: flip the team, formation and system in the middle of the game and it just all works as it’s supposed to. Like a proper professional football team, that knows what it’s doing, does. It’s time again for our semi-regular delve into the Ark of the Covenant that is the replies to the club’s official Twitter account, by way of illustration that being half decent at Fifa Ultimate Teams isn’t going to help you critique somebody of Mick Beale’s pedigree any more than it’s going to assist you getting laid any time soon: "Huh? Tim stays on the pitch and Field comes off?”; "Sorry but Mick has lost it today.” Anything else in the box Pandora?
Kakay overhit a cross. Urgh, love him, but that happened too often to justify the sevens you guys have given him in the interactive ratings, despite the goal, so no letters please. Kakay shot just wide from range. Better. Much better. More like this. I’ll get you a drink.
It just felt, somewhere, somehow, there was something coming here. Paul Ince (is a wanker) said it was always going to finish 1-1. Hmmm. Well, yes. Not for me Clive. I couldn’t tell you which end it was coming at - though Dickie-Dunne-Clarke Salter is some fucking back three at this level and Seny Dieng is one of the league’s best keepers even playing on one leg and throwing the ball past the halfway line instead of kicking it — but it wasn’t finishing 1-1. It just wasn’t. Jeff Hendrick and Junior Hoilett probably — I’m just watching. Nesta Guinness-Walker: great name; even better signing on a free from Wimbledon; and a throw Nasa usually insist on a weather report and a countdown for. Reading brought Ejaria on - remember when he was "better than Eze"? Like when ITV tried to make Adrian Chiles the new Des Lynam. But when you’ve got Chair, Amos, Iroegbunam, Dozzell, Paal, Clarke-Salter, Dickie, Dunne… these are good players mate. They lost their way, their mental fragility was exposed, but there’s a new sheriff in town who has shown them the way. They’ve bounced back. And hopefully this time we won’t be pulping the book in April. The walls of the bowling alley were closing in. The noise and energy and smoke in the place were all flowing one way. It just needed one Reading player to crack a door they shouldn’t to peep inside and we’d be living in the backdraft poster we all had on our student bedroom wall.
Second phases off set pieces. Ask Dan Lambert. Here it is. Field tiring from his midweek masterclasses, Johansen waning too, Amos and Dozzell adding much needed punch, but it was Tim Iroegbunam’s turn to step up to the plate. Hatteburg, grab a bat you’re hitting for Burnsy. Off he set at a lick and a split, burning past exactly the sort of tactical foul Reading had made intelligently all night, and into a second one which is one of the dumbest things you’ll ever see outside of Jay Emmanuel Thomas’ career choices. It’s one of those. Everybody in the ground. Everybody in the ground. The people that shout all the time, the people who shout none of the time, the swearers and non-swearers, the parents and kids, the drunks and sobers, the men, the women, the children, the players, the bench, the people who can stand up, the people who can’t, the people on the gantry, Andy fucking Sinton — rise as one, lift both arms into the air and cry "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY”. Watch the replay, look behind the goal, pick a face, wind it back, pick another, watch it through again. And again, and again, and again. It’s a foul so blatant even Thomas Bramall has seen it. Loum the guilty party — take her home, thick as shit. It is time for a kick from the penalty mark. It’s QPR’s first of the season. It’s QPR’s first since March. And it's Lyndon Dykes with the ball in his hands.
Given that Lyndon Dykes had a free shot at the Blackpool keeper from eight yards and shit the bed to such a terrible extent that we’d only just replaced the bed and steam cleaned the room in time for him to do even worse from even closer range against Hull, he probably wouldn’t have been your first choice. But then the last time we had a full terrace at the Loft End of the ground the key goal of the game wasn’t a 30 yard Les Ferdinand barn burner, or a Ray Wilkins chip, or a Trevor Sinclair spectacular. It was Devon White, an electrician from Ilkeston, who got so fed up with the ball bouncing and bobbling around in the goal mouth that he thrust out a fist and punched it into the back of the net to see what would happen. It took ten years off Neville Southall’s life, and it made nine-year-old me know this was the place for me. A place for outsiders to belong. That he wanted to take it should put you on this boy’s side.
The tattooed Scotsralian from Surfer’s Paradise Apollo via Queen of the South is more QPR than we care to admit. Mick Beale described him as someone who "carries it around his neck more than you would know… gives us everything he’s got… a boy that doesn’t cut any corner, any day”. Yeh, he’ll miss from eight yards (and six, and two), but if he didn’t he wouldn’t be playing for us. When that day arrives, we’ll live on Ocean Drive, but until that point… Sorry, excuse me while I interrupt myself, Tom Holmes is trying to dust up the penalty spot. My word. Might have been a better idea tracking Dykes’ run for the first goal you melt. Yellow card. Groundskeeper Illy replaced the turf anyway. I’ll never be surprised by the depths of stupidity footballers will stoop to. What do you think he's going to do, fall in a hole? Actually, that does sound like something he would do.
Anyway, no, Reading is Lyndon’s team. He snapped a 20-game goal drought with a goal at the Waitrose distribution centre in March 2021, and scored twice here against them in January (as our season peaked). After that he’s managed just one against Middlesbrough (which should only count half the way those dickheads are playing) in 24 outings. The QPR crowd has stuck with him, and his song, way longer than it’s taken them to destroy many others. On his twenty seventh birthday it was his time. Four steps, firm and true, bottom corner like a clown’s pocket. That whole standing corner of the ground, Lower Loft in particular, went absolutely insane. For a penalty? Against Reading? In October? Yes. Bite me. We’ve seen some shit here, we’ve been through a mill. Feels like lightning running through my veins. John Spencer used to enjoy playing Reading too. Lyndon’s your fucking man now.
Lumley’s decision to charge up for an injury time free kick was genre peak. He left the ball behind, deep in his own half, to Paul Ince (is a wanker)’s obvious exasperation, burning off what remained of the added time. To put the tin hat on his night, his replacement’s trademark is now this. In the final second of the final minute of the final part of injury time at the end of one of those nights, under the lights, following Queens Park Rangers, Seny Dieng comes regardless. However far out you hang it, however big the crowd, however tense the situation, Dieng is coming, from the moment it’s kicked, Gadget arms stretching into the sky, to collect, and claim, and catch, and collapse onto the floor. I’d usually lazily generalise and say it was a cheer louder than the goal, but no cheer was louder than that second Lyndon Dykes goal. Jimmy Dunne mounted him from behind. A queue started to form behind them. QPR had won. Without Willock, without Laird, three game week, blah, blah and indeed blah. Slip inside the eye of your mind.
The Crown stayed open past midnight. It was like a cross between an episode of This is Your Life and Last Days of Rome in there. If you’d rather be anywhere else than in this tiny corner of London, with this accident-prone rabble of insanity, with these people, on nights like this, then I don’t want to know you.
You R’s.
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QPR: Dieng 7; Laird 6 (Kakay 26, 6), Dunne 7, Clarke-Salter 7, Paal 6; Iroegbunam 7, Field 6 (Dickie 69, 6), Johansen 6 (Dozzell 74, 6); Roberts 6 (Amos 74, 6), Dykes 7, Chair 7
Subs not used: Archer, Adomah, Shodipo
Goals: Dykes 33 (assisted Kakay), 84 (penalty, won Iroegbunam)
Bookings: Iroegbunam 53 (foul)
Reading: Lumley 7; Yiadom 5, Hutchinson 5 (Hoilett 39, 6), Holmes 5, McIntyre 6, Guinness-Walker 7; Hendrick 5, Loum 4, Fornah 6 (Ejaria 70, 5); Carroll 7, Joao 6 (Ince 75, 6)
Subs not used: Meite, Bouzanis, Mbengue, Abbey
Goals: Carroll 30 (penalty, won Joao)
Bookings: Hutchinson 25 (foul), Carroll 45 (foul), Holmes 83 (being a knob)
QPR Star Man — Tim Iroegbunam 7 I've been around and around on this. I left the ground thinking Tim was man of the match, but then his give away and rashness for the penalty changed my mind in hindsight. Watching the game back, though, with Field waning after a great week, Johansen the same, his surges forward and influence on what is his first ever 90 minutes of men's senior football nudges him back up ahead of several other candidates and the Lyndon Dykes narrative. Sorry, not sorry.
Referee — Thomas Bramall (Sheffield) 5 A depressing experience. Despite a slew of retirements from the likes of Mike Dean, Kevin Friend and Jon Moss last season this guy was the only EFL referee they deemed worthy and capable of being promoted into the top flight. I look at this performance in that context and just despair. If you want to tell me that Carroll rattling through Roberts’ shins is ok, and a yellow card, rather than a red, then ok, fair enough, I usually like to go lenient cards wise too, so perhaps. Likewise the Reading penalty, which I’ve already discussed. But for Hutchinson to be able to stand in the Reading penalty box, with nobody anywhere near him, stick his arm out and bat the ball out for a corner, look guilty as fuck, and neither a Premier League referee nor either Premier League linesman sees it or does a thing about it is just scandalous really. I’ve a dead grandmother, six foot under the ground, 200 miles away at the other end of the country, who could see that was a fucking penalty. Exasperating. It is absolutely not as difficult as these people make it look, I’m sorry.
Attendance — 16,656 (2080 Reading) Lower Loft looked like it was absolutely buzzing when the winning goal went in. Bringing that terracing back is one of the best off field decisions the club has made lately.
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