Just six points separate QPR from the bottom three now after a seventh defeat from eight games, this time at home to Birmingham City in a desperately low quality game at Loftus Road on Saturday.
Choose your fighter. Perhaps, for you, it was the Lyndon Dykes long throw. First half, eight minutes on the watch, School End of the ground, full count, bases loaded, and here’s the pitch... Dykes took up his stance, assumed the position, walked three steps forward, and heaved the ball straight into the stand behind the goal. Not the front row of it either, more like ten feet deep into the away end. Clown school.
Maybe it was the moment ten minutes before half time when Birmingham shovelled a ball down the right flank and Luke Amos, believing it was going out for a throw but not bothering to check it actually had, turned and walked off in the opposite direction allowing Tahith Chong a free run to the byline and unchallenged cross which caused absolute chaos in the penalty area, was flicked goalwards but Lucas Jutkiewicz, saved in improvised fashion by Seny Dieng, and then three QPR players all converged on the rebound in a blind panic and belted it into each other’s shins. Amos - whose return to the side from the start for the first time since November 5 was one of only two changes made despite the midweek debacle at Blackpool and represented the sum total of the "cavalry” we’ve been promised are coming to save us - would soon pass the ball stone cold to a Birmingham player and stand with his head in his hands in the centre circle. He would finish with a pass completion rate of just over 60% - essentially, one in every two times he had the ball, he gave it away.
Or could it be Seny Dieng’s remarkable save onto the underside of the bar on the hour, denying Jutkiewicz what looked like a certain goal after he’d helped a wide free kick on towards the net. An attack of Stendhall’s syndrome — dumbstruck by extreme beauty having been surrounded by the banal — the save was entirely out of keeping with a game entirely devoid of quality throughout. It lifted the crowd, it kept QPR in the game, it was a valuable moment for Dieng after his own personal horrors at Bloomfield Road, and with half an hour to go it felt like the sort of moment that turns tides, that you look back on after the game as the key incident when things started to go our way. What would Rangers do with the boost? Well, they marched straight downfield, won a corner, the captain Stefan Johansen went across to take it from the Ellerslie Road side, he composed himself for the delivery and raised one hand in the air to indicate the direction of travel. This sign, we now know, means he’s going to plant it very firmly onto the forehead of the unattended, unchallenged Birmingham player closest to him, for him to head back away down the field, taking whatever meagre amount of air we’d managed to force into the limp balloon back out again. There would, later, in an extended period of stoppage time, be another chance for Johansen to deliver a wide set piece, this time a free kick from the corner of the penalty box. This was the ball game, by this point, proper last chance saloon stuff — Seny Dieng was going up for the dead balls by now. Johansen skied the delivery over and above all of them, and off towards Shepherd’s Bush Green. Thanks for saving us the time Stef.
In fact, though, it’s not that deep. Sure, several more weird and wonderful Taylor Richards’ shoelace-type incidents to add to the catalogue of ‘things I’ve only read about in books’ nonsense being served up by this horrific QPR team this season — Richards, by the way, not even on the bench for this one, absolute waste — but you need look no further than the goal that won the game.
QPR lasted 30 seconds before caving to Blackpool during the week. Here the "keep it tight early lads” lasted nearly two minutes — these things count as marginal gains for this shower. Albert Adomah, starting right wing back, because that’s where we are now, dived into a sliding tackle weighted at least 70:30 in his favour on the halfway line and succeeded only in taking himself completely out of the game and leaving Reda Khadra the freedom of Shepherd’s Bush to waltz into and do as he pleased. What pleased him most was a low pass to Juninho Bacuna, also unmarked, and from here we were back at the seaside again. Rob Dickie and Jimmy Dunne both sucked out of the middle towards the ball at the same time, neither win the tackle, now they’re out of the picture as well, and the penalty box beyond them is populated by unmarked visitors. Sam Field has been drawn into the goal mouth, almost under the cross bar. With several players walking back, George Hall was unchecked and available for a cut back, but the ball went instead to Chong, who Osman Kakay was wrong side of throughout, and he couldn’t miss from four yards. A pathetic shambles. Like a Conference South team in an FA Cup tie. Unprofessional slop. The reaction from all of them to it spoke volumes.
As, I thought, did the impact made late in the game by Sinclair Armstrong. As on Tuesday night, essentially a full afternoon of football stretched out ahead of QPR to retrieve the situation they’d largely created for themselves, and yet it felt like game over as soon as the ball hit the net. Serious threats on John Ruddy’s goal numbered zero. Rangers spent the majority of their time planting balls straight onto the bonse of Marc Roberts. Twice they were invited to play on through injuries by ever eccentric referee Keith Stroud, twice they panicked at the opportunity of facing ten men, twice the opportunity slipped by. Dykes’ blocked volley in first half stoppage time was the beginning and end of the highlights. They spent more time picking up thick yellow cards for daft challenges chasing their own mistakes — Sam Field’s tenth of the season just the right side of the amnesty date to avoid a ban, Luke Amos’ horrid afternoon complete with one of his own. Tim Iroegbunam’s brilliant tackle on 34 minutes got us out of another potentially dire situation and earned him praise from fans online, but, again, for me, a lot of walking around and going through the motions from the Villa loanee here.
Only 19, plunged into a terrible situation, playing central midfield first with Dozzell during the week and now Amos here, all with balls now whizzing around above his head, there’s plenty of mitigation for a loanee who is at least turning up to play each week — though a cynic may question how much of that is because we’re financially penalised when he doesn’t. No such excuses for Jamal Lowe, who’s only been here since January, and won’t have been troubling the laundry with his kit after this total abdication of his responsibilities. Difficult to think of a single positive contribution he made across 82 minutes in which he managed just 18 touches of the ball (less than half those managed by Seny Dieng, and easily the lowest of any starting player on the pitch) and the value of having a quick, physical striker who is at least willing to run around and put himself about was shown starkly when Armstrong belatedly joined the attack. Raw, with all the goalmouth composure of a epileptic gnat, but the Irish youth international caused Birmingham problems immediately, twice coming close to lobbing the onrushing John Ruddy having chased through balls, twice winning corners which Dykes missed chances from first with a stabbed finish and then a header, and just generally posing a threat, making an effort and giving the crowd something to get excited about. Jamal Lowe can’t do that, no? Should be ashamed.
That Armstrong was able to look this good, and effective, said a lot about the standard of the game and quality of the opposition. This is not a good Birmingham City side. Better than us, certainly, with some eye-catching players like Chong, Khadra and (when he’s upright) Bielik, but above us in the table only on goal difference with a near identical WDL record. They’d won one of seven prior to kick off, and were beaten 3-0 by the dire Watford side we beat last weekend while we were having our arse handed to us at Blackpool. Only when our youth team striker came on for the final ten minutes did they look anything approaching uncomfortable in this game. But for one Dieng save, and one Iroegbunam tackle, they’d have won by several more.
If there’s ever been a lower quality match played at this level before I would hate to have been there to see it. It took QPR nearly five minutes of the second half to complete a single pass - when they then miraculously managed four in a row it created a half chance for Iroegbunam, and then a succession of corners eventually headed tamely at goal by Jimmy Dunne for one of only two shots on target all day. The amount of times we just booted the ball straight out of play was a joke. From WhoScored.com, QPR’s pass completion was just 59%, with only Iroegbunam (77.4%) completing at a rate better than 70%. Several players — Dickie (59%), Amos (60.9%), Martin (52.4%), Dykes (45.5%) — effectively gave the ball away every other time they had it. With this, they once again managed a paltry two shots on target, as they have in 12 of their last 15 outings. One of those was the 6-1 at Blackpool, who followed that up with a 4-1 loss at home to Coventry while we were phoning in this latest shocker. Almost a third (28%) of QPR’s passes on the day were "long balls” — Birmingham managed even more than that 39%.
An utterly brutal watch. Really quite sad, in its own way. More an assault on the senses than a football game.
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QPR: Dieng 5; Adomah 3, Dickie 4 (Armstrong 77, 6), Dunne 4, Field 4, Kakay 5 (Drewe 45, 5); Iroegbunam 5, Amos 3 (Johansen 61, 4), Lowe 2 (Dixon-Bonner 82, -); Martin 4, Dykes 4
Subs not used: Archer, Gubbins, Dozzell
Bookings: Field 22 (foul), Amos 56 (foul), Armstrong 90+6 (fighting), Johansen 90+6 (fighting)
Birmingham: Ruddy 6; Colin 6, Roberts 7, Long 6, Trusty 6; Chong 7 (Graham 86, -), Bielik 6, Bacuna 7 (Chang 63, 6), Khadra 7 (Mejbri 72, 6); Hall 5, Jutkiewicz 6
Subs not used: Etheridge, Hogan, Longelo, James
Goals: Chong 3 (assisted Bacuna)
Bookings: Ruddy 78 (time wasting), Trusty 81 (foul), Long 90+6 (fighting)
QPR Star Man — Sinclair Armstrong 6 Star man from a ten minute outing and basically because he made effort, ran around and matched it physically with the opposition. The difference he made to the QPR attack showed how potentially easy it could be to get at a team with one win from its previous eight away games, and shamed several others who started the game and couldn’t be arsed to even go through the motions.
Referee — Keith Stroud (Hampshire) 6 Can’t even cheer myself up with a bit Keith Stroud rant because, bar the usual fussiness and eccentricities that are the norm with this official, he was fine.
Attendance — 15,097 (2,500 Birmingham approx.) Take two weeks guys, you’ve earned it.
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