Stop me if you've heard any of this before - Report Sunday, 22nd Oct 2023 22:56 by Clive Whittingham QPR sunk deeper into the Championship mire with an incompetent opening and 2-1 defeat to fellow strugglers Huddersfield on Saturday - both opposition strikes looking awfully like goals this team concedes all the bloody time. Here we go again, then. Here we go again. A Queens Park Rangers throw in. We know what that means. Anybody who’s watched any of QPR for any length of time whatsoever knows what that means. Within, at most, two touches, this ball is going to back with the opposition. Eight minutes into Saturday’s game at Huddersfield, Osman Kakay cut out the middleman entirely and just planted the thing straight on Tom Lees’ head without any teammate involvement. Thanks for saving us the time Jean. We may as well write to the league now and say we don’t want throw ins anymore. Just award them all against us regardless. We only throw them straight back to whoever we’re playing against anyway so what’s the point in colluding in the illusion we’re ever going to do anything else? Waste of everybody’s energy even pretending. From there, after a quick head tennis session, it took just one straight pass through the lines and a simple set back to get Jack Rudoni clear into the Huddersfield left channel and he put a nice early ball across, behind the retreating Rangers centre backs, for Kian Harratt to tap in unmarked at the back post. Much like the amateur hour throw ins, you’ve seen this team concede this goal before. You saw it a fortnight ago, at Leeds, where Kakay was again complicit in handing over possession down our right side. From there it needed just one pass straight back past him to free Rutter into exactly the same space Rudoni ran into, and he played a remarkably similar pass across an exposed backline to Summerville, also unmarked at the back post, for an identical finish to Harratt’s. You’ve seen Joshes Eccles and Simms both score this goal for Coventry at Loftus Road recently. On those occasions it went down their right and our left, but it was still a ball given away in midfield only then requiring one straight pass to get in immediately down the side of our defence, and another swift low cross to an unattended player at the far post. Coventry scored three more remarkably like it in W12 at the end of last season. QPR give it away, opponent plays a direct pass forward between our lines, ball is crossed to unmarked player. Lather, rinse, repeat. Birmingham also won a game at our place not so long ago with a goal exactly like this. It’s all the same, only the names have changed. With the quarter hour approaching, Huddersfield, presumably through foul play or witchcraft, kept the ball for a few passes from their own throw in. Captain, captain, I know we usually give the throw ins away but why not, this time, keep the ball and try to create something? You know, something we like? This outright, flagrant cheating got Sorba Thomas into space down the right-hand side from where he was able to attack the byline and then cut back a low cross. At the risk of repeating myself, we all know what this means as well. It means a goal. This time for Rudoni, sliding in from 12 yards out with no defender near him. We know it means that because a fortnight ago, against Blackburn, we let Joe Rankin-Costello get to that byline and cut a ball back for Tyrhys Dolan to score the same goal from the same position. And then we let Sammie Szmodics do it for Sigurdsson. Against Swansea we let Jamal Lowe go to that byline and cut a cross back for Josh Ginnelly to score, albeit with his hands, after five minutes. Against Sunderland, Aouchiche got to the same part of the pitch on the opposite side and pulled it back for Ba to smash into the roof of Begovic’s net. At West Brom on Easter Monday, Gardner-Hickman, waved through to the byline unchecked, cut back cross for Swift to strike low and, although Seny Dieng made a save that time, Ajayi bundled the rebound into the empty net. We’ve conceded 48 goals in 26 games under Gareth Ainsworth and it’s the same goals, the same two or three fucking goals, every single time. Time after time, game after game, week after week. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways. One - we give the ball away and the opposition are in on us in one pass with our centre backs completely exposed. Two - we allow the opposition to reach our byline and cross unchallenged to runners arriving late in the box unfollowed and unaccompanied. Three - I suppose we did at least get through this one without defending a set piece like Fred Karno’s Army. Still, what exactly are they doing down at that shiny new training ground? Ainsworth said: “We’ve worked really hard over the break”. On what? Memorising the characters in Guess Who? Tell me, please, because I don’t see it here. Perhaps it’s because they only get to practice against our lousy attack, but I’m not seeing a lot by way of work being done on the gaping flaws in our team, are you? Two weeks of training, analysis, video sessions, self-reflection, soul searching and they come up with… Albert Adomah at right wing back. Fuck me sideways. It’s a long way to travel amidst a transport meltdown to watch a one-season novelty act winger trying to play full back two-and-a-half-years after we should have been shaking his hand. On the pitch the reaction is also, always the same. Resigned indifference. Jake Clarke-Salter bangs his hands on the ground a bit, Sam Field gives a wave for them to get back to the halfway line and start again, but nothing apart from that. No inquest, no shouting and yelling, no anger. Just, sadness. I’d do my usual noir comedy line about a toaster in the bath but when I looked there was a queue of first teamers waiting to climb into the tub with the four-slice ahead of me. Where are these "culture guardians" we've heard so much about, guarding the culture? Unless the culture here now is to keep losing 2-0, 3-0, 4-0 and just be grateful it's not 5-0, 6-0, 7-0? Even that will be a pipe dream against the likes of Leicester if we play like this. Over on the touchline the exaggerated, exasperated shrug from the manager. The performative hands to the face for the benefit of those still left in QPR away ends. The scratching of head. And then the journey back to the dugout to gather around the iPad which, watching us make the same mistakes over and over again like this, one can only presume is just Gavin Ward, a goalkeeping coach who controls the goalkeeper signings despite a track record of delivering slop, Ben Williams, the smooth talking miracle-working spin-class leader, bibs balls and cones specialist Paul Hall, and Dobbo the soothsayer, sitting around watching a back catalogue of Rick Stein’s French Odyssey. It cannot be showing the game. And they cannot be paying attention to it. It/they just can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t know if this is a good time but, while I’m burning the house down here, the best player on the pitch, Jack Rudoni, spent three years and nearly 100 appearances looking an absolute cut above his level, seven miles away from us at Wimbledon. Even I spotted it, through a diet of 50 Peroni bottles a week. Our recruitment department and scouts watched him constantly, and liked him a lot. We repeatedly passed up the chance to sign him, going first down the Charlie Austin/Stefan Johansen/Andre Gray route with Andre Dozzell bought in his position instead, and then down Mick Beale’s chosen path of collecting all the boys he remembered from his time coaching U8s football. Eventually Rudoni moved to the other end of the country for a few hundred thousand quid and joined another team in our league instead. And don’t get me started on Sorba Thomas, who was playing non-league football 15 miles away at Boreham Wood before going 200 miles north to sign here while we were cracking out a salty load over Adomah’s Tik Tok tricks and flicks videos. So far so bloody typical. Just add another one to the list. Now nine defeats from 13 games this season, 17 in 26 under this manager, 28 in 44 since topping the table a year ago, 44 in 85 since the now infamous 4-0 win against Reading at the end of January 2021. Just keep throwing them on the pyre lads. This one even had Jake Clarke-Salter pull up, wince, hobble, and embark on 20 minutes of the exaggerated stretching and signals to the bench pantomime, just to let everybody know he was “injured” again and bravely soldiering on through the pain of whatever mortal wound he reckoned he’d suffered this time. You’re going to have to narrow it down for me. Give me a clue. And then something strange began to happen. QPR started to play. I mean, more plop than Pep, more Brian Williams than Brian Clough, but relative to what had gone before it was something by way of flotsam to cling to. It was also enough to provoke a mild panic in our hosts who, lest we forget, are already onto a second manager, had also only won twice so far, and are presumably counted in the “mini-league” Gareth’s now trying to win after quietly abandoning the notion something special is building here and we’re about to imminently shoot up the actual table. The Terriers were eventually reduced to bringing on 7ft-tall Solihull Moors graduate Kyle Hudlin and, look, if you’re looking for a mythological creature to terrorise your medieval village in folklore, or serve as mascot for your can of sweetcorn, than I guess he’d be okay, but watching the home team reduce themselves to “HA HA LOOK AT THE FUCKING SIZE OF THE BLOKE” as a primary tactic, and us lose to them anyway, was profoundly upsetting. I sense there are many low points still to come, but watching Queens Park Rangers players rolling about in the mud with somebody who’d be pushing trollies around the car park of a death star Asda if he was even four inches shorter is going to be right up there come May. Rangers finally got Sinclair Armstrong away into the right channel and onside for the first time after half an hour. This is essentially this team’s plan A, B, C and D and on this occasion it fashioned a chance for Kenneth Paal who, after dummying nicely around his man, saw a shot deflected over for a corner which was headed just wide by Jimmy Dunne. Buoyed, within two minutes Paal was crafting a clever ball into Ilias Chair down the opposite side of the field and his nice back and around created space for a cross to Adomah at the far stick to unload shots which were first blocked and then off target. When Armstrong got in behind a second time, and checked onto his right foot, he too saw a low strike divert off a defender for a corner. This was again met by Dunne and blocked in the goalmouth. What do you know, there might be something here for us if we stop giving the pissing ball away and start playing some modicum of football. This lot might not actually be very good after all. Who would have thought? The deficit was duly halved on the stroke of half time. An odd goal, not least because that’s a hell of a leap and powerful header from a guy who’d spent the prior 20 minutes making out his groin had exploded into a thousand pieces. But mainly because the build up to the corner that provided it had seen QPR - mainly in the form of Osman Kakay, Jack Colback and Sam Field - passing the ball about in an apparently aimless triangle wide on the right, at times in open wide-armed exasperation with each other, and the rest of the team, about where this was going and what exactly the plan was. Town stood off, wondering what on earth we were doing. The ‘plan’, such as it was, seemed to be just knock it about a bit and see if something happens by accident, rest of the team statically next to their respective markers watching it all unfold without contributing. And that was enough for a goal. In this game, against this opponent, that was enough for a goal. It’s heartbreaking really. The second half started in much the same vein. Firstly, Dutch forward Doctor Zoidberg, who has spent his entire career to date playing on the continent, dived in the penalty area, just as he’d done in the first few minutes of the game. This one so egregious that even Keith Stroud’s mogwai Gavin Ward was moved to issue a yellow card. No card for Jonathan Hogg mind, not for cracking through Ilias Chair after ten minutes, nor for deliberately pulling back Jack Colback as he advanced into the Huddersfield half in this instance. Ward’s policing of tactical fouls and repeat offenders is every bit as haphazardly inconsistent as his enforcement of the supposedly strengthened time-wasting rules – Lee Nicholls, in the home goal, at one point allowed to stand with the ball in his hand for half a minute, only for his team mate Yuta Nakayama to be carded for delaying the taking of a free kick by all of five or six seconds having only just stepped off the bench. Then, as if we needed any confirmation the summer’s latest clampdown had lasted all of two rounds, just the standard five minutes added to the end. You’d genuinely get a better product having a random draw machine referee your game than this elf. Secondly, QPR actually completing the odd pass or two, and playing football in the opposition half of the field, was enough to pose at least an intermittent goal threat. Clarke-Salter, quickly growing into our best player now he’d decided he was physically able to continue after all, improvised an absolutely outrageous lobbed effort over Nicholls from a loose free kick in the box. When the ball rebounded back into play off the inside of the post, Sinclair Armstrong was faced with the simplest tap in you’ll ever see but was too casual and not assertive enough, allowing Michal Helik to execute a goal saving sliding tackle that, while spectacular, should never have figured in the equation at all. You have to score there. You have to. Whether I would have taken him off, though, I’m not sure. For all his faults, Armstrong was getting in behind the home defence, causing them issues, and creating problems. The Irish striker was absolutely furious to be subbed, with a big point and angry “ME!?” when his number went up, and then a storm past the manager on the touchline. What followed was plenty of case for his defence. Paul Smyth, fresh from a goal for Northern Ireland against San Marino, spent ten ineffective minutes in his position trying to field long balls (great plan, Bart) before being shunted back out wide. Rayan Kolli was asked to do similar with only very slightly more success – one immaculate touch out of the air and swept switch pass to the far side worthy of note. Smyth might have had a penalty mind you – pulled back attacking a back post cross, on the linesman’s side of the field. With Ziyard Larkeche asked to continue his Christer Warren tribute act instead of Kenneth Paal, Elijah Doxon-Bonner unwisely dragged down to the deep end of the pool with the grown-ups instead of the increasingly effective Colback, and the whole Smyth instead of Armstrong thing, it was starting to feel like the manager was out to show Chris Willock exactly how many weird and wonderful combinations he is willing to consider before getting to him. Maybe do Archer for Field next? In the away end, fans who’d battled storm, plague, pestilence, and rail replacement bus services to make it this far, at one point began chanting the winger’s name. Only a first sighting of Reggie Cannon instead of Osman Kakay – who in the preceding two minutes had finished a dreadful personal afternoon by losing his rag with Ainsworth after the manager pasted him for playing a backwards and squad pass, and then been justifiably told in no uncertain terms where to get off by Andre Dozzell after trying to blame the midfielder for not reaching another hopelessly inept ball forward – could have been considered to have a positive effect. Afterwards Ainsworth said Rangers had been the better team for 70 minutes, the aggressors who “looked for all the world like they would score”, and he believed they were going to get a point or even win the game. In fact, QPR, who haven’t scored three goals in a game for more than a year, got progressively worse with each of Ainsworth’s subs just as it finally felt like they were building a bit of momentum. Beavis must be starting to wonder where he’s got to. There’s a philosophical debate to be had about whether a man punching you in the face 100 times in a minute, but then slowing down, is good news or bad news. If I’ve pumped raw sewage into your local river for the last 18 hours, but now I’ve stopped, are you looking at that as a positive or a negative? Ainsworth desperately wants you to believe curling that monstrous log into the S-bend against Blackburn a fortnight ago and then being marginally less crap against a Huddersfield team vastly inferior to Rovers is some kind of good news story. “I’m a glass-half-full guy. The Blackburn game was not acceptable and the transformation is something else. We’ve improved from Blackburn,” he said. “Roll on the season because it’s going to be a good one. I’m pretty sure we’re going to finish above that line.” That sounds very much to me like he’s spent the last fortnight soothing Amit and Ruben’s furrowed brows with promise of a “transformation” following two weeks hard graft on the £20m training ground they’ve just built for him. It’s a funny word that, isn’t it, transformational? Because, you know, Vesuvius’ impact on Pompeii was pretty transformational. Arthur Fowler’s aggressive rearrangement of Pauline’s sitting room was pretty transformational. You’ll wait a long while to play a team as poor as Huddersfield again, Hogg and the magnificent Rudoni apart, and even if you think our circumstances this season mean it’s ok to be talking about Queens Park Rangers crawling to fourth bottom in the Championship as some sort of monumental achievement and success story, it is depressingly small time and defeatist for a manager of this club to be trying to pitch a marginally less abject defeat to last week’s as some sort of cause for celebration and positivity. Particularly against a crap side like this. God only knows what he’d have been like if he’d got a point. He, and we, absolutely should have done. Jimmy Dunne, poor all afternoon, inexplicably and inexcusably planted a free header over the bar from five yards in the closing stages. Through all the gloom it was at least nice to watch us repeatedly threaten from attacking set pieces for once – the much-maligned Andre Dozzell with an afternoon of deliveries begging to be scored from. More like this please. Dunne should be expecting to hear from Andre’s lawyers over a lost assist bonus for this horror. Why then, given that, you’d get a corner in stoppage time, signal from the sideline to send Asmir Begovic up, and then take a quick short one before even the centre backs had arrived in the danger zone, rather than let Dozzell whip another one into a box crowded with ten QPR players as a final throw of the dice, only you and I can guess. “It’s just not dropping our way at the moment,” said the manager afterwards, seeking to paint his team as a combination of not very good but also not very lucky. Actually, we’re not very good, and really, really fucking dumb. Either way, lethal combinations, and the gap to fourth bottom Plymouth is now four points. Links >>> Ratings and Reports >>> Message Board Match Thread Huddersfield: Nicholls 5; Pearson 6 (Nakayama 81, -), Helik 7, Lees 6; Thomas 6, Rudoni 8, Hogg 7, Wiles 5, Koroma 6 (Headley 67, 5); Zoidberg 5 (Hudlin 82, -), Harratt 6 Subs not used: Edmonds-Green, Diarra, Maxwell, Austerfield, Jackson Goals: Harratt 8 (assisted Rudoni), Rudoni 14 (assisted Thomas) Bookings: Zoidberg 47 (diving, not the first time), Nakayama 85 (time wasting, harsh) QPR: Begovic 5; Kakay 3 (Canon 70, 6), Dunne 4, Clarke-Salter 6; Adomah 4 (Kolli 74, 5), Colback 6 (Dixon-Bonner 74, 5), Field 5, Dozzell 6, Paal 6 (Larkeche 75, 4); Chair 5, Armstrong 4 (Smyth 64, 5) Subs not used: Willock, Archer, Kelman, Duke-McKenna Goals: Clarke-Salter 44 (assisted Dozzell) Bookings: Chair 34 (foul), Colback 45+4 (foul) QPR Star Man – Jake Clarke-Salter 6 Playing as part of a defence conceding goals like this, and then spending 20 minutes going through this bloody pantomime we’ve seen before with the exaggerated stretching and shaking his head and “oooh I don’t know gaffer”, this looked like a world away from an acceptable performance to begin with, and just a continuation of what we’ve come to expect from him since he arrived here replacing Yoann Barbet. But his goal was well taken – take note Jimmy Dunne – and he was desperately unlucky with the chip that led to the Armstrong miss. He was, as at Leeds, one of the few players we had who looked like he belonged at the level. And so grows the frustration with Jake Clarke-Salter: he’s easily the best centre back we’ve got when he’s fit and interested, but he’s rarely either of those. Lo and behold, groin injury requiring 20 minutes of performative dance routine in the first half wasn’t enough to go off the field after all, nor prevent him scoring one, almost a second, and being our best player. Referee - Gavin Ward (Surrey) 5 Nothing massively problematic but you can just tell when people are refereeing a game without a feel or understanding of what it is they’re actually in charge of. After about ten minutes here somebody, I think Hogg, absolutely clattered through the back of Ilias Chair and left him on the ground. You and I know this is obviously a deliberate act, early in the game, by an experienced player, almost certainly talked about in the home team prep, against what would probably be considered our best player and somebody who has played very well against Huddersfield in recent meetings. Ward played advantage, but what advantage is there with QPR two v six in the opposition half and our best attacker down holding his spine? Particularly when you don’t return to book the aggressor. Chair was furious, and ended up booked himself out of frustration, while Ward was incredulous that the Moroccan wasn’t delighted he’d played on as we had the ball. That’s just lack of understanding of the sport you’re in charge of. Another example was the booking of Nakayama for time wasting over a late free kick when, for me, he’d done nothing of the sort and actually only been on the pitch 30 seconds. Ward is doing that because he didn’t have the gumption to do anything about Nicholls repeatedly standing with the ball in his hands for 20-30 seconds at a time without releasing it. To punish that would require an indirect free kick in the box, and all manner of hassle, so he doesn’t do it. He shows a token yellow card to somebody else in a neutral part of the pitch to show everybody how stern and authoritative he is on such things, and then adds the standard five minutes on at the end anyway. I’m going to keep repeating this for him, Jeremy Simpson, David Webb, Keith Stroud etc but it is little short of a disgrace, with the money washing around in the sport in this country, a tiny portion of which we could use to revolutionise the training, recruitment, retention and therefore talent pool of match officials, that you’ve got referees of this standard in charge of games this high up the ladder in this country. It’s a shame and stain on the sport. Attendance 18,010 (759 QPR) Well, 759 tickets sold but whether that many actually made it having not only contended with engineering and rail replacement bus services to begin with, but then added in Storm Barbet sweeping diagonally across the country the night before and leaving Kings Cross in Last Chopper Out Of Saigon status on Saturday morning, I don’t know. It was a long way to come, a lot of money to spend, an a lot of effort to go through to arrive and find Gareth’s big plan, after two weeks away plotting, was Albert Adomah at right wing back. He was a long way from the worst of the QPR offering here, but that's like arguing over who's the most vacuous Kardashian. I’ve seen some of Ainsworth’s delusional comments described as “gaslighting”. For me he’s gone way beyond that, he’s opened a whole bloody power station. We’re down to the absolute hardcore behind that goal now, I felt like I knew everybody there by face if not name. And they - we - deserve a lot better than this. A lot better. If you enjoy LoftforWords, please consider supporting the site through a subscription to our Patreon or tip us via our PayPal account loftforwords@yahoo.co.uk. Pictures — Ian Randall Photography The Twitter @loftforwords Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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