With one win in 13 and out of both cups, the feeling after last weekend's Swansea stalemate was of another QPR season drifting away - the club can ill-afford to put its fans through another one of those, particularly the lunatics heading to Hull tomorrow.
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The overwhelming sense walking away from the draw with Swansea at Loftus Road last weekend was of another season beginning its long, slow drift away to nothing.
For a team that topped this league in October, and would still be joint sixth now but for a pair of late equalisers by the Swans and Sheff Utd in the last couple of home games, that may be typically, unduly pessimistic on my part. Pulling back the magician's curtain - 24 hours ago I was in Austin, it was 20 degrees, I had a beer by the river, I haven't slept since, I had four hours of heavy turbulence over the Atlantic to keep things interesting overnight, and now I'm in Hull. I'm not going to be in a good mood am I?
Pessimistic, also, because it’s a division where two or three wins in three or four games can take you a long way very quickly. There are two obviously outstanding teams, and a couple of others auto-piloting it through on parachute payments, but the rest of the division is matched in its mediocrity. Swansea and QPR have both shown themselves capable of winning six games in eight fixtures and climbing into the play-offs, but they have also both gone on long winless runs and they’re not alone in this. As he who shall not be named said in the summer, it’s about timing one of your eight game streaks for the end of March. Nevertheless, one win in 13 games, no victories in six at home, six goals in 12 games, three goals in front of the Loft all season — none of this immediately screams that QPR will be that team.
We also have to face up to the fact that this is, already, a second sequence of six matches without a win this season. QPR have averaged two of these a year for the last six seasons, and there’s been plenty of five match winless streaks among that as well. I write on here often that one of the frustrations with this team is we know they can do it, because we’ve seen it, as opposed to previous QPR teams who were patently just not good enough at their jobs. That said, a team that is going on these sequences quite this often (one win in 13 at the moment; seven defeats from nine and four wins from our last 20 games last season; another one win from 13 games stretch in 20/21; that dreadful lockdown run of two wins in our last nine in 19/20; a run of three wins in 21 games in Steve McClaren’s year in charge; three wins in 16 at one point under Ian Holloway the year before that and so on) isn’t a good team capable of crap moments, it’s the opposite.
We’ll assess our transfer window ahead of next week’s trip to Huddersfield but, as it stands, and as I said at the start of January, I’ll be surprised if that assessment stretches much further than me pointing at Jamal Lowe and saying "oh look, there’s Jamal Lowe”. Maybe we’ll do a tonne of business this week but I doubted that at the start of the month and there’s been nothing to change my mind so far. Lowe, who they almost snared on the August deadline day until Macauley Bonne’s agent started playing silly buggers over his pay-off, was always an obvious addition once Bonne had finally shuffled off back to Charlton. But we have no FFP headroom, and no available loan spots, so if you’re Tweeting West London Sport everyday asking for rumours and stories I’ve got to ask you… what exactly were you expecting? And why? There’s a possibility we could make the wildly successful Taylor Richards loan permanent early, given Neil Critchley has said that will still go through next summer regardless of his ongoing Missing status, and that would free another loan spot. But it always felt like the weird "obligated to buy unless we get relegated” was designed to kick his transfer fee out of the 22/23 accounts and into the 23/24 ones for FFP/rolling-three-year-reporting reasons, and buying him in January negates that.
Other than that it was, yet again, going to be a month of John Candy running a Casio up his arm trying to persuade/trick/con clubs into taking an enormous swathe of stodge barely good enough for the division below which clogs up our squad beyond the first eleven, costs God knows what in wages, and the people in charge of overseeing at our club really need to be held to account over. While I hold my hands up to quite liking the George Thomas signing when it was made, and of course acknowledging that it’s not an exact science and the general hit rate for football recruitment is somewhere between one in three or four signings, some things — like Trävelmän’s four year deal - obviously didn’t make sense right from the start. For a club that’s meant to be skint, we don’t half commit a lot of wage to Hamaleinen, Shodipo, Bettache, Thomas, Bonne and Masterson types who we then spend every transfer window trying to find Oxford and Lincoln types willing to have a borrow of them for a bit.
We’re still in touch enough for a return by Stefan Johansen, or Chris Willock rediscovering some form, to propel us back into contention and delivering an exciting end to the season. Lowe is a good signing. Having calmly ditched out of both cup competitions at the first possibly opportunity to two crap League One sides it would be nice to see a bit of that "concentrating on the league” to give us something to get the blood pumping a little bit over the remaining months. Look at our away games: we start tomorrow in Hull; next week we’re in Huddersfield; then we’ve got Middlesbrough on a day when there’s engineering and no trains from King’s Cross; then it’s Rotherham; then it’s Blackpool on a Tuesday night; and then it’s Wigan on the Avanti West Coast line. That’s before we even get the next set of train strike dates. These are huge distances, at great expense, and enormous hassle. Numbers are going to dwindle right back down to the clinically insane, and they're going to be increasingly pissed off if things continue as they have for the last couple of months.
Season ticket renewals draw ever closer and with the team’s performances on the pitch, the state of the "matchday experience” at Loftus Road, the constant fucking about with kick off times and dates, and the general malaise about the place all combining with the "cost of living crisis”, that’s going to be a tough sell for the club. Getting new, younger fans interested and engaged while serving this up even more so. All at a time when the club desperately needs to be building and adding to its support base, not alienating the small one it’s already got. A drift, if it’s a drift to be, could get super bleak, very quickly, played out in front of tiny and increasingly aggy and bitter away followings and morgue-like home atmosphere. The club can ill-afford that, and desperately need this team to start performing a little bit. Hull at home in August certainly fits in the "see, they can do it category”, so if they could shows it again tomorrow against the same opponent that would be great.
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Team News: Plenty of first team names involved in the midweek B Team victory against Brentford at Loftus Road — probably the best B Team we’ll face all season. Stefan Johansen got an hour as his comeback steps up, he hasn’t played since the defeat at Birmingham pre-World Cup and was an unused sub last weekend. Jake Clarke-Salter also played for 61 minutes along with Andre Dozzell, Albert Adomah and Chris Willock. Adomah scored along with Taylor Richards who played 90 minutes and Sinclair Armstrong who hasn’t been making the bench recently, so there are some options coming back for Neil Critchley — although Richards has since suffered a bereavement with the death of a close friend. Ethan Laird’s muscle injury that forced him out of the first half against Swansea will likely sideline him this weekend but not much more than that. Lyndon Dykes was ill rather than injured in the second half of that game so he’s back. Leon Balogun has done some running this week apparently, which must have been nice for him.
Hull loan signing Malcolm Ebiowei rather terrorised QPR at Loftus Road last season for Derby, but hasn’t played any senior football since a 12 minute sub outing for Palace on November 12 so may have to wait to start his loan spell at Hull from the bench. Benjamin Tetteh stuck the nut on a geezer at Sheff Utd in the last game so starts three matches on the naughty step. Regulars Ryan Longman and Jacob Greaves are also out.
Elsewhere: With the rest of the division engaged in something it says here is called the FA Cup fourth round (me neither, will have a look on Wikipedia a bit later) there are only two fixtures on Saturday as well as our own, and then a third in the midweek slot.
Watford in third travelling up to Boro in sixth is not only a clash of two play-off contenders, but also two of the few teams that have done some cash business in this transfer window. Boro are getting midfielder Dan Barlaser from Rotherham for £1.6m, a good deal less than he’s worth to the Millers because of his contract situation, and are in for a number of other targets with a few days to go. Watford meanwhile, as parachute payment clubs are wont to do, have whopped a quick £10m+ on central midfielder Ismael Kone from Montreal, right back Joao Ferreira and centre forward Henrique Araujo from Benfica and Colombian teen forward Jorge Cabezas. Free agent Leandro Bacuna is also heading to Vicarage Road, and of course no window would be complete without a nice convenient swapping of a player from the Pozzo’s right hand to their left hand — left winger Mattheus Martins is the 66th separate transaction between Watford and Udinese in the last 10 years, and the 55th of those to be listed as a loan or an undisclosed fee. Perfectly level playing field there.
Five ins at Huddersfield ahead of their weekend trip to Coventry as they attempt to stave off relegation from the Championship — Martyn Waghorn, Matthew Lowton and Anthony Knockaert bring experience of the level, but I was surprised to see them let Sorba Thomas go on loan to Blackburn as he’s been one of the stand out performers the last couple of times we’ve played the Terriers.
Midweek catch up is Lutown at home to Cardiff, where former Nottingham Forest boss Sabri Lamouchi is in as their third manager of the season already. Now 11 without a win (God that nil nil we allowed to fester at theirs over Christmas really was a crap result) and fourth bottom he’ll certainly have his work cut out. Likewise whoever’s next in at Wigan — likely Shaun Maloney — with Kolo Toure sacked after just nine games in charge, a dismissal inevitable from the moment they appointed him in the first place in what was obviously a bloody stupid idea. So far 33% of his managerial career has been against Luton.
Referee: James Linington travels nearly as far and often as Nico Hämäläinen, and the Isle of Wight official gets a third QPR date of the season up in East Yorkshire — two big wins for the R’s with him so far this season at Sheff Utd and home to Cardiff. Details.
Hull: Hull had won three, drawn one and lost only one of their first five league games when QPR took them apart in the first half of August’s meeting at Loftus Road — Ilias Chair, Ethan Laird and the artist formerly known as Chris Willock with the goals before half time. That, however, sparked a run of seven defeats in eight-games for the injury-ravaged Tigers, a sequence that would cost manager Shota Arveladze his job. Liam Rosenior, a former Hull player and briefly Derby manager, was given the gig of turning his former club’s fortunes around and he started with a 0-0 draw at Millwall which has rather set the tone for his tenure so far. City come into this game having lost only two of the last ten, but five of Rosenior’s games in charge have yielded draws so far, two of them 0-0. Three of those draws have come on this ground - all of them 1-1 against Huddersfield, Sunderland and Blackpool — stretching Hull’s winless run at home to eight league and cup matches. Having started the season with three home wins, they’ve managed only one since and only bottom two Wigan and Blackpool have won fewer than Hull’s four home victories. Only bottom placed Wigan (49) have conceded more goals than Hull’s 44 in the Championship. Oscar Estupinan top scores here with 12 which puts him second in the division overall — he has four goals in his last six appearances.
QPR: Rangers are late equalisers at home to Sheff Utd and Swansea away from currently sitting joint sixth — four points shy of the play-offs as it stands. Rangers have now led but failed to go on and win in three of their last four games. Nevertheless, those results contribute to yet another run of six without a win for the R’s (D4 L2). It’s the second time this season we’ve gone through six winless games, and the twelfth time we’ve done so in the last six and a half seasons — with several sequences of five thrown in there for bad measure. It also brought up six home games without a win, and the run of games without a goal at the Loft End now stretches back eight to the Cardiff victory in October. Rangers have netted just three in front of their home end this year, two of those penalties. Overall they’re currently one win from the last 13 fixtures, and the 2-2 comeback against Reading is the only occasion in that run we’ve managed to score more than one goal — we’ve failed to score in seven of those 13 games and on 11 different occasions over the season as a whole. Rangers have lost five away games this season which is a respectable total — seven teams have lost fewer, but that includes the top three in the division, and three of the teams above us in the table have lost more.
Prediction: We’re once again indebted to The Art of Football for agreeing to sponsor our Prediction League and provide prizes. You can get involved by lodging your prediction here or sample the merch from our sponsor’s QPR collection here. Last year’s champion Cheesy tells us…
"Neil Critchley must have been relieved with the B game against Brentford after all the postponements they have had to finally give some game time to Stefan. I would like to see him and Willock start in place of Tim and Tyler. Love watching Tim go forward, but he has so much to learn. I am one of those that am a bit annoyed at Chair at the moment. I wrote on the message board a year ago wondering why this hanging on to the ball too long hasn't been coached out of him after all this time. Going for another 1-1 here and after what I have said about Ilias, he's bound to go past four defenders and slot it in the corner.”
Cheesy’s Prediction: Hull 1-1 QPR. Scorer — Ilias Chair
LFW’s Prediction: Hull 1-1 QPR. Scorer — Jamal Lowe
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