As Jamie Mackie heads to Championship rivals Nottingham Forest, LFW wonders how the keenness to sell the former Plymouth man can possibly sit alongside QPR’s stated aim of bringing “the right sort” to the club.
The abiding memory of Jamie Mackie’s time at QPR is clear.
He’s wearing the superb red and white halved away kit of the 2011/12 season and he’s playing wide on the right for a QPR team facing up to the prospect of 30 minutes of vitally important football with only ten men. Rangers are in a tight spot: it’s the final game of the season and having not won an away game all calendar year they’re faced with the prospect of beating the billion pound Manchester City team on their own patch, denying them the league title in the process, or relying on Bolton not beating a poor Stoke side with nothing to play for. If it goes wrong, Rangers are relegated.
City are known for bottling such occasions and have allowed their visitors to equalise through Djibril Cisse immediately after half time thanks to a mistake by defender Joleon Lescott. But QPR are equally prone to acts of self-immolation and having done all the hard work — silencing the crowd, levelling the game, demoralising the Bolton players down at Stoke — they have done their absolute damndest to turn the situation back against them by having a man sent off. Joey Barton’s behaviour that day, given the circumstances of the game, should not be allowed to dull in the memory lest we ever invite him to let us all down so badly again.
With Barton splashing around in the early bath water it looks like a case of hanging on as best as Rangers can for the remaining time — kill the game, take the point, hope it’s enough.
But there’s a twist to come in the script. Armand Traore accelerates away down the left wing and, although he seems to be doing so more to keep possession of the ball as far away from the QPR goal as possible than set up a chance of a score at the other end, he does have form for producing fine crosses from such situations — earlier in the season Heidar Helguson had torn the net off the back of the posts at Stoke with a fearsome header from one such delivery. The Senegalese full back crosses again, but it’s deep to the far post and striker Bobby Zamora has gambled on the near stick so, with only ten men on the field, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s going to drift away into Man City’s left back spot and the onslaught on the QPR goal will recommence.
From the upper tier of Manchester City’s well positioned away end my eyes, and the eyes of everybody around me, pan across the field from right to left as the ball travels through the air, and as we do so a second figure enters the field of vision from our left. As the first chords of Mariah Carey’s Hero strike up we watch, open mouthed, as Jamie Mackie hoves into view. He looks like a Labrador puppy pursuing a stick into a stretch of fast moving water — naïve, enthusiastic and totally unaware of what he’s about to do. And somehow, gloriously, in slow motion, it’s all opening up for him. The ball hangs in the air as if suspended there, airborne for the perfect amount of time to intersect Mackie’s run to the heart of the penalty area at precisely the right moment. Panting, Mackie closes his eyes, puts his arms down by his side, and launches his body into the air in a horizontal position. The ball falls plum onto his forehead, gathering power and direction as it does so and landing at just the right point inside the six yard box to bounce up and over goalkeeper Joe Hart, and several desperate attempts from defenders to get back on the line, and into the roof of the net.
Mackie, scarcely able to believe it himself, races round to the away end and collapses in front of the delirious masses. He’s crying. What follows has gone down in Premier League folklore, and rather lost in that is the fact that QPR survived.
Some like to take the easy route and be quite sniffy about Jamie Mackie. Football supporters respond well to work rate and effort but when it starts to appear as though that’s all a player has to offer the armchair experts start to crawl out from their basement computer rooms and talk about things they have little comprehension of but have read about in books and old copies of FourFourTwo — technique, passing percentage, end product, assists, ratios, statistics. The idea that Mackie is literally a footballing dog, capable of nothing more than running around a lot, has grown and gained support. He’s not Premier League quality, his touch is lacking, his end product is poor, only in England would a player like this make it at the top level and so it goes on. In true QPR style we apparently need somebody else, somebody new, somebody different, another new signing - more blood. When he does score it’s written off as a dog having its day — "even Devon White scored every now and again” the Monday morning quarterbacks quaff — and when he doesn’t score it’s added to this prosecution file that he’s not actually any good at all.
Quite prolific this little dog though isn’t he? And not many consolation strikes in 4-1 defeats on his slate either. Few players at QPR in recent times have had such a knack of scoring such important goals quite as often as Jamie Mackie. He’s done it too often for it to be coincidence or fluke — he’s actually not a bad player at all.
You could, for instance, quite easily start a summary of his time at QPR with another memorable moment. In injury time of a home match with Liverpool that Rangers had trailed by two goals with little over ten minutes remaining but somehow clawed their way back level he was at it again. Mark Hughes, ever the positive optimist, stood on the touchline ordering his relegation haunted team to sit back and defend the point they’d won but Paddy Kenny, rightly, ignored his manager and launched a long ball upfield. Although it was cleared initially it was headed straight back into the danger area by Luke Young and when Jose Enrique missed the ball completely it was all up for grabs and it was down to Mackie again. He confidently strode through and slipped the ball beneath goalkeeper Pepe Reina and into the net for a last second winner. Mackie stood by the corner flag, delirium all around, and shrugged his shoulders. Nothing to it.
And not a one off either. Shortly after arriving at the club for a couple of hundred thousand from relegated Plymouth in the summer 2010, and buoyed by a goal on his debut in 4-0 win against Barnsley and another in a subsequent 3-0 win at Sheffield United, he wasn’t in the mood to give up the ghost on another two goal deficit in a late August game at Derby County. Patrick Agyemang, you sense more by accident than design, had rolled in a goal a minute into stoppage time to halve the gap but nobody would ever have believed there was time to not only restart the game, but also level it through a fine turn and finish from Mackie. But Mackie believed.
Perhaps he was shrugging his shoulders after that Liverpool goal because he was asking "what exactly have I got to do to convince you all?” If you want to be critical and write three absolutely crucial, dramatic goals in key games off as coincidence then you’d really have to go some to continue doing so as you look down Jamie Mackie’s QPR record as a whole. After the goals against Derby, and Sheffield United, and Barnsley he scored two more in a 3-0 win at Ipswich when the R’s were first and the Tractor Boys third. A couple of days later he scored twice again to seal a win from a difficult trip to Leicester. Different kinds of goals as well — powerful headers, long range strikes, neat finishes at the end of mazy runs.
This is a limited player, capable of only the basics, with limited ball control is it? A work horse and nothing more. Do me a favour.
Mackie broke his leg that winter in an FA Cup game at Blackburn — a game manager Neil Warnock had wanted to rest him for but he had insisted on playing. Remember that, in the context of the season just passed at Loftus Road where players were queuing up to report strains and muscle pulls that meant they couldn’t go up to Newcastle to play an important game three days before Christmas. He came back well, settling into a team playing a division higher and scoring good, important goals. In a shambolic defeat at relegation rivals Blackburn Rovers, Rangers somehow nearly escaped with a point from a three goal deficit because Mackie climbed up off the bench and scored twice in the closing stages — the second an absolute peach. Despite being sidelined at the start of the season, despite playing at the highest level he’d ever been at in his career, and despite playing in a poor, relegation haunted, side Mackie scored seven goals that year from a wide right position. QPR’s leading scorer in the whole of 2012/13 got six.
The sale of Jamie Mackie has exposed QPR’s chosen PR line of the summer for exactly what it is — empty spin. Harry Redknapp and Tony Fernandes both talk about getting the right sort into the club and you wonder what on earth they mean if they’re not referring to people like Jamie Mackie.
They want young, hungry players with a point to prove who want to play for QPR. Mackie was, and is, all of those things. He’d served his apprenticeship in the lower reaches of the game with Exeter, gained his Championship experience with Plymouth, and saw QPR as a big move. He hit the ground running and performed consistently well either side of a bad leg break for the best part of two years. They want experienced heads who know the game — Mackie has now clocked up well over 300 appearances in the top five divisions of English football.
Redknapp, rightly perturbed by the cliques that have formed in the QPR dressing room based prominently along English and French lines, has spoken this weekend about targeting good, hardworking, English and Irish pros, to start building a spirit and dressing room again. Jamie Mackie, from Dorking, is as hard working as any player Rangers have had since Gareth Ainsworth, is too mentally simple to be anything other than honest, and was part of the Orr-Kenny-Derry-Hill axis that underpinned the club’s promotion push in 2010/11.
The decision to sell him makes no sense, and therefore has had to be carefully managed. The club’s PR line of choice is Mackie "wanted to leave” — they even put out an unprecedented, and classless, announcement on the official website that the player had requested a transfer to reinforce it. Why did he request the transfer? Because he’d spent the second half of last season strapped to the bench while far less effective players, caring far less about the club, and trying nowhere near as hard as he would have done, were remorselessly picked instead. Stephane Mbia, Jose Bosingwa, Junior Hoilett, Bobby Zamora and others were all picked regardless of fitness, form or attitude. Mackie, admittedly in very poor form after Christmas, was benched for a loan player — Andros Townsend — who might come to QPR permanently this summer as long as he doesn’t get a better offer from a Premier League team. Is that really forward thinking? Does that tally with this "right sort” rhetoric? Preferring a loan player to a whole-hearted, committed, talented player who has a permanent contract and history with the club? And then selling Mackie while we wait and see if Townsend gets a better offer?
In the meantime Rangers persist with another player on vastly more money than Mackie for a grossly inferior return - Shaun Wright-Phillips.
Redknapp, and Mackie’s detractors, can say that he played very poorly in the second half of last season and they’d be absolutely right. His overall game was lousy and he missed several gilt edged chances. You could say he wasn’t alone in that, and was punished disproportionately for it when compared to several others, but even if everybody else had been brilliant and his dropping entirely justified it’s once again a prime example of QPR’s "more blood” attitude to squad building. Mackie lost form after two years of consistently good performances at a time when he was surrounded by people who had done nothing, compared to him, to get QPR in the Premier League and were now doing nothing to keep them there. Form comes back. QPR’s reaction to a loss of form from a player is to treat him as a permanently spent force, to be dumped in reserve games and loan spells and offloaded at the first possible opportunity and replaced by another cash purchase. QPR’s longest serving players are Adel Taarabt, Hogan Ephraim and Ale Faurlin and the club is trying to get rid of all three of them as well. Little wonder that spirit, commitment and effort levels are a problem when QPR is little more than truck stop with a dodgy cash point spewing out free money on most players’ career paths.
Mackie’s not playing so well, let’s go and sign the latest flavour of the month instead — sell him, spend some more money on somebody else. Always another player, always another signing, always throwing money at every problem that presents itself, even if it’s actually not a problem at all.
The frustrating thing is if this transfer was the other way around, and Jamie Mackie was coming QPR’s way for £1m from Nottingham Forest, it would be almost universally hailed as a shrewd piece of business. Exactly the kind of dangerous, committed, wholehearted player QPR need and at a great age and price as well.
And no Mackie isn’t going to be pulling any difficult balls out of the sky on his instep, or rolling his foot over the ball and shimmying past a bamboozled full back. But compare his touch at the end of his spell with the club to the start and it’s clear that not only is he a player with excellent commitment, work rate and goal record for a wide player but he’s also somebody who worked on his game and improved at QPR when the vast majority of players passing through the club remain exactly the same or, more often, regress. Not as naturally talented as Adel Taarabt, not as good as Wayne Routledge, not as good as a lot of players, but the sort of player every team needs to run hard yards at both end of the pitch and provide a platform for the showmen to perform on.
And even that is probably mildly insulting to a player who was very effective for almost his entire time with the club bar the second half of last season. Twice at the end of 2011/12, after the Liverpool goal, teams chasing the Champions League places — Arsenal and Spurs — came to Loftus Road and had to substitute international left backs who had been unable to cope with Jamie Mackie.
Benoit Assou-Ekoto was one of those unable to deal with Mackie’s direct style, and Harry Redknapp was the manager who substituted him. Short memory clearly.
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