When Alex Perry filled in as a match reporter for LFW in 23/24 we liked what we read so much we decided to give him his own column – and here’s his first offering assessing what we’ve seen so far from QPR’s new look side.
When Clive asked me this summer if I would be keen to contribute more to his season upon season gauntlet of QPR coverage, I had to think hard about whether my dopamine reserves could handle actually having to take notice of all of it.
If anything has marked the chasm between fervent support to passing interest over the last decade, it’s quite how all-encompassing following your football team has become. I won’t be treading new ground or providing any searing insight into how football fandom has shifted online, but the sheer amount of content you can consume around any club is quite staggering.
Previews, reviews, match reports, signing by signing analysis, five major social network channels to follow and at least four club dedicated podcasts to consume fortnightly, if not weekly. That is without even getting into engagement on all of these pieces of content, every other comment further developing the quagmire that all our thoughts/views/hopes/dreams are gleefully built upon every August.
To support a football team is to enter a Faustian pact. Compromises must be made, rational feelings sacrificed and normal behaviour patterns are to be shattered. I applaud you, every single one of you that contributes to all the above every damn season. All the money, miles, tears and time you funnel into this tinpot club are noted and valued – I clapped for you on Thursday evenings.
Why all this preamble? Why are you writing these things? Have you tried BetterHelp? Well, reader, it’s because as I sought out Christian Nourry’s recent interview on the BBC and spent 15 minutes of my life listening to his alarmingly sensible output, to quote Mark Corrigan I started to get the feeling I am totally, totally fucked.
I won’t ever claim to be one of you. I won’t be seen doing a 400-mile round trip for an obscure Carabao Cup tie, I won’t be spending the bleak midwinter watching QPR buckle under the weight of a 3-game week and I won’t be available to endure every catastrophic referee display/goal conceded/mascot life choice that further throws you into the mire of self-fulfilling prophecy.
But I want to contribute, because whether I like it or not (or my therapist tells me to stop) I am very much back in. How do I plan on doing this from the confines of Leicestershire? By engaging in football’s purest and most relevant offshoot – online discourse, baby. Every month I am going to be delving into five talking points and offering immaculately crafted takes that are more than likely based loosely around what someone has said on Twitter (no, we’re not calling it that). So, with six games played, some cup progress and five points accrued, let’s get into it.
We can file this one firmly into ‘things I did not think I would say this season’ but Michael Frey is good. I am not saying he is great, but with all nascent available evidence from his first full season at the club, he is doing well. I understand that relativity comes into all these things when discussing a player. So, after watching several years of Lyndon Dykes produce more hair styles than goals it is fair to say the bar for a striker at QPR is predictably low. But given most people experienced the apex of apathy when his loan was turned permanent signing, he has done plenty to stir the blood since the start of the season.
It's very easy to make comments about the fact he’s tattooed his own name on his chest (I would know, I have made these comments on this very website), or the fact he runs with a gait that suggest his brain and legs are having an argument. But if there is something that has always fascinated me about the Championship, it’s the propensity for it to say ‘fuck it’ to every available metric and let someone have the season of their lives.
4 hours sleep and still absolutely buzzing!
That away end… 😮💨😮💨#QPR pic.twitter.com/Dpib7DKcWQ— S Michail (@smichail89) August 31, 2024
Buoyed by watching that display against Luton, it is hard not to acknowledge that what he lacks in aesthetic qualities he makes up for in very unspecific but noticeable knowhow. Not to mention some genuine end product, gone was the total air-kick he produced against West Brom and in was actual composure and finesse in assisting Madsen and producing a sublime finish on the volley. I am well aware that with three goals and one assist to his name I am somewhat jumping the gun by declaring he will be a future trivia question, there just might be the origin story of a cult favourite taking place in its stead.
All this is to say that whilst this early part of the season has felt like a slow burn, this player, in this system and with those creative players around him, it has been heartening to see him announce himself as someone capable of contributing at this level. All very timely as well, given we have sold our two recognised strikers and with most of the fan base wants Celar shot into space for having the temerity of needing time to bed in.
There’s been a lot of chat in certain circles this summer about Longlegs. An incredibly striking cinematography experience that keeps the viewer feeling deeply unsettled, at times repulsed and yet in enraptured by the beauty it presents. I am of course, talking about Nicolas Madsen’s limbs and their first month at QPR.
I like this man, a lot. If you want actual analysis of his profile and what he will realistically bring to the team, then check out Clive and Greg Spires’ brilliant and sensible piece about his signing. If you want to know why I think his 6’4 frame is incredibly captivating, read on.
Nicolas Madsen looks exactly like a regen of every Scandinavian guy who has shouted in your ear whilst you’re on some kind of ‘lads’ trip in sunny eastern Europe, bellowing over some deep house music to ask where you can get some MDMA in this city you’re not sure you actually like. Yet, here is a seriously enticing professional footballer. It is mesmeric when any player with exceedingly long limbs gets on the pitch but when you combine such things with guile and technical proficiency, you get a spectacle so paradoxical that you can draw your eyes off it.
There is something refreshingly unserious about Madsen and I do not mean this in a bad way. The demeanour with which he carries himself on the pitch carries a self-assuredness that I’m not sure I’ve seen at QPR for a while, he is unflinchingly competent and appears to be settled in that. I don’t think I have actually seen him run yet, this implies his stride is either so large he doesn’t need to, or his positioning is very sound and I am bad at concentrating on things. I don’t think I have seen him be dispossessed either, even when he’s clattered onto the ground for some Sunday league style kicking match those god damn long legs just seem to rake the ball in and protect it. I have seen him score a goal with an absolute minimum of fuss that I know will have had Clive worrying about how much more mileage his non-goalscoring QPR CM stats could have. It may be personal preference because he looks like he could be an E-sports champion, but this magnificent specimen feels like a sure-fire tick in our recruitment this summer.
The last three years have been thin gruel. As a club we have managed to serve up some of the most woeful footballing experiences one could imagine, plummeting new depths of ineptitude on the field and new depths of masochism off it as people kept paying to witness it. During that time there are probably only two names who supporters can utter without an expletive as a precursor and that is Ilias Chair and Sam Field.
The latter is who I want to focus on here. Since his arrival from West Brom he has been one of the few players who you couldn’t put into a bin and wheel into your local riot police this summer. Is he a slightly limited player? Yes. Is he also wildly consistent, fit, professional and handsome? Also, yes. It’s this context that leaves me with a very heavy heart in thinking about whether this team under Marti can actually accommodate a player with his very particular set of skills.
Perhaps I am just experiencing a small dose of PTSD after a summer of watching England put round pegs in square holes to very little positive effect, I just can’t keep watching deep lying midfielders not turn around, but something about Field in a Marti midfield just doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe I am misconstruing a man who is enamoured with Jimmy Dunne at RB, as a footballing idealogue who’s Cruyff inspired principals demand a total footballer in midfield. But with Chair to come back, Madsen and Varane bought in this summer and Bonner-Dixon still around I think it is fair to ponder whether a Colback/Field midfield axis is the evolution we are anticipating this season.
It would be a great shame to see Field rendered obsolete if the team does move to a more possession focused sufferball under Marti, I would like to think someone with his defensive attributes will always be vital to the makeup of a squad but he feels too good to just be a squad player in a (hopefully) middling team like QPR. As admirable as the quality of his character is as well, there is a ruthlessness in Marti that hasn’t often been seen in the dugout at Loftus Road. All of that just makes you wonder if he was pragmatic enough to play Jimmy Dunne at RB, maybe he’s also pragmatic enough to move on from the nice boys who don’t necessarily fit into his plans.
Whether it’s at the match or online I have rarely seen a player of his quality irk the fanbase to the extent it has over the past 12 months. His signing was hailed as a data nerds’ triumph and precisely the kind of the signing that signalled a forward-thinking approach under a new manager in Beale. It’s not his fault the man who sold him a project also proceeded to tank his career at such breakneck pace he’s not even viable to appear on high performance podcasts in this current climate. Even during the aftermath of that clusterfuck he has still managed to churn out 90+ appearances when a lot of Mick’s children played sick, he’ll become a centurion this season whether you think it’s 99 appearances too many or you’re hoping for 200* not out.
Fundamentally, the ire he has received he has received this season is probably more to a summer’s long discourse around LB’s than it is his actual output. Kenneth is a quirk of timing, if he was playing instead of Lee Wallace when we actually looked like a viable football team I doubt there would be much uproar with his performances or antipathy around his contract running down. It just so happens he got aboard a cursed voyage and as it finds steadier waters the guy is stood next to Jake Clarke-Salter who has quietly become our best bit of business in a decade.
So, next time you go to chastise him for the offence of not being very tall or because he hit a wayward cross. Think about all the years they patched up Lee Wallace to chug up and down the wing like a great steam Lokomotiv, or when Tyler Roberts was someone who entered your consciousness and maybe just take a second to be a little kinder to my short king - Kenneth Paal.
Remember how you felt after we conceded the same goal three times against West Brom on opening day? Remember how Sheffield Wednesday then offered Plymouth a lesson in levels 24 hours later? Remember how it felt like we had maybe hitched our wagon to the wrong miracle worker? It’s funny how quickly narratives change in football, not least for the club you’re invested in.
It took roughly 140 minutes of gametime for my dad to text me claiming that something was wrong with the team, in a tone (whether intended or not) that will have you presume Marti had managed to instil a deep seeded rot at the core of that team as quickly as it took him to flush it out. We all experience it, what else is a football fan to do. You spend the summer months missing your favourite distraction from the shit show that is modern times and replace it with anticipation, you check to see comings and goings and lay your dreams out once again that maybe this is the year your team does something special. In many ways, the fact that feeling was even available to us this summer is to speak of my wider point, that expectations can only get skewed when our lenses are firmly coloured blue and white.
To be a QPR fan during pre-season (even though you weren’t really allowed to be, physically) was to experience a myopia. With 2024’s form being so remarkable and the pace at which standards improved, it is easy to see why one could get carried away. Imagine what this fine Spanish fella could do with a whole pre-season and some investment, all we need is that 20 goal striker, a much better goalkeeper, a more fluid midfield, some back up for the defence and Ilias Chair to stay out of a jail and I think we might be top half. It’s a beautiful dream, but a dream, nonetheless.
Clive wrote excellently this time last year about the true scale of rebuild this team required, he did not sugarcoat it and for a fan who lives further afield it was eye opening to myself. I do not wish to be dour, but to temper expectations – a sentence my girlfriend really, really likes me to say – we really should try and remember large part of this team were on a one-way trip to league One for at least a year. We have somehow, through a brilliant managerial appointment, found ourselves being one of the worst teams in the division for two years without ever suffering a catastrophe. It has been as close to a near miss as you can get, your foot should still be shaking on the clutch such was wreckage we so narrowly avoided.
This league is brutal and, in a year where the relegated teams are not a shoo in for promotion, also refreshingly unpredictable. Four games in, five points accrued and four of them coming away against two freshly relegated teams is creating a strange angst amongst us all as it leaves us firmly in the hard to predict category. This is the Championship though, the league of dreams or something else Gary Weaver normally shouts during a 1-1 between 14th placed Stoke and 10th placed Watford. Until three-game weeks and farcical amounts of fixture congestion pile up alongside inevitable injuries and a lack of patience for the country’s infrastructure, only then can we really make any judgements about who is going to be where. Until then, I’m ready for every single point I’ve made here to age terribly because I’m feeling pretty sanguine about it all.
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