Despite personal ties with Mick Beale and a similarly acrimonious departure to his previous Championship job at Blackpool, QPR were always likely to plump for Neil Critchley as their new manager for a whole variety of sound reasons.
Losing a manager you hoped would shape the future of your club 21 matches into a three-year contract is never going to be ideal, but QPR, for once, might have had a bit of a touch here.
Firstly, because Mick Beale was always leaving, from the moment he walked through the door. We obviously hoped we might get a successful season, or two, out of him before it happened, and the departure would therefore be a mutually beneficial thing, but it soon became apparent that even this was too much to ask. In just five months at Loftus Road he spoke to three other clubs about their jobs at least, these conversations were happening as far back as the last week in August, and those are just the ones we know about. Even with all of this out in the open - with his move to Glasgow completed so soon after his "honesty and integrity” chat it made him a laughing stock of the national football media, with us all well aware he’d been guest of the director of football for games at Ibrox while Giovanni van Bronckhorst was still employed - that he can still sit in Rangers press conferences and say "this came completely out of the blue” with a straight face makes me doubly sure we’re best off out of that relationship. The lying is almost compulsive.
Secondly, QPR’s owners in recent years have been loathe to change managers mid-season. Hiring and firing Neil Warnock, Mark Hughes, Harry Redknapp, Chris Ramsey and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink the way they did — and the disastrous consequences and results caused by each decision — has at least had the effect of driving them towards a proper interview process and recruitment strategy that is best executed when given time over a summer. The days of Tony Fernandes picking big names/crowd pleasers thankfully finished with him "getting Steve McClaren out of his system” a few years back. This has led to the less than ideal situation of Holloway, McClaren and Mark Warburton all knowing they were dead men walking long before the trigger was pulled — McClaren tanked so badly in the end they did ditch him with a couple of games left, while Warburton only avoided the chop in March with a surprise away win at Luton — but it’s better than what was happening before.
This season, however, came with an unusual mid-season month off for the World Cup. It’s only been two weeks today since Beale left, but in a standard Championship November that could have meant as many as five games under caretaker charge, and frankly one afternoon of slop against Burnley was more than enough for me thank you very much indeed.
Thirdly, because Beale had been hired so recently, and the club was so sure he was bailing on them to join Wolves in October, Rangers are still reasonably fresh from one comprehensive assessment of available managerial candidates, and had already given that one re-heat just a few weeks prior. Even allowing for these assessments being ongoing things at clubs now, this wasn’t starting from scratch by any means. Obviously some candidates from those processes are now unavailable — had Beale left for Molineux or Nathan Jones defected to Southampton a bit later I think there’s a reasonable chance Rob Edwards would have been our new boss, which means the meeting of the two teams later this month at Loftus Road will be a weird sliding doors affair where the two managers involved could very easily have been in opposite dug outs in slightly different circumstances. Others have seen their stock fall — remember those weeks spent with Liam Manning as odds on favourite in the summer? This week, sans Twine and Parrott strike force, ditched by MK Dons and now unemployed.
But, fourthly, one name that has figured in conversations from the start is now freely available and QPR have this weekend taken that logical step and appointed Neil Critchley on a three-and-a-half-year contract. Critchley’s work at Blackpool, where he won promotion with a young team, and then kept his side in the Championship comfortably where so many other League One clubs have failed in recent years, had him on QPR’s long list in the summer, but a compensation release fee of £1.2m made it something of a non starter. He was subsequently tempted away by an eye-watering contract at Aston Villa to go and do Beale’s job at Villa Park with Steven Gerrard but early struggles there saw the management team ditched and so now suddenly somebody Rangers wanted but wasn’t available to them is out of work and ready to start immediately.
QPR, like many clubs, are admiring of the work being done by Stephen Schumacher at Plymouth, and Kieran McKenna at Ipswich. But would either leave high flying League One clubs at this point to take a tough Championship job where expectations are high and money to spend is zilch? Even if they would, both clubs would demand decent release fees and compensation, and QPR are not in a position to be paying out significant fees for players, managers or anything else at the moment. Hammarby coach Marti Cifuentes crashed through the betting odds last week - lots of in the know Swedish journalists said he wanted the job, was flying in for talks and the QPR Twitter got all hot and horny - but with several agents involved and another club to extricate him from that was a complicated deal that would have taken time. More to the point, a release fee of around £750,000… well, I’m just going to be repeating myself here. Gareth Ainsworth’s now traditional mention, weirdly pumped out by Sky Sports as an exclusive on Friday when Critchley was all but signed and sealed, is either one of the most obvious pump and dump moves from an online bookmaker we’ve seen, calls into strong question the already shaky journalistic standards of that broadcaster, or both.
Cifuentes was trendy enough to get the QPR Twitter aroused, despite never really being a goer, and the response to Critchley has therefore been quite underwhelmed. I can’t believe a hive mind that today has come up with the idea to abuse Jimmy Dunne online so much that he’s deleted his Instagram really has that much knowledge of the Spaniard beyond ‘he doing well in Sweden like Graham Potter innit’ but it is worth bearing in mind that for every Potter-like wundercoach who’s come into the British game that way, there’s a Michael Jolley who swapped Eskilstuna for England and subsequently bombed hard at Grimsby and Barrow.
Had we poached Critchley from Blackpool in the summer, the reaction I presume would have been altogether more positive. He was a good appointment then, just six months ago, and he’s a good one now. Only this time it’s for free.
Given the levels of animosity felt towards his predecessor by all in W12, I wondered whether the similarities in background and personal ties might put QPR off Critchley regardless. Both he and Beale worked together in the same Liverpool academy set up, and the pair met up in the summer to swap notes on the QPR squad Beale was inheriting from a Blackpool point of view, and the Villa squad Critchley was taking over — not that it did either man much good, Critchley was out of a job there before Christmas and Blackpool won 1-0 at Loftus Road in August.
Critchley also walked out on one of our Championship rivals in the summer, and only for an assistant manager job in the Prem. The Pool faithful are every bit as pissed with him as we are with our adulterous git. Seaside blogger Mitch Cook’s Left Foot (@CooksLeft) told us: "He seemed totally sold on ‘the project’ and to genuinely appreciate the adulation he was showered with by fans home and away. Then… he just… well… left. For a fucking assistant manager job. Without saying a word. Not one word. No ‘thanks’, no ‘I’ll remember the club forever.’ Not even a platitude. Nothing. He’s still never addressed Blackpool fans once. I understand how Beale going angers QPR fans - but Critchley has angered us in a similar way. He made such a play of understanding the notion of ‘a working class football club’ and how ‘special’ we were and in the end, he walked out without a word. Bitter? Me? Yes. Very much so. It’s not that he left - it’s the utterly classless way he did it.” A ‘continuity candidate’ like this probably isn’t the big sell it should be to QPR fans at this moment.
One of QPR’s big problems over several years wasn’t just the rate they changed managers, but also how they veered so randomly from one character and style to the next. There cannot really be less joined up thinking — method, style, personality, type of football, background — that links Mark Hughes to Harry Redknapp to Chris Ramsey to Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink to Ian Holloway to Steve McClaren. It means you’re constantly in a state of flux, trying to shuffle big groups of players out that suited the style before but don’t now, and recruit players for something entirely different that will only last the next nine months or so. It’s how you end up with Ian Holloway in charge of Idrissa Sylla, Steve McClaren in charge of Matt Smith, Mark Warburton managing Toni Leistner etc. The brief that led them to Beale in the first place was for a development coach, and Critchley certainly ticks that box.
Like so many of the bright, up and coming coaching talents in this country he had an unremarkable playing career - a handful of appearances split between Crewe and Leigh RMI finishing with retirement at just 24 — and has dedicated himself to coaching from a young age, starting under Dario Gradi at Crewe when he was still a teenager himself. He was academy director at Gresty Road by the age of 29 and moved to Liverpool’s U18 set up six years later. Four years with the U18s and three with the U23s eventually led him to stand in for Jurgen Klopp for cup matches away at Aston Villa (0-5) and Shrewsbury (1-0) when Liverpool were required to field youth teams because the senior squad were playing the World Club Cup in Qatar. The 44-year-old is one of only 16 people in the world to have been awarded UEFA’s Elite Coaching Badge.
Critchley’s first full season at Blackpool saw them triumphant in the high scoring end of season play-offs to win promotion to the Championship. A team packed with bright young talent signed through Critchley’s academy connections, including our own former charge Josh Bowler and current Sunderland hot shot Ellis Simms from Everton, lost just two of their final 25 games of the season and stuck six through Oxford over two legs of semi-final before defeating Lincoln at Wembley. They kept seven clean sheets in their final nine regular season fixtures, winning the last four games to nil including a 1-0 awayer at Sunderland. Worth bearing in mind though, they sat second bottom of the table after one win in their first seven prior to a formation switch — could new manager bounce elude QPR once more? After one point and one goal from six games one would hope not. There’s also a geography element to this — Critchley’s youth career was spent entirely in the North West, and bar Chelsea’s Dujon Sterling and Arsenal’s Dan Ballard the majority of the business he did was with academies in that area, which could be a potential tripwire now he’s London based.
At least one promoted League One side has been relegated straight back from the Championship in each of the last five seasons, but it never looked likely to be Blackpool in 2021/22 and given the going over they gave QPR in a febrile atmosphere and howling gale at Bloomfield Road last November it was actually a bit of a surprise to find them down as low as sixteenth (he sounds like an Oakland A already) by the end of the season with just two wins from the last ten — albeit one of those was a 6-1 against Birmingham and they ended up safe by a thick 23 points. This was achieved while paying fees for just five players across his two-and-a-half-years, for a total of £2m, and a net profit once Josh Bowler had continued his career quest to play as little football as possible and gone to Nottingham Forest this summer. The achievement was sufficient for him to be named manager of the year at the North West Football Awards, beating Pep Guardiola into second place, which is all beautifully Jamie Pollock v Jesus Christ. He left Bloomfield Road with a 45-30-34 record from 109 games (41.2 win percentage).
Even while fuming about the manner of his departure Mitch Cook’s Left Foot says: "It’s impossible to conclude that Critchley was anything other than a success. The manner of his departure has soured many towards him and left us wanting to talk down what he did but ultimately, as a football manager, he came into a club seriously lacking direction and left it a division higher and with a reputation for hard working professionalism.”
His time at Bloomfield Road is one of a flexible pragmatist, rather than a stubborn idealist. When a 4-3-3 and pass-out-from-the-back style he’d brought with him from Liverpool only yielded one win in his first seven games he switched completely, to a Mike Basset-pleasing four-four-fucking-two, direct balls to Gary Madine, workmanlike midfielders through the middle, and any flair kept to wide areas.
"It’s really hard to pinpoint a particular preferred style or formation,” our man says. "He played just about every variation you can think of for us - he’s remarkably adept at coaching a change of formation in a short space of time. One thing he seems to be scared of is creative midfielders. He loves a hard-working midfield engine and any flair he permits is almost invariably out wide. He will accommodate flair, but only so much and only in particular areas of the pitch. He tried to coach us into a short passing side initially but then by the time he left ‘Grimshaw (GK) to Madine (big lad)’ was statistically the most frequent long ball in the Championship. I’d imagine that latter style was borne of pragmatism and if I was to sum him up in a sentence it would be ‘arrived as an idealist and left as a pragmatist’.”
Where there is clear daylight between Critchley and his predecessor is self-evident from his opening interview with the QPR official website today — very village sub post master vibes, gazing off wistfully while talking to Channel 4 News about how he ended up doing time because he was too polite to say anything about his Horizon computer. Beale’s geezer down the pub style won friends among fans and media early doors for its honesty, particularly in the wake of the Charlton cup defeat where he mentioned the large following behind the goal, until it turned out nothing he was saying was true. That unusually boisterous approach to club media duties wound Millwall up to such an extent over the summer they resolved they’d rather retain, bench and lose Danny McNamara for free than sell him to Beale who couldn’t stop gobbing off publicly about somebody else’s player, and was happy to tell QPR fans at the kit launch that we’d be going back in with another bid and were very confident of getting him which then of course ended up on social media and pissed them off further.
Critchley is, clearly, much more cautious and reserved, and that will be welcomed at first simply because Beale is now so hated around Shepherd’s Bush. There’s a lot more on this that’s worth your time from Dan Bennett, a journalist working on West London Sport who is a Blackpool fan - here. But this, like Warburton’s ‘get our rewards, first contact second ball’ cliches, will grate when results and performances are poor and you want "honest answers” and a bit of public anger from the manager. As I said when people were slating Warbs, you won’t always like the next guy’s interviews, team selections and substitutions either, but there’s a lingering doubt that it’s big characters who do well at Loftus Road, and the more polite and studious ones get swallowed up by this place’s lethal combination of expectations vs resources.
The World Cup break may have been well timed for a manager hunt, but it has done little to revitalise and refresh an ailing QPR squad if Sunday’s rather pathetically insipid surrender against Burnley is anything to go by. Critchley takes over a team with one point and one goal from its last six matches.
Quite what he’s inheriting here has divided our message board all weekend. Burnley are currently the best team in the league, full of form and confidence, while QPR are a vastly inferior team on paper and in a rotten run of results. Vincent Kompany is flying, while QPR players are reeling from the guy who sold a lot of them the project in the first place ditching them so quickly. Missing Chair, Johansen, Roberts, Amos and Balogun we perhaps shouldn’t have expected any different. The QPR fans who use this site seem to split exactly down the middle this cold and snowy Monday between those who think yesterday was ‘one of those things’ and this remains a good team with decent prospects having a tricky spell, a team capable of topping the league just half a dozen games ago remember; and those who are looking at one point and one goal from six games, and the manner of performances particularly against Coventry and Burnley, and thinking this is a cratering team that’s going to end up very grateful indeed it posted 30+ points when it had the chance.
It remains to be seen what players like Laird, Paal, Clarke-Salter, Iroegbunam, Roberts and Balogun who were brought here by Beale and moved to play for him respond to his departure, and what the mood of the dressing room is generally having been sold the ‘you versus yourself’ snakeoil and then been deserted by the salesman. The early signs against Burnley were not at all promising, There is, as we well know, very little money to do any surgery on this team, and some or all of what leading lights it does have are going to have to be sold in fairly short order to ward off more FFP headaches. That’s a tough gig for any manager, but Critchley thrived on a limited budget at Bloomfield Road and is certainly taking over a better team than he left behind there — one glance at the league table enough to tell you that.
With what we know in mind, this line from Mitch’s piece stood out the most to me: "He’s tactically excellent when his back is against the wall. A seemingly terminal injury crisis will turn into the best run of form for the season.”
That could turn out to be very useful. Backs against the wall and injury crises are two of the few things QPR are very adept at indeed.
Links >>> The view from the Tower — Blackpool fan assesses Critchley’s time >>> Blackpool 1-1 QPR — Match Report >>> QPR 2-1 Blackpool — Match Report >>> Official website first interview >>> Dan Bennett’s WLS analysis
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